By the time Ashpound was budding in spring, Mrs. Gervase Norgate had fallen away, and changed rapidly for the worse, to the disappointment and with the condemnation of her acquaintances. She lay in bed half the morning, dawdled over her breakfast, and trailed her way from place to place, ageing too, with marvellous celerity.
Sunk in the mire as Gervase was, he noted the transformation in his wife with discomposure and vexation. It fretted him always, and infuriated him at times, to discover that she was likely to justify his contempt by proving a poor wife after all. Her rule ended, her energy exhausted, given over to an unprincipled, destructive listlessness and, carelessness, such a prospect did not make Gervase amend the error of his ways: but it caused his road to ruin to be harder to tread, it caused the fruits of his vice to be more bitter between his teeth, it drove him at times to reflect when it was madness to reflect. She would not take the luxuries which she had bought dearly, which he wanted her to take. Her person, drawing-room, flower-garden were fast showing neglect and cheerlessness, in spite of him, or to spite him, as he vowed savagely. Here was his sin cropping out and meeting him in the life of another, and that other a woman. She was going to ruin with him as truly and faithfully as if they had been a pair of fond lovers. The shy goodwill of Gervase Norgate's early married life had waned into discontent and dislike, and was fast settling into rooted hatred.
"Lawk!" Dolly the dairymaid reflected indignantly, "Madam is become as careless and trolloping-like as master is wild. If we don't take care, no one will continue to call on us and hinvite us with our equals. For that matter, the mistress has denied herself to every morning caller this spring, and it is my opingen she never so much as sends hapologies to them dinner cards as she twists into matches. If it were me, now, wouldn't I cut a dash of myself? She didn't care a bit of cheese-curd for him, folks say, when she had him to begin with, so why she should pine for his misdeeds now, is more than I can compass."
It was on a clear, fragrant evening in June, when the world was all in flower, that a whispering, and pulling of skirts and sleeves, and throwing up of hands and eyes, arose among the servants at Ashpound, at a sight that was seen there. The servants' hall were gathered secretly at a side-door and a lobby-window, and were watching Mrs. Gervase Norgate feeling her way, like a blind woman, her tall figure bent down, crouched together, swaying, along the pleached alley from the garden.
One or two of the more sensitive of the women covered their faces and wrung their hands. Old Miles tugged at his tufts of red hair and smote his hands together distractedly. The new shame was too open for concealment; he could only cry, "God ha' mercy; there is not one to mend another; what will we do?"
As living among men and women given up to delusions begets delusions in rational minds with a dire infectiousness, so living with Gervase Norgate, and day by day regarding the evil which could not be stayed, Diana had caught the fell disease.
A whisper of the culminating misfortunes of Ashpound spread abroad like wild-fire, soon ceased to be a whisper, and became a loud scandal; and Diana lost her credit as summarily as she had acquired it. It was—"That wretched Mrs. Gervase Norgate came of an evil stock, though drinking was not Mr. Baring's vice. They were an ill-fated race, these Barings, with a curse—the curse of ruined men—upon them. Who knew, indeed, but if poor Gervase Norgate, come of honest people at least, had gone into another family—one which he could have respected, which could have shown him a good example and remonstrated with him with authority—he might have been reclaimed?"
About the middle of summer there came a seasonably rainy period, such as frequently precedes a fine harvest. But Gervase Norgate was so ailing that he could not go out and look at his fields, where the corn in the ear was filling rarely, and the growth of second clover was knee-deep. He was forced to keep the house. He loathed food, and his sleep had become a horror to him. He had fits of deadly sickness and of shaking like an aspen. His only resource, all the life that was left to him, was to be found in his cellar; and even Miles, seeing his master's extremity, brought out and piteously pressed the brandy upon him.
Gervase's cronies had never come about his house since his marriage. There had been something in Diana which had held them at arm's length; and although they had heard and scoffed at her fall, they had not the wit to discern that it clean removed the obstacle to their harbouring about the place as they had done before her reign and abdication. They might come and go now by day and night without feeling themselves too much for Mrs. Gervase Norgate, or being compelled to regard her as a being apart from them. But they did not comprehend the bearing of the common degradation, and they had not returned to their haunt as they might have done.
Gervase had declined into such a state of fractiousness and sullenness, that he was very poor company even for illiterate country-bred men like himself. He was something of a ghastly spectacle, as he sat there, with his glass three-fourths empty, and part of its contents spilt around him, trying to smoke, trying to warm himself, with the soles of his boots burnt from being pressed on the top of the wood fire, his teeth chattering, at intervals, notwithstanding, as he cast furtive, dark glances behind him.