Yet in the integrity of his own heart he had no conception that her embarrassment was the result of fear—fear of the interpretation her jealous madman of a husband should put on so unwonted a visit.
He thought he saw a smile of malice in the corners of the mouth of the bold woman who met him in the hall, and nodded to him so freely as he passed her on his way out; but no prescient spirit whispered in his ear that his twenty minutes’ visit on absolute business would furnish envy and jealousy with a pretext for foul-mouthed slander, for coarse vituperation, for the use of a whip, and for calumnious accusations which cut deeper than its lash.
Cicily, who intervened to save her mistress, might have conveyed some inkling of this to Mrs. Ashton, but Augusta absolutely forbade her sympathetic servant’s interference.
“You would do no good, Cicily,” she said; “the evil is beyond earthly remedy; you would only distress my dear mother to no purpose, and she has suffered too much on my account already. It cannot last for ever!”
On the next occasion Jabez was accompanied by his joint-executor, but even that fact did not save Augusta from her husband’s wrath, and his vile aspersions went far to drive out the last lingering sentiment of affection or regard she had for him. But she clung to her child, and that bound her to her home and him whom in an evil hour she had chosen; though tears fell bitterly on Willie’s curly head, when he, like his father, gave her back blows for kisses. And if at times her conscience smote her for her haughty repulse of Jabez by the stair-foot window at Carr Cottage, what wonder? Had not Laurence himself scored his rejected rival’s name on her heart with his braces and whip-lash?
She shut the obtrusive memory out with a shudder, and, dropping on her knees, prayed earnestly for strength to bear and to forbear.
Yet much of the cruelty of Laurence at this time arose from another source than causeless jealousy. He had been living far beyond his private means, and was greatly involved. He had calculated on laying his hand on a good round sum, and was disappointed. In order, however, to raise the needful, he sold his father’s old-established concern to their head clerk, far below its value. On the Fallowfield estate his friend Barret held a mortgage; and had it been possible, he would similarly have disposed of Augusta’s possessions. Here, however, he was doubly baffled, and he turned on her as the primary cause.
The old law which preserved the woman’s absolute right over properties legally settled upon herself, by strange anomaly did not secure to her one guinea of the coin those properties produced.
Well did Jabez watch over Augusta’s interest, but his heart ached as he saw her sad countenance, and the greedy triumphant eyes of ever-present Laurence when her dividends were paid in. For, before his very face, Laurence laid his hand upon the money, to squander it as he had squandered his own on Sarah Mostyn and other dissolute companions, leaving his wife without so much as would purchase a pocket-handkerchief.
Then, lest she should make her wrongs known, he kept her a close prisoner at Fallowfield, and for all the pleasure she had of her Ardwick mansion, she might as well have been without it.