“If only they knew the whole,” he said to himself, “they would not wonder at her unnatural behaviour. ‘Alarmed’ about me! No indeed! The saddest sight that can meet her eyes will be my returning alive and well.” And with this bitterness in his heart, he followed Margaret to the drawing-room in quest of Marion.
What evil spirit of pride and unlovely perversity had been whispering to her? And why, oh! why had she listened to its voice, wilfully stifling the pleadings of her gentle woman’s heart, and deliberately destroying what might have been the happy, softening influences of the day’s occurrences? Much doubtless of the miserable state of things between these two, bound together by the closest, most sacred of ties, they—she—was not to be blamed for. “Circumstances”—the only name we, in our ignorance, can find for the mysterious combinations which destroy the lives of so many—“circumstances” in great part, were the scape-goat in the case of the great mistake of Marion’s life. She had meant to do right, poor child, and had tried her best to execute her intention. Terrible mistakes we are all apt to make, the wisest of us perhaps more than the humbler and less confident. But for such, though the temporal punishment is often disproportionately heavy, in higher tribunals we are leniently judged. Not so with deliberate acts of cruelty and unkindness to each other, such as Marion Baldwin was this evening guilty of.
She knew what she was about; she knew, though possibly she would not have owned it to herself, that she wished to wound Geoffrey, deliberately meant and intended to punish for some offence towards herself which she would have found it difficult to define, the heart whose only blame, if blame it were, was its too great devotion to her.
She was angry with herself for having been frightened about him, mortified, though yet her relief was real, at the matter-of-fact conclusion of what she had been picturing to herself as a crisis in her fate. So, after the manner of people when angry with themselves, she did her best to make another as unhappy as herself.
When Geoffrey entered the drawing-room, and Margaret Copley with instinctive delicacy withdrew, he did not at first perceive that his wife was present. In another moment, however, he caught sight of her, seated at the little table in the furthest corner of the room, apparently engrossed in a book. His heart throbbed with disappointment, wounded feeling, and even some mixture of indignation; but he controlled himself, and determined to give her a chance.
“Marion,” he said, “I am going to take off my wet things, but I have just looked in to tell you I am all right. You heard me come just now, I suppose? Lady Anne and all the others were at the door to meet me. I’m afraid I have given you all a very uncomfortable evening, but it was Coquette’s fault, not mine. However, all’s well that ends well, and I flatter myself the beauty has had a lesson that she won’t forget in a hurry.”
He went on speaking in a half nervous manner, for Marion did not appear at first to hear him. When he left off she raised her eyes from her book, and said, in the provokingly indifferent, half-awake tone of a person still engrossed in the pages from which the attention is hardly withdrawn:
“I beg your pardon, Geoffrey. I did not hear you come into the room. Was it I you were speaking to? Yes, I heard your horse come up to the door. What a fuss Lady Anne gets into for nothing at all! Hadn’t you better go and change your things?”
And without giving him time to reply, her eyes were again bent on her book. Geoffrey looked at her for a moment without speaking. She felt his gaze fixed on her, she felt, though he could not see, the expression of his face. Almost she felt inclined to spring up and run towards him to ask his forgiveness, to tell him of the anxiety she had endured, the genuine relief she had experienced when she heard of his safe return.
“But he would not believe you,” whispered the evil spirit she had been listening to. “Why lower yourself thus unnecessarily to one who no longer cares for you?”