Compared to the dangerous attack she had at Guild, of course her present state seemed to be a vast improvement. On first coming home, the change for the better appeared to be marvellous; and Mr. Lake, never seeing anything but the bright side of things, congratulated himself that she was well again. The improvement did not go on as it ought to have gone; but the falling off was so gradual, the increasing degrees of weakness were so imperceptible, that he neither saw nor suspected either. Had any one told him his wife was in a bad way, he had simply stared in amazement. Latterly the inertness, the seeming debility had certainly made itself apparent to him, but only as a dim idea; so little importance did he attach to it, that he set it all down to apathy on his wife's part, and chided her for not "rousing herself." He did not mean to be unkind; never think that of him; for his wife he would have gone through fire and water, as the saying runs; but he was light, unobservant by nature, and careless.
He was enjoying himself immensely. Chiefly dividing his leisure time between Katterley and Guild. To-day he would be at home with his wife, tomorrow with Lady Ellis; the affectionate husband to the one, saying soft nothings (it must be supposed) to the other. Of course he never went for the sake of seeing my lady; certainly not; there was an excuse ever ready. Mrs. Chester had given him this commission, and he must go and report to her; or Mrs. Chester had given him the other; or she wanted to consult him on her affairs, which were going downwards; or he went over to escort some of the Jupps; or he had business with his tailor; for he had fallen into a freak to employ one who lived at Guild. On one plea or another, a plausible excuse for taking him to Guild never failed.
The fault of this lay partially with Mrs. Chester. Nearly at her wits' end lest Lady Ellis, wearied with the monotony of the house, should leave her; plainly seeing that Mr. Lake's visits were the sole attraction that kept her, Mrs. Chester invented demands upon him to draw him over to Guild. That the confidential footing on which he and Lady Ellis continued was scarcely seemly for a married man, Mrs. Chester completely ignored. She shut her eyes to it; just as she had shut them in the days when Clara was at Guild. I am telling the simple truth of the woman, and things took place exactly as I am relating them. What mattered it to Mrs. Chester whether the wife's feelings were pained, outraged, so long as her own ends were served? Clara was at a safe distance, seeing nothing; and, after all, it was but a bit of passing nonsense between them--there was no real wrong, reasoned Mrs. Chester in her sophistry. "What the eye does not see the heart cannot rue."
"But Mr. Lake ought not to have given way to her," remonstrates the upright reader. Of course he ought not, everybody knows that; but he liked the pastime. Lady Ellis made herself uncommonly attractive to him, and it never occurred to him to see that she ought not to have done so. She was exacting now; saying to him "You must come tomorrow," or "You must come the next day." They rode together and walked together as before; not so much, because it was winter weather; and they strolled out in the wide gardens in the dim afternoons, and sat alone very much in the drawing-room by twilight.
Unfortunately these pleasant arrangements were not kept from Clara. If she had partially forgotten her jealousy upon returning home, her husband's constant visits to Guild, and the whispers reaching her from thence, brought it back in all its unhappy force. She was not told purposely. Of the Jupps, the only one whose eyes were open to the flirtation going on--that is, to a suspicion that it was deeper than it ought to be, considering that Mr. Lake had a wife--was the eldest of them, Mary. She held her tongue. But the others, after a day spent at Guild, would jokingly allude in Clara's hearing to the soft hours spent together by him and Lady Ellis, and tell her she ought to keep her husband in better order. They meant nothing. Had Clara been there she might have thought far less of it than she was doing; incertitude always increases suspicion, just as jealousy makes the food it feeds on. So Mrs. Lake sat at home with her cough, and her increasing weakness, and her miserable torture; conscious of little save one great fact, that her husband was perpetually at Guild. Had he gone more openly, as it were, without framing (as he invariably did) some plausible plea for the journey, she had thought less. What could Clara do? Could she descend to say to him, you shall not go there? No; she suffered in silence; but it was killing her.
A bright December morning, clear and frosty, Mrs. Lake was seated at the window in their comfortable room, making tiny little flannel petticoats. There was a good deal of distress in Katterley, and she was intending to give warm garments to sundry poor half-naked children. Stooping over the work, her cheeks had acquired their hectic tinge, seen frequently now, otherwise the face was pale and thin; the fingers were attenuated. Mr. Lake, who had been looking at the newspaper, reading occasional scraps of news from it to his wife, rose from his chair by the fire and stretched himself.
"How busy you are, little wife! Who on earth are all those small things for?"
"The poor children in the cottages by the brick-fields. They are so badly off, Robert," she added, glancing up, with a pleading look. "I could not help doing something for them."
"All right, my dear; do whatever you like. Only, don't over-work yourself."
"There's no fear of that. Elizabeth will do part of them; and Mary Jupp is coming to help me."