Lover and Husband: A Novel

by Mrs. Molesworth

Geoffrey as thankful when it was over; and they had settled down into a sort of commonplace routine, and to a great extent independence of each other in their daily lives. It was grievously hard upon him—this broken-spirited, heartless “coming home.” Harder to bear, I think, than if his joyous anticipations had been cut short by death itself. For had it been a dead bride he was thus bringing home, he would not have felt so far, so utterly separated from her, in all that constitutes the real bitterness of disunion, as he felt himself now from his living, unloving wife—the pale, cold Marion, whose terrible words still rang in his ears. “I did love him even then with all the love of my nature, and, oh, Geoffrey, I love him now.”

They both, though they did not allude to it, dreaded intensely the first visit to Miss Veronica. By tacit agreement they did not pay it together, by tacit agreement too, they decided that the secret of their fatal “mistake,” should, if possible, be concealed from the affectionate and unselfish friend, who, to some extent, was responsible for their having committed it. But they reckoned without their host! Veronica’s perceptions, naturally acute, and rendered still more so by her reflective life and in her present case by her loving anxiety, were not so easily to be deceived. Though no word of misgiving escaped her, she yet saw too clearly that Geoffrey’s gaiety was forced—that Marion’s expressions of content and satisfaction wore not genuine—that neither of the two confided in her as of old. She was the last person in the world to take offence or be hurt by their silence. That its motive was to spare her pain she divined by instinct. Still on the whole, I think it was a mistake. Poor Veronica suffered, I believe, more acutely from the mystery surrounding her friends’ evident alienation from each other, than would have been the case had they taken her into their confidence and related to her the whole of the strange and exceptional history. On their side both Geoffrey and Marion paid no light price for the reserve they thought it their duty to maintain. For the first time since childhood Geoffrey felt himself forced to shun the society of the friend to whom he had carried every grief and perplexity, every interest, every joy of his life. And to Marion likewise, it was no small trial to be deprived at this critical time, of the wisest woman friend she had ever known; of the gentle sympathy which during the many dreary months of her Mallingford life, had never failed her.

The Manor Farm was one of those rather anomalous habitations, half farm, half gentleman’s house, of which in some of the agricultural counties one sees so many. With no special characteristics of its own, save perhaps that it was somewhat quaint, and decidedly old fashioned: hardly picturesque and not exactly ugly; it was the sort or house that takes its colouring mainly from the lives of its inhabitants. All dwellings are not of this description: there are venerable walls which we cannot but associate with gloom and solemnity, however merry may have been the voices, however ringing the laughter which there we may have heard resound; there are “rose-clad” cottages, which our memory refuses to depict save as smiling in the sunshine, though our sojourn therein may have been of the most sorrowful, and the brightness without seemed but to mock the aching hearts and tear-laden eyes within. But the Manor Farm was by no means an impressive abode. It was comfortable already, and with a little trouble might have been made pretty: but alas, at this time there was no grace or sweetness in the heart of the young girl who came with reluctant steps to be its mistress, whose youth and brightness had been swamped in the deep waters through which she had passed.

Unconsciously she was entering on a new phase in her experience. The first effect of her again meeting with Ralph had been to revive in her the consciousness of his irresistibly strong personal influence. For a time she felt very near to him; as if indeed she only lived in the immaterial union with him which she had before imagined was at an end. This did not surprise her. It seemed to her that the bar on her side of a loveless marriage was in point of fact no bar at all: whereas so long as she had believed in his union to another, she had felt herself more utterly divided from him than by death itself. Woman’s indefensible logic, no doubt, but so she felt, and so she expressed it to herself. She was wrong—mistaken to a great extent—she had been drifting away from Ralph. Only his actual presence, his personal influence had recalled her: of which he himself was conscious when he deliberately resolved utterly to sever himself from her life; by no species of intercourse or communication, however apparently innocent or irreproachable, to keep alive in her the consciousness of an influence so fatal to her prospects of peace as the wife of another man.

I hardly think this first phase of her suffering, though acute almost to agony, was after all the worst. There is a great compensatory power in strong excitement—the after days of grey depression are to my thinking the most to be dreaded. On these she was now entering; for though she knew it not, the full strength of his immediate influence was already beginning to fade. The entering on a new life, the return to scenes with which he was in no wise associated, had much to do with this. Still, at times the first sharp agony returned to her; but generally when roused by some external agency. The sight of any silly trifling thing associated with him—a book out of which he had read to her, hand-writing resembling his, even little details of dress recalling him—all had power to stab her. Ah, yes! Even to the day of her death she felt that the scent of honeysuckle would be to her unendurable, for that fatal day in his excitement Ralph had plucked a spray off the luxuriant branches overhanging the old arbour, and ruthlessly crushing it in his hands, the strong, almost too sweet perfume had reached her as she sat before him.

But these acute sensations gradually grew to be of rarer occurrence; very possibly, had her new life at the Manor Farm been fuller and more congenial, had Geoffrey been more experienced, less humble, and perhaps less unselfish, at this crisis things might have mend. By allowing her to see that, notwithstanding all that had passed he yet loved her as fervently as before, that yet she was to him a very necessity of his being; the husband might gradually have drawn her out of herself and eventually led her at once to cling to and support, the man who truly, as he had once said, found “life without her” a very mockery of the word.

But Geoffrey could not do this. He pitied her too much; he hated himself for what he had brought upon her. He went to the extreme of fancying himself actually repulsive to her. He guarded himself from the slightest word or sign of familiarity or affection, imagining that the revulsion these would engender would drive them yet further and more hopelessly apart.

“At least,” he thought, “she shall live in peace. All I can now do to please her is to keep out of her way and not disgust her by constantly reminding her of her bondage.” So, though his whole existence was full of her, though her slightest wish was immediately, though unobtrusively, attended to, he yet left her to herself, maintaining an appearance of such indifference to her and adsorption in his independent pursuits, that the girl was almost to be excused for imagining that Geoffrey was “more of a farmer than a man,” incapable of very refined or long-lived affection, and that, after all, so far as he was concerned, what had happened did not so much matter. “He would have been pretty sure to get tired of me before long in any case,” was the reflection with which she threw off all sense of responsibility with respect to him, and stifled for the time the pangs of reproach for the blight which through her had fallen on his sunny life.

There was little society of any desirable kind in the neighbourhood of the Manor Farm. The other side of the county was much more sociable, but about Brackley there were few resident county families—the great man of the place a permanent absentee. Besides which the Baldwins’ position had been a somewhat anomalous one, lying rather on the border lands, for the father’s status as banker in Mallingford naturally connected him with the little town, while at the same time it induced a species of acquaintance with the out-lying districts. Geoffrey’s rooted aversion from earliest childhood to anything in the shape of office or desk, or indeed to indoor occupation of any kind, had led to the removal to the Manor Farm some time before the old man’s death. Hunting, shooting, and so on, with the sons of the few squires in the neighbourhood, had brought about the sort of bachelor friendliness between him and these families which was pleasant enough so far as it went, but committed the other side to nothing in respect of the future Mrs. Baldwin. Had he married quite in his own sphere, or slightly beneath him, he would have sunk, as a Benedick, into peaceful obscurity. But when it was known that his bride, though poor, was a daughter of the well-known Hartford Vere, himself a cadet of one of the “best” Brentshire families, mammas began to think they must really call at the Farm, and “show a little attention to her, poor young thing!” To which disinterested amiability on the part of their spouses, papas, being in general more liberal-minded in such matters, made, of course, no objection.

So Marion received some visitors, of whom the Copleys of the Wood were the only ones in whom she felt the slightest interest. A moderate amount of invitations to dreary dinner-parties, or still more trying “candle visits,” followed. Geoffrey thought it right to accept them, so, feeling that to her, change of scene was but the replacing of one kind of dulness by another, Marion agreed to his decision, and they went.