Gundred had given her whole heart to her husband. But now, in the shadow of all her ancient selves, something began to thrill in her veins that was more than the mere pride of part-proprietorship in a splendid and historic house. An old house, soaked in all the personalities of a thousand bygone years, must needs retain the flavour and fragrance of them; and on one who in his own person resumes the lives of twenty generations, the compelling influence of his home, the scene and material of all those lives that throb again in his, must necessarily be so dominant that insensibly he takes the colour of the past by which he is surrounded. If this was so in the case of Kingston, hampered and controlled by all the decent ancestors that had lived and died unnoticeably in Darnley-on-Downe, it was likely that the effect would be far more obvious in the case of one whose own character was so neutral as Gundred’s, and whose ancestors were so terrific and blazing as the Mortimers. From every flagstone, from every wall, pressed out upon Gundred the influence of some masterful forefather; and in her quiet nature here and there a secret nerve or fibre, latent hitherto, and unsuspected, recognised the call of the soul in which it once had formed a part, and thrilled to life again. At Brakelond Gundred insensibly took the lead. It was she that decided to settle in the little ancient wooden wing that jutted away from the main mass of the Castle out upon the spur of cliff by the Chapel of King Mark. Her gentle manner grew more and more imbued with sovereignty, and her husband found himself now amused and now rebuffed by Gundred’s obvious sense of being at home. Away in London she might be anyone in general, or no one in particular, concealed her family pride in the Mortimers, was able to give her zeal for morality full sway in the condemnation of Queen Isabel. But at Brakelond her own individuality was swamped. Half reluctantly at first, but soon openly and even proudly, she began to contemplate the career of the wicked Queen, and exalted her with faint damnation that soon passed into positive sympathy. She spent her days unfolding to her husband all the nooks and secrets of the Castle. And, whereas normally she was a person of the most sensitive and neat-minded righteousness, hating fierce crimes, frigidly abominating love-intrigues, here in Brakelond her sense of right and wrong was in abeyance, and at times she canvassed old bloodstained stories with an unmoral calm, and a manner that admitted a not uncomplacent participation in their horrors.
To Kingston it became a relief to hear her retailing the legends of her house. The honeymoon, in its undiluted intimacy, may well become a strain. However much two people may have to say to each other, the knowledge that there is absolutely no one else at hand to speak to may well impart that itch of rebellion which most people experience when bowed under the yoke of necessity. Not to be able to do a thing often brings the wish to do it; a wish which, without the prohibition, might never have occurred. So an enforced duet may occasion faint hankerings after an occasional trio.
In a honeymoon, too, after the first emotional stress and glory are over, a revulsion well may threaten—a revulsion to which ardent lovers are more liable than those couples who have married on lower calmer levels, and who, having never risen to great ecstatic heights, can never, therefore, fall to the emotionalist’s profound abysses of languor and depression. And, if two people shut up together in a lighthouse, with the hope of some day parting, develop insane, irrelevant furies against each other’s ways, how much greater danger of disillusionment must there be for a man and woman forced into minute prolonged contemplation of one another, with no reasonable hope of any release on this side of the grave. The most passionate love leaps over crimes and vices in the loved object; but stumbles at times over a personal habit, a veil ill-tied, a faulty taste in hats. The Ideal is a high and holy empyrean where love can range unfettered and unimperilled; the kingdom of daily life is a lumpy and uneven territory where the winged feet of emotion are apt to trip over some mean, unlooked-for obstacle. And the honeymoon is a time for complete revelation of personal as well of spiritual peculiarities, in which the veil of mystery is finally torn away from the nude reality of two people’s lives.
Kingston and Gundred began insensibly to enter on that period of prosaic exploration which lies between the mystic raptures of the first hours and the later harmonies of settled married life. The day of blind passion seemed over. Gundred found herself commenting inwardly on Kingston’s habits; the smell of tobacco was no longer so precious to her as in the days when it stood for part of an enthralling enigma; his ways were untidy, he dropped the newspapers on the floor and never picked them up, he wrote his letters at odd times instead of setting aside a definite hour for correspondence; he was never in really good time for meals. And then he had mannerisms which, in the dual solitude, began to prey upon his wife. He sometimes walked up and down the room like a bear in a cage, until she wanted to scream; when he sat quiet, he occasionally kept up a maddening succession of little rhythmical taps with his feet; and, above all, he was given to whistling. Then in mind, though altogether precious, of course, and adorable, he had certain flaws. His religious views were clearly lax, his moral attitude was not strenuous, he was too eager, too inquisitive, for Gundred’s intelligence, which preferred to hold on firmly, with the unswerving trust of the dutiful pupil, to everything it had received at second-hand. She took life for granted, considered the scheme of things very admirable, and her own position in it more admirable still. Nothing was to be questioned. Therefore Kingston’s habit, divined or expressed, of accepting nothing without examination, made his wife feel worried and restless, as if her mind had mated with an earthquake. Finally, as the days went by, Kingston dissatisfied her inmost desires by gradually relaxing the amorous enthusiasm of their first married days. It is usually the man who first wearies of conjugal outbursts—men having other business in life, and women, under the old primeval dispensation, none. And Gundred’s discontent was the more exasperating that she was secretly ashamed of it, and had far too much personal pride, far too strong a sense of decorum, to express it. As Kingston grew less and less demonstrative in his affection, Gundred revenged herself at once on him and on her own feelings by stiffening herself into an added primness of factitious maidenhood, by which she had the power of holding herself aloof from her nearest and dearest, as well as of repelling that very sense of intimacy that her own most secret soul desired. Her soul was of those that render themselves to no subduing warmth of love, but, whatever the fate of the body, must be violated, if possible, and taken by assault.
Kingston, for his part, found that marriage had not dissipated or broken the spiritual barrier between himself and Gundred. Her citadel was still locked against him, inexpugnable, not to be captured by any guile or violence. There were still great heavy gaps in their conversation, great tracts of desert country across which their souls were incapable of taking hands. The calm beatitude that Kingston had foreseen began to reveal itself a state of something not unlike sterility, diversified with moments of irritation when he skirmished round the stone walls of Gundred’s guarded mind, and only succeeded in bruising himself, no matter how furiously he attacked. She could not be led, forced, cajoled, kissed, harried, or bullied into understanding. A sense of hopelessness sometimes seized him before the sweet indomitable obstinacy of her mind. It was at once so hard that no blow could make an impression, and so soft that no blow could strike home. Unlike Anne Elliot in all else, her manners—of mind and body alike—‘were as consciously right as they were invariably gentle.’ That invariable, gentle consciousness of rectitude was cruelly trying to the restless, questioning, agile temper of her husband. He longed to stir up its provoking serenity, to stick pins into its lethargic mass. But nothing, no effort of his, could move it, shake it, upset that tranquil self-complacence. It was like grappling with a phantom in a nightmare. Neither men nor angels could ever turn Gundred Darnley from an opinion or a habit. She knew that her outer and her inner woman alike were both thoroughly, faultlessly dressed, in the best-fitting, most suitable garments, and no jot or tittle would she alter of her physical or mental trimmings. Neat, not gaudy, was her equipment, and, secure of perfection, she could not conceive the possibility of any improvement.
That was another thing—her neatness was something inhuman, something almost appalling. She always put everything back in its place, always folded up the papers and laid them down tidily on the table when she had finished them, always devoted the hour after breakfast and after tea to the writing of letters, was always dressed and ready exactly a minute before the gong sounded. Neat, neat, heartlessly neat, were all her proceedings, from the way she docketed her ideas to the way she buttoned her boots and did her hair. True it was, indeed, that the maid was responsible for these details, but she, too, had evidently been mastered by Gundred’s devastating tidiness. Never a thought mislaid, never a curl misplaced, never too much or too little of anything, no excess, no enthusiasm, no hot outbursts, nothing but a serenely equable development, as cruel and crushing in its steady, remorseless movements as the advance of a steam-roller. If she sat, she sat with perfect correctness: feet in the proper position, hands folded in her lap, or prettily occupied with some pretty piece of work. If she walked, it was crisply, concisely, without softness or undulations, erect, well-modulated, and poised in the certainty of faultlessness. And the very qualities that had so appealed to Kingston’s fastidiousness a month before, now became a terror when he contemplated a lifetime’s endurance of them. To see Gundred ruffled, muddy, untidy, would have been as great a joy to him as water in the wilderness; but no wind ever tumbled the orderly daintiness of her hair, no gale ever pushed her hat out of place, no mud ever dared adhere to her brilliant little boots. Never tired, never angry, never out of looks, Gundred was also never buoyant, never ecstatic, never radiant, and the bland sweet monotony of her threatened to become as maddening to her husband as the incessant repetition of one level, unvarying note.
One or two small habits she had, too, which exasperated him at times. She was fond, for one thing among others, of talking about God in a frequent, casual way that he found intolerable in its assumption of intimacy, and in its cheapening of the soul’s most private thoughts. God’s, to Gundred, was the biggest name on her visiting-list, and she displayed it with a pride that people quite devoid of terrestrial vulgarity sometimes think it allowable to display when talking of their acquaintance in celestial circles. Her soul had a tinge of supramundane snobbishness, and though, on earth, she would not have thanked a Queen for a kiss, she took a gentle satisfaction in emphasizing her possession of the Almighty’s approving friendship. She conceived heaven as an enormously magnified and everlasting Court-concert, where only the “nicest” people were admitted, and where she herself was not only to have the entrée, but to be in the very heart of the royal set.
She had, besides, a way of appending an interrogative ‘yes’ to every other sentence, which, by degrees, drove her husband to distraction. He found himself looking ahead for it along the conversation as one looks ahead for the next telegraph-pole on a slow journey. And as surely as the telegraph-pole that ‘yes’ would come, maddening him with the certainty of its reiteration.
Brakelond, accordingly, was a relief to both husband and wife—how great a relief they neither of them knew. They could take refuge from themselves among the ghosts of the dead Mortimers. Gundred almost grew excited as she repeated the stories of her people, and the spirits of the dead seemed to fill her veins with some of the blood she apparently lacked. A stark thorny tree it was, to have borne, at the last, so mild and white a bud as she. Always in opposition, always ambitious, always unscrupulous, maniacs in persecution, in martyrdom, in love, the Mortimers had risen and fallen, tempestuously fighting, up and down the steps of the throne. Ruined with Queen Isabel, they had survived only to fall again before the House of York. With the Tudors their glory towered once more, until a characteristically ambitious attempt to marry the Queen of Scots had destroyed the March of the time. Then, after a few years of comparative quiet, they had risen conspicuous as the only great house that had sided with the country against King Charles. This unpopular piece of patriotism forced the Mortimers into discreet seclusion through Restoration days, until a new opportunity of manifesting it arrived with the Great Revolution. The House of March, always especially patriotic when patriotism involved enmity to the Crown, had had a narrow escape of ruin at the time of King Monmouth’s disaster, and, for its safety, the Prince of Orange did not land a day too soon. His coming, however, with the comparative loyalty that followed, and its resultant dukedom, had established March and Brakelond in that period of slow prosperity which had led on through two centuries of gradual inanition to its present effete or atrophied state. It seemed as if the furious old Castle and the furious old race that owned it could not live fully nor thrive without that atmosphere of violence in which they had so often gloried and agonized together. Peace—slackening, corroding, monotonous—was fatal to the vitality of the Mortimers.
But, despite the obvious influence exerted by the Castle on the individuality of Gundred, Kingston could not but be struck again and again by the contrast between his pin-neat, impeccable wife, orderly in mind, body, desires, and the many riotous scarlet lives that she summed up in her own neutral-tinted nature. Always turbulent, always passionate, impatient of rule, loving and hating without limit or bond of reason, breathing the air of battle from birth to death, and flagging in the close air of peace, the Mortimers were a strange race to end thus, in a woman to whom peace, order, reason, limit were the very conditions of her being. As she talked to him of her people, Kingston noticed the small, flickering flames of vitality that leapt up in her nature out of the dead past. Here and there in her utterance from time to time some bygone tyrant dictated an inflection, some dead Queen contributed a thought. Kingston heard these voices so distinctly, noticed so clearly the occurrence of each foreign thought that twanged abruptly in the music of Gundred’s voice, like the sudden throb of a harp across a piano’s level ripplings, that it seemed to him at last as if, at moments, she were the mere mouthpiece of ghosts. For a vanishing instant, now and then, her lips spoke what her mind had not conceived, what her heart had not sanctioned. She was possessed by a fragment of the life that had gone before. But was this all? Robbers and wantons that they were in their lawless splendour, had the Mortimers given their descendant nothing beyond these fragmentary reminiscences? Was there in her, far down under the orderly, decorous placidity of her surface, no stirring possibility of those old primitive passions, of those fierce blood-lusts or those religious frenzies, that should have come with the very fabric of her life out of the buried long-ago? The question was strangely interesting, in the bizarre contrast between the neat, methodical thing she was, and the wild daughter of the past that, by some freak of fortune, she might perhaps again become. Kingston watched her keenly, hoping that some day, sooner or later, might raise again the hidden depths of her nature, and reveal, in a tempest of passion, the frantic possibilities of the Mortimers. The idea was inconceivable, monstrous, grotesque; but attractive as a romantic paradox. As with most paradoxes, deep down in his heart he utterly disbelieved it.