Tuesday the 22nd came, but Captain Chancellor set off on his visit to Marshlands alone. Eugenia was ill—too ill to leave her room, though better than she had been. The restrained suffering of the last few weeks, the unhealthily reserved and isolated life she had begun to live—she to whom sympathy was as the air she breathed—all had told upon her; and the excitement of the painful discussion with her husband the day of Lady Hereward’s unfortunate visit, had been the finishing stroke. After that she gave way altogether.
She was not sorry to be ill. On the whole, she felt it the best thing that could have happened to her. She was glad to be alone. She was very glad now that Sydney’s visit had been deferred. With all her haste and impulsiveness, there was in her a curious mixture of clear-headedness and reasoning power. She liked to understand things—to get to the bottom of them. Now that she had left off pretending to deceive herself with false representations—now that she had ceased to try to cheat herself into imagining she was happy—she found a strange, half-morbid satisfaction in dissecting and analysing the whole—her own character and her husband’s; the past lives of both, and the influences that had made them what they were; the special, definite causes of their discordancy.
“He is not—I see it plainly now,” she said to herself, with a curious, hopeless sort of calm, “he is not in the very least the man I imagined. That Beauchamp has never existed. Is it just, therefore, that I should blame the real one for not being what he never was?” Here she got a little puzzled, and tried to look at it from a fresh point of view. “And being what he is, and no more, why should I not make the best of it? It seems to me there is something repulsive and unworthy in the thought. I would almost rather go on being miserable. Yet I suppose many women have had to do it. I could fancy Sydney, for instance, doing it, and never letting any one suspect she had had it to do. In time, perhaps, I may find it easier, or grow callous.”
Then she would set to work to think out a new rôle for herself—that of an utterly lonely, impossibly self-reliant woman, living a life of self-abnegation, of lofty devotion to duty—unappreciated devotion, unsuspected abnegation—such as no woman has ever yet lived since women were. Seen through the softening medium of physical weakness, not amounting to actual suffering, this new way of looking at things came to have a certain attraction for her. The idea of total and lasting sacrifice of all hopes of personal happiness, all yearning for sympathy, was grand enough and impossible enough to recommend itself greatly to this ardent, extreme nature, to which anything was better than second bests, nothing so antagonistic as compromise in any form.
“I have staked my all and lost,” she said to herself with a sort of piteous grandiloquence; “there is nothing left me but duty and endurance; for though he did love me, I doubt if he does so now. I am not necessary to his happiness. He does not and cannot understand me.”
Only unfortunately there were two or three little difficulties in the way of settling down comfortably to this conclusion. In the first place, notwithstanding her love of theorising, and of idealising even the woes of her lot, Eugenia was essentially honest, and being so she could not allow to herself that her conduct had been blameless, especially in this last and most serious disagreement. She had said things which she knew would gall and irritate her husband. In the morbid excitement of the moment she owned to herself that she had even wished them to have this effect, that his behaviour might excuse the violence of her indignation. And her conduct in general—her conduct ever since their marriage—ever since, at least, the first few weeks of careless happiness—how did that now appear to her from her new point of view? She knew she had been gentle, and in a superficial sense unselfish; with but very rare exceptions she had entirely merged her own wishes in those of her husband, had opposed nothing that he had suggested. Such submission, such sinking of her own individuality, had been unnatural and forced, completely foreign to her character. And, what had been its motive? Not the highest—far from it. It had not been that she really believed that in so doing she was acting her wifely part to perfection; it had not been earnest endeavour after the best within her reach that had prompted her, but rather, a cowardly, a selfish determination to close her eyes to the facts of her life—a weak refusal to see anything she did not want to see—the old wilful cry, “All or nothing; give me all or I die”—the shrinking from owning, even to herself, the self-willed impetuosity with which she had acted—the terror of acknowledging that she had been deceived, or rather, had deceived herself.
“Yes,” she said, “I have been all wrong together. How selfish I have been too! Months ago how indignant I used to get with poor Sydney if she ever attempted, as she used to call it, to ‘clip my wings for me.’ How angry I was with papa when he suggested that we should defer our marriage till we knew a little more of each other! How selfish I was in Paris, too—selfish and unsympathising in Beauchamp’s change of fortune! Perhaps, after all, it is no more than I have deserved that he should feel as he does now.”
The reflection was a wholesome one, and its influence softening, and Beauchamp had been very kind since her illness. He might not understand her, but at times she felt it was certainly going too far to say that he no longer cared for her. He seemed to have already quite forgotten all about this last discussion, and in truth the impression it had made upon him had been by no means a deep one. “It was all a fit of temper of Eugenia’s,” he said to himself, and as one of his fixed ideas was that such a thing as a woman without a temper had never existed, he resigned himself to his fate, with the hope that his share of this unavoidable drawback to the charms of married life might be small.
Up to the last Captain Chancellor hoped that his wife would be able to accompany him to Marshlands. To do him justice, he was very reluctant to go without her.
“It is such a pity,” he said. “It would be just what I should like, for you to see a good deal of Lady Hereward. It isn’t every one that she takes to, I can tell you.”