Lover and Husband: A Novel

by Mrs. Molesworth

Her opinion of human nature in general was by no means an exalted one. Disinterested goodness, in the highest sense, was to her incredible, or rather inconceivable. Strange, at first sight, this may appear. Strange in so young a girl, for Florence was little more than twenty, and her actual experience of the world had not been very extensive. Strange, and no less sad, for the disbelief, or slowness to believe, in the truth and goodness of our fellows, which is almost excusable in a soured and world-tried man or woman of middle age, revolts and repels us in a very young person. Meeting with it we cannot but suspect some terrible defect in the early up-bringing of such an one, if not some crooked tendency of peculiar strength innate in the character itself.

So, as I said, Ralph puzzled Florence. His devotion to study for its own sake, utterly indifferent to its bringing him name or fame; his distaste for society, in which, nevertheless, his rank and prospects would have insured him a cordial reception; his goodness itself; the union of strength, with gentleness which to her seemed almost weakness; nay, more, his very faults—his whole nature, in short—baffled her utterly.

And, above all, his indifference to her charms! For in this last there was a certain amount of inconsistency. Not in his being always kind and attentive to her; that went for nothing, she knew he would have been so to any woman. But, over and above this, she saw that he admired her. In a quiet, cold sort of way, as if she had been a picture or a statue. She was pleasing to him as a beautiful object, for his perceptions were refined and correct to a fault. And even she felt, and truly, that to be thus admired by him was worth all the coarser adulation of the many—the vulgar triumph of reigning as a ball-room belle.

But this was all! Beyond this point she could not succeed in impressing him. At last, after much cogitation, she decided in her own mind that he, a student, if not already a “savant,” must be of a different nature from other men, and she must content herself accordingly. One comfort certainly was hers. She need fear no rival, past, present, or future. His never having been specially attracted by any young lady had become, as it were, a proverb in the family. And as for anything else—. No; she felt instinctively there was nothing to fear. No awkward entanglement which might have precluded the idea of matrimony, or engendered a distaste thereto. And she was right. The life of this man, from earliest boy hood to the present time, would have stood the strictest scrutiny.

He must have always been, she decided, just the same peculiar being she found him now. It was simply not in him to fall in love, “to lose his head about anyone,” as she phrased it to herself. The best she could hope for was, that he should become, as it were, accustomed to her, regard her with quiet friendliness and respect, feel a certain amount of pleasure in her society; so that when his mother should one day make the proposition to him, for which Florence was thus carefully paving the way, the idea should not, at least, be repugnant to him. He would marry her, no doubt, if his mother wished it, provided it could be done without much trouble or interference with his usual habits. Still, it was mortifying to think of, that with this faint, colourless sentiment she must be content. For though herself too cold, or perhaps too thoroughly selfish, ever to experience the all-absorbing, self-devoting, uncalculating intensity of a genuine love, she was yet by no means insensible to the extreme gratification, the agreeable triumph of awakening such a feeling in all its depth towards her in the bosom of another. She had all the elements that go to the making of a thorough-paced coquette; but she was wise enough to see that, in her critical position, the exercise of any such arts might result in the direst misfortune to herself; and, through her, to the only three people in the world she really cared about.

The one consolation to her wounded vanity—Ralph’s evident admiration of her beauty for its own sake, she sedulously cultivated. She was perfectly aware that it was merely the gratification an artist experiences when brought into relation with harmony of any kind. An utterly different feeling from that, happily far more common-place one, by no means confined to artist natures, which makes the outward form precious for the sake of its owner. The feeling which made makes Rochester declare that “every atom or Jane’s flesh” would, must be, dear to him, in pain, in sickness—yes, even in the wild paroxysms or insanity. The feeling so exquisitely described in another sense, in that lovely picture or motherhood, when Heather tells how precious to her is every freckle on her little Lally’s snub nose.

Well aware that Ralph’s admiration for her sprung from no root of this, kind, Florence found it the more necessary to nurse and cherish, with the utmost care, the delicate plant.

Never, in all the months they had been members of the same household, had Ralph seen her in any but a perfectly well-chosen and tasteful “toilette.” Unless, indeed, on one or two occasions when he had “accidentally” caught sight of her in the most becoming of studied “negligés.” Her magnificent hair escaped from its trappings perhaps, or decorated with a wreath of flowers to please her little cousins in a game of play, which had flushed her usually pale cheeks with an exquisite bloom.

This sort of thing, she imagined, kept up with Sir Ralph her character of gentle artlessness, somewhat subdued by the trials of her past life. Whereas, in reality, she neither sat nor moved, looked nor spoke, when in his presence, save with the one purpose of strengthening and increasing his admiration.

This girl, then, as I have shown her, this Florence Vyse, was the young lady who entered the room that rainy morning, just as Marion had left it.