“I don’t want to make any trouble,” she answered, drearily. “I must do what you tell me; but I do think it cruel of you to put this upon me. I don’t expect you to sympathise in my greatest loss, but I cannot understand your not caring about our poor little baby.”
Captain Chancellor gave vent to a muttered exclamation of impatience.
“You are infatuated, Eugenia!” he exclaimed. “Do you never look at home as the cause of half the things you complain of? It is not true that I did not care about the poor little thing. I cared as much as was natural considering the circumstances, and that it was not a boy. But I detest exaggerated sentiment. And really, you have no right to reproach me. You must know you have no one to thank for this particular trouble but yourself; your own want of self-control and wild behaviour because I had prevented your going off to Wareborough in that insane way, were the cause of it all. I did not intend ever to have alluded to it; but you provoke me, I do believe, intentionally. I cannot express the least wish of late but you set yourself against it. It never seems to occur to you that I have my share of disagreeables to put up with. Do you think the sort of life I have had the last few months was what I looked forward to, or that any man would envy me a wife everlastingly in low spirits like you?”
He left the room as he spoke, having, as usual, when he lost his temper, said more than he meant or really felt, regretting already that he had said so much, and at the same time mortified by the consciousness of his rudeness and unkindness. Eugenia remained where he had left her, some degrees more miserable than she had been before this conversation, though such painful scenes were not, unfortunately, so rare as to give any fresh direction to the current of her unhappiness. “Yes,” she thought to herself, “it is all true—it has been a wretched mistake for him too. It is all true, but ah! how terrible for him to be the one to say it.”
The next day brought Mrs Eyrecourt—Mrs Eyrecourt, in brilliant spirits and beautiful attire. For the correct number of months of mourning for her cousins having expired some time ago, she had deserted the trailing crape in which her sister-in-law had last seen her, for less lugubrious plumage. And on Eugenia’s present mood, unfortunately, the bright though well assorted colours struck as discordantly as last year’s sable on the feelings of the bride. But there was an unexpected pleasure in store for Beauchamp’s wife. Out of the fly containing the luggage and the maids a small figure appeared. It was Floss—Floss, smaller, queerer, greener-eyed, and more defiant than ever; but internally, nevertheless, in a state of intense excitement and delight at the thought of seeing Aunty ’Genia again, hearing more dolls’ stories, possibly—who could say?—seeing those venerable ladies themselves.
“Floss wouldn’t come in the carriage with her uncle and me,” said Gertrude, turning to Eugenia. “She is more of a little savage than ever, I fear.”
“Poor Floss!” thought her aunt, as she kissed her.
Gertrude was in a very amiable mood. She congratulated Eugenia on looking so well—“Ever so much better than she had expected to see her,” while wondering in her secret heart at the sad change in her sister-in-law’s looks. “It must be partly her clothes,” she decided, and marvelled more that her brother allowed her to wear such “atrociously made mourning.” She sighed as she reflected what a different wife she would have liked to see at the head of her brother’s table, and sighed again as she remembered her own short-sightedness in another direction. But her sighs were upstairs in her own room. Downstairs, she was amiability and liveliness itself. She talked, and laughed, and asked questions about the neighbours and neighbourhood, to which nearly all the answers came from Beauchamp—for in most instances Eugenia’s information was at fault, her interest palpably languid. Yet when Gertrude turned from her with a patronising “Oh, no, of course, you have not met them—it was when you were ill;” or “Ah, yes, I remember you were not there,” Eugenia felt unreasonably indignant. Altogether, this first evening left her with a mortifying sensation of being an outsider in her own home; she felt again the same sensation of loneliness and isolation, of being in no wise essential to her husband’s well-being, which had so depressed her the first evening at Winsley. And more bitterly than ever her thoughts went back over and over again to the irreparable past.
“Aunty,” inquired Floss, a day or two after this, when she was alone with Eugenia, “are you as pwetty as you used to be?”
The stare of the blue-green eyes was rather disconcerting.