It is not for a moment to be supposed that Edward could resist such an appeal. He went with the distracted father, and fought night and day for two or three weeks for little Georgie’s life, as well as for the lives of several other little Georgies as dear in their way. Here he had what he wanted, but not when he wanted it. When he woke up in the morning from the interrupted sleep, which was all his anxieties allowed him, he would remember in anguish that even the clue given by the bankers would serve no longer. But during the day, as he went from one bedside to another, he had too much to remember, and so the dark winter days wore away.
Winifred had taken refuge in the universal expedient of going “abroad.” It is difficult to tell all that this means to simple minds. It means a sort of cancelling of time and space, a flying on the wings of a dove, an abstraction of one’s self and one’s affairs from the burden of circumstances, from the questions of the importunate, from all that holds us to a local habitation. Winifred was sick at heart of her habitual place, and all the surroundings to which she had been accustomed. It was not possible for her, she thought, to explain the position, to answer all the demands, to make it apparent to the meanest capacity how and why it was that her own heirship was at an end. She fled from this, and from the unnatural (she said) prejudice against her brother and his wife which seized her as soon as it became apparent that Bedloe was in their hands—and she fled, but not so much from Edward, as from what she thought his desertion of her. What she thought—for after a while she too, like Edward himself, began to feel uncertain as to whether he had deserted her—to ask herself whether she had been blameless, to say to herself that it could not be, that it was impossible they could part like this. What was it that had parted them? It had been done in a moment, it had been her brother’s foolish accusation—ah, no, not that, but her own tacit refusal of his counsel and aid. When Winifred began to come to herself, to disentangle her thoughts, to see everything in perspective, it became gradually and by slow degrees apparent to her that if Edward was in the wrong, he was yet not altogether or alone in the wrong. Her mind worked more slowly than did Langton’s, partly because it had been far more strained and worn, and because the complications were all on her side. She had to disengage her mind from all that had troubled and disturbed her life for weeks and months before, and to recover from the agitation of so many shocks and changes before she could think calmly, or at least without the burning at her heart of wounded feeling, hurt pride, and neglected love, of all that concerned her lover. It was some time even before she spoke to Miss Farrell of the subject that soon occupied all her thoughts. Miss Farrell had felt Edward’s silence on her pupil’s account with almost more bitterness than Winifred herself had felt it. She had put away his name from her lips, and had concluded him unworthy. She avoided talking of him even when Winifred began tentatively to approach the subject. “My darling, don’t let us speak of him,” she had said. “I have not command of myself: I might say things which I should be sorry for afterwards.”
“But why should he have changed so?” Winifred said; “what reason was there? He was always kind and true.”
“I don’t know about true, Winnie.”
Then Winifred faltered a little, remembering how he had advised her to humour her father. She made a little pause of reflection, and then abandoned the subject for the moment; but only to return to it a hundred and a hundred times. She was not one of those that prolong a misunderstanding through a lifetime. She pondered and pondered, and it was her instinct to think herself in the wrong. She had been hasty, she had been self-absorbed. And had he not a right to be offended when she so distinctly, of her own will, by no one’s suggestion, put him aside from her counsels, and let him know that she must deal with her brothers alone? It made her shiver to think what a thing it was she had thus done. She would have done it again, it was a necessity of the position in which she found herself. But yet when you reflect, to put your betrothed husband away from you in a great crisis of fate, to reject his aid, to bid him—for it was as good as bidding him—leave her to arrange matters in her own way, what an outrage was that! She could not think how she could have done it, and yet she would have done it over again. To get Miss Farrell to see this was difficult, but she succeeded at last; and then they both trembled and grew pale together to think of what had been done. Poor Edward! and all those days when Winifred had sat miserable in her room, feeling that her last hope and prop had failed her, and that she was left alone in the world, what had he been thinking on his side? That she had thrown him off, that she would have none of him? In their consultations these ladies made great use of the man’s wounded pride. They allowed to each other that it was the wrong of all others which he would be least likely to bear. It was not only a wrong, it was an insult. How could they ever have thought otherwise? It was he who was forsaken, and that without a word, without a reason given.
They had settled themselves, after some wanderings, in one of those villages of the Riviera, which fashion and the pursuit of health have taken out of the hands of their peasant inhabitants. It was not a great place, full of life and commotion; but a little picturesque cluster of houses, small and great, with an old campanile rising out of the midst of them, and a soft background of mild olive-trees behind. They had thought they would stay there till the winter was over, till England had begun to grow green again, and the east winds were gone; but already, though it was not yet Christmas, they were beginning to reconsider the matter, to feel home calling them over the misty seas. Christmas! but what a Christmas! with roses blooming, and all the landscape green and soft, the sea warm enough to bathe in, the sunshine too hot at noon. Winifred had begun to weary of the eternal greenness, of the skies which were always clear, of the air which caressed and never smote her cheek, before they had long been established in the little paradise which Miss Farrell, even with all her desire to see her child happy, could not pretend not to be pleased with.
“I cannot believe it is Christmas,” Winifred said discontentedly. “No frost, no cold, even flowers!” as if this were a kind of insult. “Everything,” she cried, “is out of season. I don’t see how we can spend Christmas here.”
“It is not like Christmas weather,” said Miss Farrell; “but still, my dear, neither was it in the Holy Land, I should suppose, not like what we call Christmas,” she added, faltering a little; “but it is very nice, Winnie, don’t you think, dear?”
“No, I don’t think it is nice: it is enervating, it is unmeaning, it has no character in it. It might be May,” cried Winnie; and then she added with a sudden outburst of passion, “I don’t think I can bear it any longer. I cannot bear it any longer. Oh, Miss Farrell, Edward! what can he be thinking of me, if he has not given up thinking of me altogether?”
“No, dear, not that,” Miss Farrell said, soothing her.