“No, oh no,” said Eugenia. “I quite know how you mean. I want to understand a little more about a good many things that I have not come in the way of hitherto.”
Beauchamp’s tone had been pleasant and encouraging. Eugenia’s impressionable spirits began to rise. If she could but be sure of always pleasing her husband! If she could but feel that in all difficulties, great and small, she might appeal to him, certain of sympathy, certain of encouragement! It might come to be so—married life she had often heard, was not to be tested by the outset. Circumstances so far had certainly been somewhat against her. It might be that this coming to Halswood, so dreaded by her, was to be the beginning of the life of perfect union, of complete mutual comprehension which she had dreamt of.
A glow of new hopefulness seemed to creep through her at the thought—from very intensity of feeling she remained silent, wishing that she could find words in which to express to her husband a tithe of the yearning devotion, the ardent resolutions ready at his slightest bidding to spring into life. In a minute or two he spoke again.
“Are you tired, Eugenia?” he said. “What makes you so silent?”
There was a slight impatience in his tone. He wanted her to be bright and eager, and delighted with everything. He had by now almost got over his fear of “undue or underbred elation” at her good fortune, on his wife’s part, and when alone with him some amount of demonstrative appreciation of what through him had fallen to her share, would not have been objectionable. But, as was usual with her, when carried away by strong feeling of her own, Eugenia perceived nothing of the restrained irritation in Beauchamp’s voice.
“Tired,” she said, with a little start, “oh, no; at least I may be a little tired, but it isn’t that that made me silent. I was only thinking.”
Her voice quivered a little. A sudden fear of hysterics came over Captain Chancellor. Some women always got hysterics when they were tired, and Eugenia was so absurdly excitable. A word or a look at any moment would make her cry.
“Thinking,” he said, half rallyingly, half impatiently; “what about? Nothing unpleasant, I hope? though there certainly is no counting on women’s caprices.”
“I can’t possibly tell you all I was thinking,” she began, still speaking tremulously. “I was thinking how I do hope we shall be happy together in this new life, how I trust you will be pleased with me always, how I hope you will let me come to you with my little difficulties and anxieties, and—and that we may be at one always in everything, and not grow apart from each other. Oh, I can’t half say what I feel. I think—I think, I sympathise a little with the wife in the ‘Lord of Burleigh,’ I feel frightened and ignorant, and a little lonely. But oh, Beauchamp, if you will help me—don’t you remember that beautiful line—
“And he cheered her soul with love.