It had come to that—for lack of explanation—even because of her husband’s excessive tenderness and consideration, she found she could only give him duty, never love. Her lover was gone from her—she had driven him away! Her lover, who had not married Miss Derno after all, who had loved her, her only—Phemie Stondon, who now sat with her hands folded, and her untasted breakfast before her, waiting for the news which Captain Stondon appeared unusually loth to communicate.
When he went away she vowed she would never ask a question concerning him, and so far she never had; but now she saw something in her husband’s face which impelled her to say—
“Is Basil ill—is there anything the matter?”
Captain Stondon looked at his wife as she spoke, and seeing her pale, anxious countenance—her eager, earnest expression, turned sick as he answered—“He is ill; he is coming back to England. You see what he says.” And he tossed the letter over to her, and then got up and walked to the window, and looked out, with such feelings of bitterness swelling in his heart as were only imagined by God and himself.
He made no man his confidant; but the knowledge that had come to him among the pines, while the autumn wind moaned through the branches, and went sobbing away into the night, had whitened his hair, and bowed his head, and taken the pride and the trust and the happiness out of his heart. He had his wife safe—as the world calls safety; there was no speck on her honour, so far as the world knew. Yet no time could ever make her seem to him as she had been—the Phemie he had held to his heart among the hills. The pure, innocent, guileless Phemie had gone, and left him in her stead a woman, whose thoughts morning, noon, and night, were wandering over the sea; who loved Basil as she had never loved him; whom he could not accuse of perfidy, because she had not been false; to whom he dared not speak of his sorrow, because he dreaded seeing her face change and change at finding her secret discovered, her trouble known.
And all the time Phemie was wishing that by any means he and she could come nearer to each other again—that she could show him more love, more attention, greater attachment. She was very wretched, and she wanted some one to comfort her; it made her miserable to notice his whitening hair, his bent head, his feeble steps, his failing health; she thought of him now with a tenderness such as she had never felt for him in the years before any one came between them; and if she could by any will or act of her own have kept her thoughts from wandering away to that man in the far-off land, she would have done so.
Even now she was not glad to hear he was coming back; she laid down the letter when she had quite finished it; and her husband, turning from the window, caught her eyes making a very long and sorrowful journey into the future. He knew by that look she was true—knew that the clear, honest eyes could never have held such a sad, wistful expression in their blue depths, had the news not been a trouble to her as well as a surprise.
She was thinking the same thoughts as her husband at that moment; she was wondering, as he was wondering, whether Basil were really ill or whether he was making bad health a pretext for returning to England; and she was resolving that if Basil came home unchanged, she would at all hazards speak to her husband, and let him comprehend how matters really stood; while he, on his part, was thinking that, supposing Basil were playing a false game in any way, he would either take Phemie abroad, or else—well, yes—there should be confidence—painful confidence between them at last.
And yet the man’s heart yearned towards Basil. He had been fond of him as he might have been of a son; and if he were ill, if he had overcome his madness, if he could live in England, and yet not seek to destroy what measure of peace still existed in Phemie’s heart, Captain Stondon felt he should be glad to see the man whose love for his wife had driven him forth into exile, on British ground again.
The mysteries of human nature are inexplicable; its inconsistencies are never ending. For any outsider even to attempt to describe all Captain Stondon had thought and felt about his wife and Basil—about Basil and his mother—about himself and Phemie, would be useless. I can only say that he was sorry and he was glad at the news contained in Basil’s note. He had been wretched about the young man; Mrs. Montague Stondon made his life a weariness concerning her son. He felt that if Basil died abroad he should feel as though he had almost two deaths to answer for. If Basil would only marry, if Phemie could only forget the love that had been a curse to her, if he could only see oftener the look in his wife’s face which had just comforted him, he believed his declining days might still be bright with sunshine.