He felt that her unchanged, unreproaching love was the keenest reproach to his altered manner, to his neglectful coldness. He felt that he could better have endured the bitterest blame, the most agonized remonstrance, the tears of the veriest Niobe, than meet the ever welcoming smile of those rosy lips, the ever loving glance of those soft blue eyes.
Perhaps had she possessed more of what such men as he call spirit, had the vein of her genius led to outbursts of vehement, unfeminine, Italian passion, the flashing eye, the curling lip, the face pallid with rage, the tongue fluent with the torrent eloquence of indignation, he might have found in them something to rouse his dormant passions from the lethargy which had overcome them, something to stimulate and excite him into renewed desire.
But as well might you expect from the lily of the valley the blushes and the thorns of the rose, from the turtle-dove the fury and the flight of the jer-falcon, as aught from Theresa St. Aubyn, but the patience, the purity, the quiet, and the love of a white-minded, virtuous woman.
But she was wretched—most wretched—because hopeless. She had prayed for a child, with all the yearning eagerness of disappointed craving womanhood—a child that should smile in her face, and love her for herself, being of herself, and her own—a child that should perhaps win back to her the lost affections of her lord. But in vain.
And still she loved him, nay, adored him, as of old. Never did she see his stately form, sitting his horse with habitual grace, approaching listlessly and slowly the home which no longer had a single attraction to his jaded and exhausted heart, but her whole frame was shaken by a sharp nervous tremor, but a mist overspread her swimming eyes, but dull ringing filled her ears, her heart throbbed and palpitated, until she thought it would burst forth from her bosom.
She ever hoped that the cold spell might pass from him, ever believed, ever trusted, that the time would come when he would again love her as of old, again seek her society, and take pleasure in her conversation; again let her nestle in his bosom, and look up into his answering eyes, by the quiet fireside in winter evenings. Alas! she still dreamed of these things—even although her reason told her that they were hopeless—even after he had again changed his mood from sullen coldness to harsh, irritable anger, to vehement, impetuous, fiery wrath, causeless as the wolf’s against the lamb, and therefore the more deadly and unsparing.
Politics had run high in the land of late, and every where parties were forming. Since the battle of Sedgemoor, and the merciless cruelty with which the royal judges had crushed out the life of that abortive insurrection, and drowned its ashes in floods of innocent gore, the rage of factions had waxed wilder in the country than they had done since the reign of the first Charles, the second English king of that unhappy race, the last of whom now filled the painful seat of royalty.
Yet all was hushed as yet and quiet, as the calm which precedes the bursting of a thunder-cloud. Secluded as Widecomb Manor was, and far divided from the seats of the other gentry of Devonshire by tracts of moor and forest, and little intercourse as Jasper had held hitherto with his equals in rank and birth—limited as that intercourse had been to a few visits of form, and a few annual banquets—the stir of the political world reached even the remote House in the Woods.
The mad whirl of politics was precisely the thing to captivate a mind such as Jasper’s; and the instant the subject was broached to him, by some of the more leading youths of the county, he plunged headlong into its deepest vortices, and was soon steeped to the lips in conspiracy.
Events rendered it necessary that he should visit the metropolis, and twice during the autumn he had already visited it—alone. And twice he had returned to his beautiful young wife, who hailed his coming as a heathen priestess would have greeted the advent of her god, more alienated, colder, and more causeless than before.