Lover and Husband: A Novel

by Mrs. Molesworth

R. BROWNING.

SO time went on, as it always does, through weal and woe, bright days and dull. But this winter was weary work to Marion Baldwin. Worse, far worse to bear, she constantly said to herself, than the previous one, spent Mallingford at the Cross House. Then at least, though she had much to endure, she had been free from the reproaches of her conscience, which now, for all her endeavours to silence it, would yet at times insist on being heard. Geoffrey, though she saw him but seldom in the day, constantly haunted her thoughts. She fancied she perceived a change in him. His manner was the same—perfectly gentle: but never more. But the sorrow of his life was beginning to tell on him physically. He was fast losing heart altogether, as day by day he became more convinced of the hopelessness of ever attempting to win back the wife, who indeed had never been his! Yet she was gentler, more cordial even than she had been to him; always ready to agree to his wishes, much less irritable, anxious evidently to do her “duty” by him. She thought sincerely enough, that he was wearied of her, that it was too late to convince him that in her loneliness she was fast learning to prize the love and devotion which when hers, she had so rudely repulsed. For she was truly very desolate at this time. She was pining for affection, yearning for companionship.

The remembrance of Ralph was growing to be to her as the memory of the dead, soft and chastened; shrined about with a sacredness of its own, but no longer agonizing and acute. She had grown so thoroughly to realize that she should never see him again, that he was utterly and for ever cut out of her life, that the inward strife and rebellion were at an end. She bowed her head in submission, standing by the grave of her lost love, and in heart said a last, voluntary farewell to the beautiful dream of her girlhood. She could never forget him, or in any sense replace him by another. He was still, and for ever must remain, a part of herself, of her whole existence. An impalpable, an indefinable and wholly immaterial bond yet, at times, seemed to rivet her spirit to his; and never was she so at peace as when she felt most conscious of this still existing sympathy. A consciousness altogether superior to the limitations of time or space—which the tidings of his death would in no wise have affected—a certainty that the noblest part of their natures was still and ever would be united, that, in the purest and most exquisite sense, he still loved her, still cared for her well being.

It was to her precisely as if he had long been dead; his own words had foreshadowed this, “as if one of us were dying, Marion.”

To some extent he had foreseen how it would be with her—that to her sensitive, imaginative nature, his thus dying to her, fading softly out of her life, was the gentlest form in which the stroke could come. For she was not the sort of woman, “strong-minded, “philosophical,” call it what you will, who could ever have come to look upon him personally as only a friend, to have associated with him in a comfortable “let bygones-be-bygones” fashion, possibly to have attained to a sisterly regard for his wife, in no wise diminished by the gratifying reflection that “though really she is a nice creature, my dear, Lady Severn was not Sir Ralph’s first love.”

Ralph had foreseen more. Her nature, though well-balanced and far from weakly, was too clinging, too love-demanding, not, in time, to turn in its outward loneliness and desolation, to the shelter and support (if, indeed, Geoffrey’s countenance did not belie his character) only too ready to welcome it. So much Ralph had read, and correctly enough, of the probable future; and, therefore, as we have seen, even amidst his own supremest suffering, had ventured to predict “a moonlight happiness” for his darling.

But he had not foreseen—how could he have done so?—the side influences, the disturbing elements in the way. Marion’s physical prostration at the time, which had rendered it much harder for her to act with her usual unselfishness and self-control; her monotonous, uninteresting, unoccupied life at the Manor Farm, where, partly through circumstances, partly through Geoffrey’s mistaken kindness in sparing her every species of care or responsibility, all tended to foster her morbid clinging to the past, nothing drew her to healthy interest in the present. Above all, Ralph had by no means taken sufficiently into account Geoffrey’s personal share in the whole. He had thought of him as a fine, honest fellow, devoted in his way to his wife; ready, as she herself had said in other words, to do anything for her happiness. True, he had had misgivings as to the effect of Marion’s extending her confidence to her husband, he had thought it was only too probable that her doing so might, for a time at least, have unhappy results. But he had by no means felt certain that she would feel it her duty to tell more than she had already, before her marriage, confided to him. And even in the event of her doing so, he had not realized the manner in which it would act on the young man’s nature. Few, indeed, even of those most intimately acquainted with Geoffrey Baldwin could have done so. These sunny, gleeful natures are often to the full as grievously misunderstood as their less attractive, graver and apparently more reserved neighbours. Oh what fools we are in our superficial, presumptuous judgments of each other! May not the sunlight dance on the surface of the stream without our forthwith pronouncing its waters shallow? Is there not latent in the blackest, coldest iron a vast power of heat and light?

Miss Veronica was absent from Mallingford the greater part of this winter. Her general health had been less satisfactory of late, and, after much consideration, it had been decided that the coldest months must be spent by her in a milder climate. In a sense, her absence was a relief to both her friends. It was becoming hard work to attempt to deceive her as to the true state of things at the Manor Farm: her loving scrutiny was more painful to Marion than the cold formality of the generality of her acquaintances; more unendurable the thought of her distress and anxiety than even the consciousness of the gossiping curiosity with which the young wife felt instinctively she was elsewhere discussed.

Yet she murmured, sometimes, not a little at this separation from the only friend she could really rely on: but then, in these days, Marion Baldwin murmured, inwardly at least, at everything in her life. There were times when she felt so desperate with ennui and heart-sick at what she believed to be her husband’s ever-growing indifference to her, that she said to herself, if only Veronica were attainable she would break through her reserve and tell her all. Most probably, had the resolution been possible to execute, she would have changed her mind before she was half way to Miss Temple’s cottage!

One day at luncheon Geoffrey, to her surprise, told her a gentleman was coming to dinner. She felt considerably amazed and a little indignant. It was not often any guest joined them—“entertaining,” to any extent, not being expected of a young couple in the first months of their married life, and the couple in question being only too ready to avail themselves of the conventional excuse as long as they could with decency do so—and the few times on which their tête-à-tête meal had been interrupted, Geoffrey had given her plenty of notice, had even seemed to make a favour on her side of her receiving any friend of his. To-day, however, he did nothing of the sort. Hence her indignation at what she imagined to be a new proof of neglect and indifference.