Lover and Husband: A Novel

by Mrs. Molesworth

She looked at her face in the queer, old-fashioned toilet glass. It was pale as death, and her lips looked blue. So she drank some water, and drew down the blinds, and then in her old childish fashion threw herself down on the side of the bed, hiding her face in the pillow.

“Now,” she said to herself,” I will begin to think. What must I do? How can meet Geoffrey? What ought I to tell him?”

Hopeless questions; unanswerable at least by the poor child in the state she was in. She thought it all over, again and again, that strange scene in the garden. There was a terrible fascination about it. She reminded herself of every word he had uttered, every glance and gesture through the whole of the interview. She could not force herself to think of anything else. Geoffrey, her future life, everything but this one remembrance seemed of little consequence.

Gradually she found herself thinking of it all as if it had happened to some one else and not to her; as if she had seen it acted on the stage, or read it in a book; and then she seemed to have known it always. It was nothing new—the arbour, and the flowers, and the sunshine, the dark figure in the doorway, their mutual amazement, the mingled anguish and joy of their meeting, the agony of their farewell—all seemed to have been a part of her whole life; she had never been separate from it; she would evermore exist in the thought of it.

Then the images became confused. She was no longer herself, but some one else, who, she could not decide. Ralph, still standing in the doorway, grew strangely like Geoffrey. Again a change—the whole was a dream. She was back at Altes, with Cissy and Ralph on the terrace, and Ralph was smiling on her lovingly while she recounted to him the terrible dream that had visited her. She was asleep! From very exhaustion, both mental and physical, from extremity of suffering, though compressed into the short space of a few hours, she was for the time laid to rest in the peaceful unconsciousness, which, though the waking therefrom may be bitter, is yet, at such times, an unspeakable mercy. I am not learned in medical matters, but I believe this sleep saved her from a brain fever or worse.

Geoffrey came in from his visit to the stables, which had been prolonged beyond his intentions. Not finding his wife in the little sitting-room appropriated to their use, he came along the passage to seek her in her bedroom. He was not a light stepper, and his boots creaked loudly as he approached the room. But the sound did not disturb her, nor did his tap on the door. He repeated it, but with no effect. Then, imagining she must be in the garden, he opened the door, merely to glance in and satisfy himself as to her absence. The room was very dark, all the blinds drawn down, and a general air of sombreness and desertedness. No, there was her hat on the floor, and a glance at the bed revealed herself. In no very comfortable attitude, just as she had flung herself down, but fast asleep, breathing soft and regularly as an infant, and, as he looked more closely, with a sweet smile on her lips, though her face looked paler than its wont.

“My poor darling,” murmured Geoffrey to himself, “she has been tired with her long morning alone. I must not leave her again for so long. She looks pale too. I trust she has not been ill.”

And very gently he drew the bed-curtains so as to shade her still more from the light, closed the door with noiseless hand, and softly crept back along the passage to occupy himself as best he could without her, till she awoke.

Already he had grown very dependent upon her. Indoors especially. He never felt quite in his element in the house, his life for many years past having literally been almost altogether spent in the open air.

But now it was very different. Indoors meant Marion and cheerful talk, flowers and work, and books even in moderation now and then; a sweet face, and a graceful flitting figure, and tea at all hours of the day, and pipes only on sufferance! It was all so new to him, so wonderfully pretty and delicate, this atmosphere of womanhood for the first time really brought home to him, great rough clod-hopper as he called himself. And if so unspeakably charming here, in a strange, unhomelike house, what would it not be at the Manor Farm, where this sweet presence was to take root and bloom for evermore? “Till death u do part!” came into Geoffrey’s mind that afternoon, as he fidgeted about, not knowing what to do with himself, wishing she would wake, and yet afraid to go near her for fear of disturbing her. “Till death us do part!” he thought to himself. “A queer sort of life it would be without her!” After an hour or two’s patience he crept back again to her room to see if she were awake. But she was still asleep. He stood beside her for a minute or two. Just as he was turning away she awoke: awoke from her dream that the real was a dream; awoke from her sweet vision of Ralph’s dark eyes gazing down on her tenderly, to find herself back in the hateful world of facts, and Geoffrey Baldwin, her husband whom she did not love, standing at her side with a happy smile on his honest face. She glanced at him for an instant, then with a recoil of something very like actual aversion, turned from him, and closed her eyes again, as if she wished to shut out him and all beside from her sight.