Though neither knew it, Isabel’s stormy intervention and terrible exit had tided them over the difficult preparatory stage of wedlock. Now that she was gone, they gradually settled down together in that elastic bond of mutual tolerance which promises so well for permanent peace. Neither any longer expected too much from the other. Kingston grew to acquiesce in Gundred’s limitations, and rejoice in her perfections, without feeling fretted by the one or satiated by the other. He did not ask her to be an intellectual companion, to talk, allure, amuse. She was always cool and pretty to look at, always cool and pleasant in temper, an admirable hostess, housekeeper, and friend, altogether level and satisfying as a companion. He had had enough of vain searchings for the ideal. Nothing could divorce him from the memory of Isabel. He carried it with him from day to day, shrined in the depths of his heart, and through the placid duties and happinesses of his life never ceased to worship that lost part of himself, and yearn for its recovery. But on the surface he wore a face of perfect contentment, and his marriage with Gundred soon subsided into a whole-hearted alliance that was put to no strains, that stood the wear and tear of intercourse, and was felt to be quite ideal by all that had the privilege of watching it. And Gundred, now that the storm was over, gave equal allowances to her husband. The time was gone by now for high emotions and anguish. Her dim jealousy had vanished with its cause, and she no longer pined for the perfect intimacy that her nature made it impossible for her to attain. Instead of being in love with Kingston, she was now devoted to him, served him loyally and piously, made it her pride to keep him comfortable and contented. She divined in what quarter her strength lay, and took pains to cultivate all the qualities that gave her a hold on her husband. She learned life’s lesson, grew accommodating instead of exacting, prayed for him instead of preaching at him, and pressed upon his acceptance nothing that he did not want. The years had worn down the sharp corners of their characters in the mill of marriage, until at last their harmony was exact and without any apparent possibility of discord.
The years glided placidly by, bringing no more great or violent developments into the lives of Kingston and Gundred. Five years after the fire at Brakelond Gundred bore a son, but otherwise little occurred to break the monotonous tenor of their days. Isabel, by now, was almost forgotten. Only Kingston retained his faithful worship of her, cherishing it secretly, far down under the loyal surface of his life, feeling that justice allowed him at least so much of compensation. From day to day he longed for her and listened unceasingly for some far-off echo of her voice. It seemed almost as if she had never been, as if she had left no relic of her existence in the world—except, perhaps, by a quaint freak of fortune, in the life of that Mrs. Restormel to whom Gundred had taken her on that fateful visit. For Mrs. Restormel, overcome with the horror of the news from Brakelond, had been so excited that her hour had come upon her unawares. Out of due time she had been delivered of her child, and a boy had made his appearance in the world only twelve hours after Isabel had quitted it. However, the Restormel baby prospered and grew strong, was christened by the family name of Ivor, and passed successfully through the vicissitudes of childhood. Otherwise, as Kingston Darnley felt, Isabel had come and gone, leaving no other trace in the world than that persistent image which her life had established in his own soul.
The restless heat of youth had died down in Kingston as in Gundred. His son was growing from boyhood towards manhood. Unnoticed the years had flowed away till almost a quarter of a century had rippled by since the passing of Isabel. He himself was growing fixed and solid; grey was developing itself in his heart as in his hair. Life was very level and very comfortable and very pleasant. It was no longer stimulating. As for Gundred, the years had less effect either on her nature or on her appearance. She was one of the women who neither shrink nor swell with age. She had not grown fat; she had not grown thin. Possibly she had dried up a little. The freshness was gone from her features, though not their neat prettiness. They had grown perhaps a trifle wooden in their clear and rather hard perfection. Tiny lines had drawn themselves here and there, especially round the mouth. Otherwise her face had changed wonderfully little. The alteration was in its spirit rather than in its form. It was still strangely young for its years, but now it was far more decisive than before, older in experience, more matronly, more righteous. All her points had intensified, and now she had turned from a very pretty bride to a very pretty wife, full of responsibilities well borne, of interests, charities, benevolence. Her child, her schools, her households, her Primrose League gave abundance of occupation to her life, and more and more for her growing sense of excellence to feed on. From duty she never flinched or flagged; the consciousness of such undeviating rectitude of practice gave her manner a commanding air of self-confidence. Religion, too, tightened its hold on her. The better she felt herself becoming, the more useful and valuable, not only in herself, but as an example of conduct, the more her intimacy with Celestial Persons grew. Priggishness, self-conceit, as well as all the other grosser mental errors, were very far from the well-balanced security of her nature. The worst that an enemy could have said would be that she was a little slow to admit the possibility of any limitations in herself. In earlier years she had already been calmly self-confident. Time had only justified and reinforced the calm as well as the self-confidence, so she went her methodical way, a model for all matrons, and had, in the neat garden of her life, no disorderly plots, no tangles, no weeds. It was a precise arrangement of well-kept beds—everything in its place, and no profitable herb omitted. Her husband wandered outside its borders, and roamed the shrubberies of freedom. But Gundred found all that her nature ever needed to ask in that daily round, that common task for which her character had been so perfectly fitted by time and fate.
Their life oscillated between London, Ivescar, and Brakelond. In London Gundred had her factory girls, her hospitals, her educational societies; at Brakelond there were the tenants to be looked after, the Castle and all its immense organism to be managed, the Tory Candidate to be upheld by threats of Gundred’s withdrawal of her custom from all who should so far presume upon the Ballot as to oppose him. At Ivescar there were farms, gardens, parishes to be controlled by Gundred’s masterful eye. For a masterful eye it was. Kingston slid back into himself, never regained his full vital energies, renounced interest in his career, and yielded the reins of government into his wife’s hands. As her sphere widened, and her power increased, Gundred’s unquestionable majesty increased proportionately, until the habit of ruling had grown so strong in her that no one would have presumed to doubt the wisdom or cavil at the commands of that tranquil little despot, whose voice was never raised in anger, whose orders never admitted the possibility of dispute. She arranged the lives of all around her with the serenest certainty, and indomitably shepherded her army of dependents, factory girls, tenants, and servants along the path of righteous happiness. As mistress she was a success; as a hostess the same strenuous qualities, the same self-sufficiency brought her the same success. She could never hold a room by her talk, but she could now listen graciously, and disguise her complete inattention by smiles. Clever people went willingly to her houses in London and the country. Her well-dressed, pleasant presence made a becoming quiet background for their conversation, and, as a housekeeper, she was unsurpassed. She never rivalled their efforts, she never failed to make them feel both clever and comfortable. A brilliant, ambitious woman could never have won the popularity that Gundred’s calm indifference achieved. If not gay, her set was clever and solid, nor did anyone ever discern that it was only her well-bred stupidity that had had the gift of gathering it round her by sheer force of apparent colourlessness and calm.
Gundred loved the power that her position had attained, and, as time went by, Fate also was kind, and gave her that full measure of glory which had been denied to her earlier years. London had ignored the inconspicuous Miss Mortimer, unmarried, and slenderly portioned. But London showed itself very amenable to the charms of Lady Gundred Darnley, conspicuously wealthy, and with Brakelond as well as Ivescar at her back. For the old Duke faded away at last, and Gundred’s father reigned in his stead—a mild and inoffensive reign, which left all real dominion to be exercised by his daughter. For the new Duke, like his predecessor, had slid into a gentle imbecility, and now lived at Brakelond in contented seclusion; Gundred occupied the house as mistress, vigorously took up her father’s responsibilities, and was, to all intents and purposes, the tenth reigning Duchess of March and Brakelond. She never went in to dinner after a Marchioness without feeling that such an order of precedence was altogether paradoxical and out of joint. For was she not herself a Duchess in everything but name?
Her constant energies overshadowed her husband in the public eye. By the side of his energetic practical wife he spent a peaceful existence very much alone, very little hampered by the more brilliant cares in which Gundred took such pleasure. She could not push him into any prominent position; he had lost, in an hour, all stir of ambition, and preferred to live on in the company of his dreams and memories and visions. Their son was his great delight, his most constant occupation. Gundred was a trifle too multifariously busy, a trifle too excellent to be a perfectly sympathetic mother. It was to his father that Jim Darnley carried all his more interesting private matters for sympathy and discussion. Kingston, as the years brought him increasing calm, found his world growing narrower, till at last it held only his son and his memory of that strange intoxicating passion which had ended on so terrific a final note at Brakelond more than twenty years ago. His heart still clung to the far-off thought of Isabel, and his life was always in some mystical sense alert to catch news of her in the shadowy lands where she might now be dwelling.
Kingston could never bring himself to feel that Isabel—the real Isabel, as distinct from the body she had worn—was dead; he knew that she still lived, somewhere, somehow; he felt it in every fibre of his life; every nerve vibrated with the knowledge that somewhere, in some remote corner of the world, that lost half of himself was still alive. As the years passed his ideas, instead of growing fainter, grew keener, more fixed, more certain. He lived in mysterious expectation of a call, the sound of a voice he should recognise, some hint that Isabel had come back, that their paths through the world had crossed again. Sooner or later the call would come; it was impossible that it should not. He and Isabel were so close together; accidents like physical death could not be any permanent barrier. As the time went by he grew more and more sure that the call must come soon. Each day he hoped that the sign might be shown to-morrow, and, deep in his heart, listened in every conversation for the sound of Isabel’s voice, and looked in every face for a memory of Isabel’s. Meanwhile he lived out his placid life, friends with all, popular, suspected no longer of any eccentricities. The gentle, managing woman at his side had never any notion that her husband was cherishing such fantastic hopes. To her he had long been, in reality, a stranger, a stranger very dearly loved, and very faithfully looked after, but a stranger none the less, as are so many of us to those who love us best.
As for Isabel, if Gundred ever recalled her name now, it was with a feeling of wrath that grew steadily towards hatred. Isabel stood for the one moment in which Gundred had faltered, in which she had not been sure of herself. Isabel was a painful memory, not only as recalling that far-off period of unrest, but also as raking back into recollection that one awful instant in which Gundred’s courage had failed her—with results so disastrous for poor Isabel. Had the results not been quite so disastrous for Isabel, Gundred could better perhaps have borne the recollection. As it was, they convicted her of inadequacy, and touched her secret pride in its tender point. She pushed such horrid reflections far back in the most private cupboards of her consciousness, and hated Isabel anew whenever accident compelled her to open the locked doors and turn over those dreadful bones of her one failure.
But Gundred had great skill in ignoring all unwelcome topics; it was very rarely that she remembered her cousin, and all the dim, remote unpleasantnesses that Isabel represented. Her first year of married life now loomed down upon her out of the distant past as a confused nightmare-mirage of desert wanderings, from which her nice tact and the favour of Heaven had brought her feet at last out into the Canaan of prosperity, conjugal and social. The few brief sorrows of the past assumed gigantic proportions in the haze of memory, and Isabel was their incarnation. Gundred began to realise how directly Heaven had intervened to relieve her of her cousin’s threatening presence, and, though grateful for the service, it was to her credit that she retained humanity enough to think the means adopted unnecessarily drastic. This tenderness greatly elevated Gundred in her own eyes. She remonstrated with Heaven—not acrimoniously, indeed, but with feeling, and devoted many prayers to Isabel’s happiness in another world. But she rejoiced over Isabel’s removal from this, and nothing could have given her serenity a greater shock than any suspicion that her husband ever remembered the dead woman with tenderness or longing. However, she was protected from such perceptions as much by her own impermeability to unwelcome truths as by her husband’s perpetual skill.
He had not come so far through life, safeguarding his wife’s happiness and trying to behave decently, only to undo all the good by allowing her now to see that he regretted Isabel. The course of years had taught him to keep a shut mouth on all his aspirations. His mind was apparently thrown wide for Gundred, but Isabel’s shrine was hidden in the very holiest of holies. As Gundred roamed through his mind’s reception-rooms, comfortable and clean and neatly decorated, she never had any suspicion of that locked room in the very heart of his soul’s dwelling, where the memory of Isabel was for ever worshipped. Many of us, indeed, there are that keep a secret shrine, but few of us suspect its existence in anyone else’s life. Gundred was perfectly happy in her monopoly of her husband, perfectly confident that she knew every corner of his mind. He, for his part, gave thanks for the salutary blindness which so often makes life tolerable, and continued to make his wife a visitor in the heart whose tenant was still the dead woman—the dead woman whom he daily expected to meet again, whom every hour brought nearer to the renewal of contact with himself. He had done his duty, played his part, abundantly paid Gundred all he owed and could; affection, respect, loyalty—of all these he had never failed for one moment to give her in good measure; the secret impulses of his love could not be controlled like their formal manifestations; no one could exact it; not one could expect it. His own inmost heart still yearned and cried for the return of Isabel, that return in which every day made him more firmly believe, more immediately look for.