True, he had married on a mere impulse, and in a spirit of contradiction. His fancy for Lady Bell, who was showing herself intractable and exasperating, hardly deserved the name even of passion. The accidents of her situation, and of the opportune manner in which she had crossed his path, together with her rank, had as much to do with his fancy as any gust of passion, though the girl, in her right mind, was attractive enough. He was but slightly acquainted with her. He had no familiarity with girls, not much with women of more mature age. He would, under any circumstances, have been shy and awkward, would not have known what to do with Lady Bell after he had got her, and would soon have found her in his way, even if she had conducted herself with amazing self-restraint and tact.
But he might not have betrayed speedy symptoms of moroseness and violence had he not felt deeply injured.
As it was, Lady Bell, who had been used, in her experience of mankind as master, simply to Squire Godwin’s supercilious scorn, had cause within her very first day at Trevor Court to dread Squire Trevor’s awfully furious temper. She had married the worst-conditioned John Trot in Gloucestershire, and she had set his teeth on edge in crossing his threshold.
She saw him fretting and fidgeting,—
“Lazy tykes, not to have finished with the hay crop. Who set them to hoist flags and busk arches? I’ll let them know I’ll marry every day in the year, without freeing them from their tasks. Zounds! one of the young horses broke her neck in the quarry.—I’ll break more necks before I’ve done, the fiends take them!”
She witnessed the storm gathering and rising, while he stamped here and clattered there, till it reached a roar, which, for shame’s sake, was not directed against her as yet, but which suddenly took her into the general offence.
The entire household cowered in the middle of their holiday, keeping before the untimely blast. Lady Bell cowered, too, secretly.
From that moment’s height of startled dismay she was in fear of her life whenever the Squire rampaged, swore, and (especially after his dinner and bottle of port) flung about the furniture, dashed down his pipe, kicked the very live coals from the grate over the room, and drove the dogs, with their tails between their heels, flying from the house.
But, notwithstanding, the girl was not tamed or cured of her sauciness; her spirit might be broken in time, but it was not broken at once, though it had recoiled before Squire Godwin’s irony. There was that in her which rose naturally against the physical terror of brute force, though it might overwhelm her ultimately.
Lady Bell kept as far as she could out of sight and sound of the Squire’s “rages;” but when they were over, leaving him in a condition of stupid exhaustion and dogged affront, she went her own way again, as if the rages had never been. Her way was very much the same way that she had pursued at St. Bevis’s, of carrying on always more listlessly her slender studies, and of working out idly her manifold minute devices.