“Eugenia,” he said, looking up quickly, after reading this letter, “Colonel Masterton cannot come till the 29th. That leaves us all the week after next free. Of course I shall not ask the others till he comes. How would you like to have your people for a few days then—the Thurstons and your father. The change might do him good, and you seem dying to see your sister.”
Eugenia’s face glowed all over with delight. The old bright look came into her eyes, the old eager ring thrilled again through her voice.
“Oh, Beauchamp, thank you, thank you so much for thinking of it. It would be delightful. I cannot tell you how I should enjoy it.”
“Why have you never spoken of it before if you wish it so much?” asked Beauchamp, not unkindly, but with the slight irritation of incipient self-reproach. “I can’t guess your wishes always, you know.”
“I did mention it once,” she said, timidly again. “Don’t you remember, the first time you had to go away I asked if Sydney might come to me.”
“But that was an absurd proposal. It would have looked so ridiculous to bring Mrs Thurston all the way here because I was to be away, and naturally when your friends do come I should wish to be at home to receive them; so you had better write about their coming, to-day.”
He rose as he spoke, and gathering his letters and newspapers together, left the room, feeling very well pleased with himself, and not sorry to see the bright flush of happiness his proposal had brought to his wife’s pale cheeks.
She was indeed feeling very happy. Never since her marriage, since at least the first few days of unalloyed enjoyment in Paris—had she felt so eagerly delighted about anything. And the bright gleam had not come before it was wanted. Notwithstanding Beauchamp’s comfortable belief that they had had a fair amount of variety since coming to Halswood, Eugenia’s life had latterly been very dull. The most pleasurable part of the variety had fallen to his own share—two or three “runs up to town” to see about the new furniture, or new carriages, or something of the kind; one or two short visits to bachelor shooting-boxes, to which ladies were not invited; plenty of the exhilarating out-door life, which he thoroughly enjoyed, to which as yet Eugenia, not over strong, and completely unaccustomed to horses, was not sufficiently acclimatised to find it enjoyable. No wonder Captain Chancellor considered that the last three months had been far from dull. They would not have seemed so to Eugenia, had her inner life been a more natural and healthy one; but as it was, the outside distractions that had come in her way had been few and by no means powerful.
Most of the “families of position” in the neighbourhood had called on them, but the very biggest people of all—a family residing at a considerable distance from Halswood—had not yet done so; and Beauchamp’s evident anxiety on this point had not been unobserved by Eugenia, though resolutely put aside by her as one of the things into which she would not look. Some of their neighbours had already invited them to dinner, and they had gone; but Eugenia had not enjoyed the experience, and felt little wish to renew it. “Long ago,” as now in her own mind she had learnt to call her girlhood, even the dullest of dinner-parties would have furnished her quick observation, her lively imagination, her fresh, eager nature with material for interest and entertainment. But now-a-days it was different. She was self-conscious and self-absorbed, and, as a matter of course, less attractive in herself, less ready to find others so. Her one engrossing sensation in company was anxiety to please, or at least to avoid displeasing her husband, which left her none of the leisure of mind or self-forgetfulness essential to her enjoyment of the people or scenes about her. And these had not been sufficiently striking or interesting to force her out of herself. There were not many young people in the neighbourhood; those of her own sex nearest in age to Eugenia happening at this time to be either young girls not yet out of the schoolroom, or youthful matrons, with whom Mrs Chancellor could not feel that she had much in common. They all seemed happy and busy, perfectly at ease, satisfied with their lives and themselves. “Or else,” thought Eugenia, “they are more clever at hiding their anxieties and disappointments than I am.” In many cases doubtless true. She had not yet learnt, as most women of deep feeling sooner or later must learn, to smile when the heart feels all but breaking, to force interest in the trivialities around one, when one’s own life, or what may be dearer than life, seems hanging in the balance. At this stage of her history, such seeming she would probably have stigmatised as mere hypocrisy, not taking into account that unselfishness and worthy self-respect, as often as pride, furnish the motive for the wearing of that most tragic “des masques tragiques—celui qui avait un sourire.”
So, though her beauty and gentleness prepossessed many in her favour—many even of those whose prejudices as well as curiosity had been aroused by the fact that the wife of the new master of Halswood was not exactly of their world, belonging, indeed, to one of “those dreadful manufacturing places, where the sun never shines for the smoke, and all the people drop their h’s, you know”—Eugenia Chancellor did not make much way among her new acquaintances. The women allowed she was “pretty” and unassuming, but stupid or shy, they were not sure which. The men hooted at “pretty”—“lovely” or “beautiful” was nearer the mark—and hesitated about the “shy or stupid” suggestion, coming, however, in almost every case to allow that she was difficult to get on with—either “Chancellor bullied her at home,” or she had married him without caring for him; that she was not happy was evident. At which proof of masculine discrimination, the wives and mothers held up their hands in scornful incredulity. It was “just like Fred, or Arthur, or ‘your papa,’ to make a romantic mystery about her, because she is pretty. There is nothing plainer to see than that she is silent and stiff because she feels rather out of her element as yet. It is all strange to her, of course, having been brought up as she has been, and really she is to be felt for.”