He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the Northern seas.
“You had,” said Ingram, decisively. “At one time I thought you the most fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry women—there is no difficulty about that—and you can generally get an amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young, too, and capable of understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love with her as she with him? These conditions are not often fulfilled, I can tell you. It is a happy fluke when they are. Many a day ago I told you that you should consider yourself more fortunate than if you had been made an emperor; and indeed it seemed to me that you had everything in the shape of worldly happiness easily within your reach. How you came to kick away the ball from your feet—well, God only knows. The thing is inconceivable to me. You are sitting here as you used to sit two or three years ago, and in the interval you have had every chance in life; and now, if you are not the most wretched man in London, you ought at least to be the most ashamed and repentant.”
Lavender’s head was buried in his hands: he did not speak.
“And it is not only your own happiness you have destroyed. When you saw that girl first she was as light-hearted and contented with her lot as any human being could be. From one week’s end to the other not the slightest care disturbed her mind. And then, when she intrusted her whole life to you—when she staked her faith in human nature on you, and gave you all the treasures of hope and reverence and love that lay in her pure and innocent soul—my God! what have you done with these? It is not that you have shamed and insulted her as a wife, and driven her out of her home—there are other homes than yours where she would be welcome a thousand times over—but you have destroyed her belief in everything she had taught herself to trust, you have outraged the tenderest sentiments of her heart, you have killed her faith as well as ruined her life. I talk plainly; I cannot do otherwise. If I help you now, don’t imagine I condone what you have done; I would cut my right hand off first. For Sheila’s sake I will try to help you.”
He stopped just then, however, and checked the indignation that had got the better of his ordinarily restrained manner and curt speech. The man before him was crying bitterly, his face hidden in his hands.
“Look here, Lavender,” he said presently, “I don’t want to be hard on you. I tell you plainly what I think of your conduct, so that no delusions may exist between us. And I will say this for you, that the only excuse you have—”
“There is no excuse,” said the other, sadly enough. “I have no excuse, and I know it.”
“The only thing, then, you can say in mitigation of what you have done is that you never seem to have understood the girl whom you married. You started with giving her a fancy character when you first went to the Lewis, and once you had got the bit in your teeth, there was no stopping you. If you seek now to get Sheila back to you, the best thing you can do, I presume, would be to try to see her as she is, to win her regard that way, to abandon that operatic business, and learn to know her as a thoroughly good woman, who has her own ways and notions about things, and who has a very definite character underlying that extreme gentleness which she fancies to be one of her duties. The child did her dead best to accommodate herself to your idea of her, and failed. When she would rather have been living a brisk and active life in the country or by the seaside, running wild about a hillside, or reading strange stories in the evening, or nursing some fisherman’s child that had got ill, you had her dragged into a sort of society with which she had no sympathy whatever. And the odd thing to me is that you yourself seemed to be making an effort that way. You did not always devote yourself to fashionable life. Where are all the old ambitions you used to talk about in the very chair you are now sitting in?”
“Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?” he said, looking up at last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed incapable of thinking of anything but that.
“I don’t know,” said Ingram. “But one thing is certain: you will never get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this desperate way.”