“Oh, is that you, Marion? We’ve had such a gallop home. The fog came on so suddenly. Geoffrey is back, of course?”
“Geoffrey!” said Marion in surprise. “Why should he be back before you? No, he has not come. I was asking you how his new purchase had been behaving.”
“She’s a vixen,” replied Georgie; if I were a gentleman I would call her something worse. Prince and she teazed each other so, that we separated. Geoffrey said he would come home by the fields and take it out of her. We came home by the road; but it is ever so long ago since we separated, and he said he would be home long before us. What can he be about?”
A strange sensation crept over Marion. Hardly anxiety, hardly apprehension. Rather a sort of standing still of her whole being with sudden awe, sudden terror of what for the first time darted into her imagination as the possible end of the whole, the solution of the problem of her life-mistake. Like a picture she saw it all before her as if by magic. There been an accident; Geoffrey was killed! She, his wife no longer, but freed by this awful cutting of the knot from the bonds which had galled her so sorely, against which she had murmured so ceaselessly. But was it a feeling of relief which accompanied the vision, which for the moment she believed to be prophetic? Was it not rather a sensation compared to which all her past sufferings seemed trivial and childish—a draught of that bitterest of cups of which it is given to us poor mortals to drink, unavailing, “too late,” self-reproach? If Geoffrey were dead, it seemed to her, his wife, standing there and remembering all, that she and she alone, had killed him. She said not a word. In perfect silence she watched Margaret and Georgie gather up their long muddy skirts and hasten across the hall, peeping in as they passed the open door of the morning-room to reassure their mother’s anxiety. She followed them mechanically; heard, as if in a dream, Lady Anne’s exclamations of concern on hearing that Mr. Baldwin was not with them; and while the good lady trotted off to share her motherly uneasiness with the Squire, at this time of day always ensconced in his private den, Marion crept upstairs to the room in which but a few hours before she had carelessly thrown off her hat and hurried below to risk no chance of a tête-à-tête with her husband! Her evening dress lay on the bed—through the open door into the dressing-room she saw by the firelight Geoffrey’s as yet unopened portmanteau. She shuddered as it caught her eye. Would he ever open it again? Would she ever again hear his voice, see his stalwart figure and fair sunny face? Or how might she not see him? Would they bring him home pale and stiff, stretched out in that long, dreadful way she had once or twice in her London life seen a something that had been a man, carried by to the hospital after some fatal accident? Or, worse still, would his fair hair perhaps be dabbled with blood, his blue eyes distorted with agony, his beautiful face all crushed and disfigured?
Ah! It was too horrible.
“Forgive me, dear Geoffrey, forgive me,” she said in her remorse, as if her words could reach him. “Oh, God, forgive me for my wickedness, and do not punish me so fearfully. For how can I live, how endure the light of day with the remembrance of what I have done?”
Crouched by the fire, she remained thus for some time. Then hearing a slight bustle down-stairs in the hall, she rose and went out into the vestibule, looking over the staircase to see what was taking place below. It was an arrival, but not Geoffrey. Captain Ferndale evidently. She saw little Georgie fly across the hall, followed more deliberately by Margaret and her mother.
How happy they all seemed! Had they forgotten all about her, and Geoffrey, out in the fog, alive or dead, nobody seemed to care! But she wronged them. Captain Ferndale was hardly welcomed, before they all began telling him of their anxiety.
“Papa has sent out men in all directions,” said Georgie, “I am perfectly certain something must have happened. The horse he was on is a most vicious creature. I was frightened out of my wits when he was riding beside me, though of course I didn’t say so to poor Marion, Mrs. Baldwin, you know, Fred. By-the-by, Maggie, where is she?”
“In her room, I think,” said Margaret. “I’ll go and see. We have put back dinner half-an-hour in hopes Geoffrey may come back safe and sound by then. But I confess I am very uneasy.”