Jean Ingelow.
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still,
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Tennyson’s Guinevere.
“Shall we soon be home, Hugh?”
“Very soon, Wee Wifie.”
“Then please put down that great crackling paper behind which you have been asleep the last two hours, and talk to me a little. I want to know the names of the villages through which we are passing, the big houses, and the people who live in them, that I may not enter my dear new home a perfect stranger to its surroundings;” and Lady Redmond shook out her furs, and settled herself anew with fresh dignity.
Sir Hugh yawned for the twentieth time behind his paper, rubbed his eyes, stretched himself, and then let down the window and looked absently down the long country road winding through stubble land; and then at the eddying heaps of dry crisp leaves now blown by a strong November wind under the horses’ feet, and now whirling in crazy circles like witches on Walpurgis’s night, until after a shivering remonstrance from his little wife he put up the window with a jerk, and threw himself back with a discontented air on the cushions.
“There is nothing to be seen for a mile or two, Fay, and it is growing dusk now; it will soon be too dark to distinguish a single object;” and so saying, he relapsed into silence, and took up the obnoxious paper again, though the words were scarcely legible in the twilight; while the young bride tried to restrain her weariness, and sat patiently in her corner. Poor Hugh, he was already secretly repenting of the hasty step he had taken; two months of Alpine scenery, of quaint old German cities, of rambling through galleries of art treasures with his child-bride, and Hugh had already wearied of his new bonds. All at once he had awakened from his brief delusion with an agony of remembrance, with a terrible heart longing and homesickness, with a sense of satiety and vacuum. Fay’s gentleness and beauty palled on him; her artless questioning fatigued him. In his secret soul he cried out that she was a mere child and no mate for him, and that he wanted Margaret.
If he had only told his young wife, if he had confided to her pure soul the secret that burdened his, child as she was, she would have understood and pitied and forgiven him; the very suffering would have given her added womanliness and gained his respect, and through that bitter knowledge, honestly told and generously received, a new and better Fay would have risen to win her husband’s love.