“My dear,” said her mother gravely, “I am afraid you must. A wife cannot absent herself from home because her lord and master indulges in too much wine, even though he may occasionally make a beast of himself. It is too late to think of this now. What cannot be cured must be endured. As you made your own bed, you will have to lie on it to the end. Those who leave the spring for the stream must expect muddy water. However, there is nothing so bad but it might be worse. Once is not always, and love overlooks lapses.”
Augusta’s persistence that she dared not be “shut up with him alone,” caused Mrs. Ashton to say—
“Well, my daughter, the occasion has been so unusual that even your own father has taken more wine than his wont, or he might bear you company. That groom seems a steady man; suppose he rides inside to support his master; and whatever you do, remember when wine is in wit is out, silence is a wife’s safeguard, and you will have to make the best of a bad bargain.”
A month back Augusta would have tossed her head, and laughed lightly at her mother’s pet philosophy. That night she rode home from Jabez Clegg’s wedding feast with a groom and a drunken man, pondering whether spirited resentment or tame submission was her best course. The morning dawned on a wife pinched black and blue, with hardly strength or spirit to sob.
Then followed a reaction, and a period of remorseful uxorious penitence, during which Laurence submitted with a tolerable grace to a lecture from Mr. Aspinall, who saw that something was amiss; and chivalrous gallantry towards woman being part of this gentleman’s creed, he did not spare his son.
Nor did Laurence spare himself. He knelt at his wife’s feet, called her “an angel,” and himself “a savage,” implored her forgiveness, excused his jealousy on the ground of passionate love, lavished his means on extravagant gifts for her, and exhausted language in fair promises. But so proud was he of his wife’s beauty, that he must needs exhibit at theatre and assembly the jewel he had won; whilst the admiration she excited set his jealous brain on fire, and she paid the penalty in the silence of night, or even in the close carriage driving home.
But his contrition and the old plea of “excessive love” for his jealous infirmity won her over, and not even Cicily more than suspected half his cruelty.
Great preparations had been made at Whaley-Bridge for the reception of Mr. and Mrs. Clegg; the factory windows were extra burnished; the landlord of the White Hart hoisted a flag; the mill-hands lined the road to greet them; the avenue gate was thrown open that the chaise might drive on to the cottage; somebody had put Crazy Joe into a new suit of clothes for the occasion, and he stood by the side of little Sim on the step of the Gothic arch (the greater child of the twain) to laugh and chuckle a welcome, as sincere in its way as the homely greetings of the orphan’s fosterers.
It was a fine stalwart young man, of open but grave countenance, around whom Bess threw her motherly arms, while Tom Hulme helped the bride to alight, and marshalled the way for the pair, who followed arm-in-arm into the house-place, where Simon, stiff with age and rheumatism, kept possession of the padded chair set apart for the sick or aged.