“Maria, I won’t have this; I can’t bear it,” he cried, his voice hoarse with emotion. “If you show this temper, this childish sorrow before me, I shall run away.”
He could have cut his tongue out for so speaking—for his stinging words; for their stinging tone. “Temper! Childish sorrow!” George chafed at himself in his self-condemnation: he chafed—he knew how unjustly—at Maria.
Very, very unjustly. She had not annoyed him with reproaches, with complaints, as some wives would have done; she had not, to him, shown symptoms of the grief that was wearing out her heart. She had been considerate to him, bearing up bravely whenever he was at Prior’s Ash. Even now, as she dried away the rebellious tears, she would not let him think they were being shed for the lost happiness of the past, but murmured some feeble excuse about a headache.
He saw through the fond deceit; he saw all the generosity; and the red shame mantled in his fair face as he bent down to her, and his voice changed to one of the deepest tenderness.
“If I have lost you this home, Maria, I will get you another,” he whispered. “Only give me a little time. Don’t grieve before me if you can help it, my darling: it is as though you ran a knife into my very soul. I can bear the loud abuse of the whole world, better than one silent reproach from you.”
And the sweet words came to her as a precious balm. However bitter had been the shock of that one rude awaking, she loved him fondly still. It may be that she loved him only the more deeply: for the passions of the human heart are wayward and wilful, utterly unamenable to control.
Margery came into the room with her hands and arms full. George may have been glad of the divertisement, and turned upon her, his voice resuming its anger. “What’s the meaning of this, Margery? I come up here and I find your mistress packing and dragging boxes about. Can’t you see to these things?”
Margery was as cross as George that day, and her answer in its sharpness rivalled his. Direct reproof Margery had never presumed to offer her master, though she would have liked to do it amazingly, for not one of those who condemned him held a more exaggerated view of Mr. George’s past delinquencies than she.
“I can’t be in ten places at once. And I can’t do the work of ten people. If you know them that can, sir, you’d better get them here instead of me.”
“Did I not ask you if you should want assistance in packing, and you told me that you should not?” retorted George.