Now, I was not only angry with my wife for her indiscretion, I was in a rage with myself for having behaved with so much brutality. The picture of her pale, suffering face followed me to my den, and haunted me reproachfully. She had really met with an accident, and was in sharp physical pain; and I, who at another time would have cut off my right hand to prevent her little finger from aching, had chosen the time of her suffering to come upon her like a woman-eating tiger. Just the husband’s luck again—always at a disadvantage; for precisely to the degree in which she felt herself treated unkindly and ungently by me, would rise her sympathy for the man who had been so zealous and so tender. Damn him, again!
The night passed wretchedly enough.
I sat up working till nearly daybreak. When I went upstairs, and entered my dressing-room, I felt guilty and ashamed, yet angry still. But she was asleep—I could hear her soft breathing from the adjoining bedchamber. Lamp in hand, I crept in. Yes, there she lay, soundly slumbering, her eyes red with weeping, her dark hair falling wildly around her pallid face, her neck and throat bare, her arms outside the coverlid, which rose and fell with her breathing. As I bent over her, my shadow crossed her soul in sleep, and she moaned and stirred. Poor child! I longed to kiss her, but I was ashamed.
I think we men, the strongest and coldest of us even, are weak as water, where a woman is concerned. I used to fancy once that, if a wife of mine failed in faith, or fell away from me in sin, I could strike her dead without pity; or if I suffered her to live, pass an eternity with no thought but loathing and detestation. But as I bent over that sad bed, I seemed to understand how it was that husbands, in the fulness of time, had pardoned even that, the foulest and deadliest of infidelities; how, with a love stronger than sin, and a hope stronger than death, they had welcomed back the penitent, in forgiveness, sorrow, and despair—even as a father would take back an erring child, part of the very blood and life within his veins. Weakness, I know; but weak as water, in virtue of its very strength, is Love.
It was horrible, horrible, this falling away from each other. I wished, just then, that I had had religion; perhaps then we might have been happier together. Women love a sort of matrimonial Village Blacksmith, who asks no questions, works hard all the week, and goes three times to church, in an irreproachably white shirt, on Sunday. They cannot bear revolt in any shape. They were the last to cling to the old gods, and they will be last to cling to the dead Christ. Does the law which works for righteousness, somehow or other, justify them? Was my dear wife’s alienation a curse upon me for dealing in occult scientific mysteries, like an old necromancer, and forgetting, if I ever learned, the sweet religion of the heart? Somehow, last night, I felt as if it were so. There she lay, white as snow. I knew she had prayed to God before sleeping; and I—I could not pray. I was an outcast, an unbeliever; “atheist! atheist!” said the preacher.
I crept away to my own solitary bed, feeling more sad and lonely than I had ever done in all my life.
Till midday to-day, she kept her room; but after lunch, she managed to get downstairs. I had returned to my den, and we did not meet; nor was I in the mood for meeting, for the gentle impulses of overnight had passed away, and the morning had found me gloomy, quarrelsome, and atrabilious. She did not send for me, though I secretly hoped that she might do so. I learned from Baptisto that she was stretched upon the drawing-room sofa, which was drawn close to the window, and was reading some religious book.
Restless and wretched, I took my hat and walked out into the snow. The great fir trees, loaded with the leaden whiteness, were ranged like grim sentinels on each side of the dreary avenue, and beyond these the leafless woods stretched white and cold. The sun had gone in, and the air was full of a heavy lowering sadness—a sort of darkness visible. It was cheerless weather; and as I thought of my domestic misery, and of the clouded world, with all its sins and sorrows, I was more miserable than ever.
Nevertheless, I walked on rapidly, till I came out among the frozen fields of the open country. How desolate looked the snowy meadows, with broad patches of green, thaw-like mildew, and the fallow fields, with snow thick in the furrows and wretched low-lying hedges on every side! Here and there a few miserable small birds were fluttering, starved robins for the most part; and a kestrel was hunting the furrow, hovering in a slow, dejected way, as if field-mice were scarce, and his whole occupation, like the weather, cruelly forlorn.
Before four o’clock it was quite dark.