He does not interrupt me: he is listening eagerly, and that sort of hope is still in his face.

"I _knew_ it would come, sooner or later," I continue, speaking excitedly, and with intense bitterness, "sooner or later, I knew that it would be a case of Algy over again! but I did not--did not think that it would have been quite so soon! Great Heaven!" (smiting my hands sharply together, and looking upward), "I _have_ fallen low! to think that I should come to be discussed by _you_ with _her_!"

"I have _not_ discussed you with her," he answers, very solemnly, and still looking at me with that profound and greedy eagerness in his eyes; "with _no_ living soul would I discuss my wife--I should have hardly thought I need tell you that! What I heard, I heard by accident. She--as I believe, in all innocence of heart--referred to--the--the--circ.u.mstance, taking it for granted that I knew it--that _you_ had told me of it, and I--_I_--" (raising his clinched right hand to emphasize his speech)--"I take G.o.d to witness, I had no more idea to what she was alluding--as soon as I understood--she must have thought me very dull--" (laughing hoa.r.s.ely)--"for it was a long time before I took it in--but as soon as I understood to what manner of anecdote it was that she was referring--then, _at once_, I bade her be silent!--not even with _her_, would I talk over my wife!"

He stops. He has risen from his chair, and is now standing before me.

His breath comes quick and panting; and his face is not far from being as white as mine.

"But what I have learned," he continues presently, in a low voice, that, by a great effort, he succeeds in making calm and steady, "I cannot again unlearn! I would not if I could!--I have no desire to live in a fool's paradise! I tried hard this morning--G.o.d knows what constraint I had to put upon myself--to induce you to tell me of your own accord--to _volunteer_ it--but you would not--you were _resolutely_ silent. Why were you? Why were you?" (breaking off with an uncontrollable emotion).

"I should not have been hard upon you--I should have made allowances.

G.o.d knows we all need it!"

I sit listening in a stony silence: every bit of me seems turned into cold rock.

"But _now_," he says, regathering his composure, and speaking with a resolute, stern quiet; "I have no other resource--you have left me none--but to come to you, and ask point-blank, is this true, or is it false?"

For a moment, my throat seems absolutely stopped up, choked; there seems no pa.s.sage for my voice, through its dry, parched gates. Then at length I speak faintly: "Is _what_ true? is what false? I suppose you will not expect me to deny it, before I know what it is?"

He does not at once answer. He takes a turn once or twice up and down the silent room, in strong endeavor to overcome and keep down his agitation, then he returns and speaks; with a face paler, indeed, than I could have imagined any thing so bronzed could be; graver, more austere than I ever thought I should see it, but still without bl.u.s.ter or hectoring violence.

"Is it true, then?" he says, speaking in a very low key. "Great G.o.d!

that I should have to put such a question to my wife; that one evening, about a week ago, on the very day, indeed, that the news of my intended return arrived, you were seen parting with--with--_Musgrave_" (he seems to have an intense difficulty in p.r.o.nouncing the name) "at or after nightfall, on the edge of Brindley Wood, _he_ in a state of the most evident and extreme agitation, and _you_ in floods of tears!--is it true, or is it false?--for G.o.d's sake, speak quickly!"

But I cannot comply with his request. I am _gasping_. His eyes are upon me, and, at every second's delay, they gather additional sternness. Oh, how awful they are in their just wrath! When was father, in his worst and most thunderous storms, half so dreadful? half so awe-inspiring?

"What sort of an interview could it have been to which there was such a close?" he says, as if making the reflection more to himself than to me; "speak! is it true?"

I can no longer defer my answer. One thing or another I must say: both eyes and lips imperatively demand it. Twice, nay _thrice_ I struggle--struggle mightily to speak, and speak well and truly, and twice, nay, three times, that base fear strangles my words. Then, at length--O friends! do not be any harder upon me than you can help, for indeed, _indeed_ I have paid sorely for it, and it is the first lie that ever I told; then, at length, with a face as wan as the ashes of a dead fire--with trembling lips, and a faint, scarcely audible voice, I say, "No, it is not true!"

"_Not true?_" he echoes, catching up my words quickly; but in his voice is none of the relief, the restored amenity that I had looked for, and for the hope of which I have perjured myself; equally in voice and face, there is only a deep and astonished anger.

"_Not true!_--you mean to say that it is _false_!"

"Yes, false!" I repeat in a sickly whisper. Oh, why, if I _must_ lie, do not I do it with a bold and voluble a.s.surance? whom would my starved pinched falsehood deceive?

"You mean to say," speaking with irrepressible excitement, while the wrathful light gathers and grows intenser in the gray depths of his eyes, "that this--this _interview_ never took place? that it is all a delusion; a mistake?"

"Yes."

I repeat it mechanically now. Having gone thus far, I must go on, but I feel giddy and sick, and my hands grasp the arms of my chair. I feel as if I should fall out of it if they did not.

"You are _sure_?" speaking with a heavy emphasis, and looking persistently at me, while the anger of his eyes is dashed and crossed by a miserable entreaty. Ah! if they had had that look at first, I could have told him. "Are you _sure_?" he repeats, and I, driven by the fates to my destruction, while G.o.d hides his face from me, and the devil pushes me on, answer hazily, "Yes, quite sure!"

Then he asks me no more questions; he turns and slowly leaves the room, and I know that I have lied in vain!

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

And thus I, ingenious architect of my own ruin, build up the barrier of a lie between myself and Roger. It is a barrier that hourly grows higher, more impa.s.sable. As the days go by, I say to myself in heart-sickness, that I shall never now cross it--never see it leveled with the earth. Even when we too are dead it will still rise between us in the other world; if--as all the nations have agreed to say--there _be_ another. For my part, I think at this time that, if there is any chance of its bearing aught of resemblance to this present world, I had far fainer there were none.

With all due deference to Shakespeare--and I suppose that even the one supreme genius of all time must, in his day, have made a mistake or two--I have but faint belief in the "sweet uses of adversity." I think that they are about as mythical as the jewels in the toad's ugly skull, to which he likened them. It is in _prosperity_ that one looks up, with leaping heart and clear eyes, and through the clouds see G.o.d sitting throned in light. In adversity one sees nothing but one's own dunghill and boils.

At least such has been my experience. I think I could have borne it better if I had not looked forward to his return so much--if he had been an austere and bitter tyrant, to _whose coming_ I had looked with dread, I could have braced my nerves and pulled myself together, to face with some stoutness the hourly trials of life. But when one has counted the days, hours, and moments, till some high festival, and, when it comes, it turns out a drear, black funeral, one cannot meet the changed circ.u.mstances with any great fort.i.tude.

It is the horrible contrast between my dreams and their realization that gives the keenest poignancy to my pangs.

To his return I had referred the smoothing of all my difficulties, the clearing up of all my doubts, the sweeping of all clouds from my sky; and now he is back! and, oh, how far, _far_ gloomier than ever is my weather! What a sullen leaden sky overhangs me!

I never tell him about Algy after all! I do not often laugh now; but I _did_ laugh loudly and long the other day, although I was quite alone, when I thought of my wily purpose of setting Roger on his guard against Mrs. Huntley's little sugared unveracities.

No, I never tell him about Algy! Why should I? it would be wasted breath--spent words. He would not believe me. In the more important case has not he taken her word in preference to mine? Would not he in _this_ too? For I know that he knows, as well as I know it myself, that in that matter I lied.

Sometimes, when I am by myself, a mighty yearning--a most constraining longing seizes me to go to him--fall at his feet, and tell him the truth even yet. After all, G.o.d knows that I have no ugly fault to confess to him--no infidelity even of thought. But as soon as I am in his presence the desire fades; or at least the power to put it in practice melts away. For he never gives me an opening. After that first evening never does he draw nigh the subject: never once is the detested name of Musgrave mentioned between us. If he had been one most dear to us both and had died untimely, we could not avoid with more sacred care any allusion to him. And, even if, by doing infinite violence to myself, I could bring myself to overcome the painful steepness of the hill of difficulty that lies between me and the subject, and tell the tardy truth, to what use, pray? Having once owned that I had lied, could I resent any statement of mine being taken with distrust? Would he believe me? Not he! He would say, "If you were as innocent as you say, why did you _lie_? If you were innocent, what had you to fear?" So I hold my peace. And, as the days go, and the winter wanes, it seems to me that I can plainly see, with no uncertain or doubtful eyes, Roger's love wane too.

After all, why should I wonder? I may be sorry, for who ever saw gladly love--the one all-good thing on this earth, most of whose good things are adulterated and dirt-smirched--who ever saw it _gladly_ slip away from them? But I cannot be surprised.

With Roger, love and trust must ever go hand-in-hand; and, when the one has gone, the other must needs soon follow.

After all, what he loved in me was a delusion--had never existed. It was my blunt honesty, my transparent candor, the open-hearted downrightness that in me amounted to a misfortune, that had at first attracted him.

And now that he has found that the unpolished abruptness of my manners can conceal as great an amount of deception as the most insinuating silkiness of any one else's, I do not see what there is left in me to attract him. Certainly I have no beauty to excite a man's pa.s.sions, nor any genius to enchain his intellect, nor even any pretty accomplishment to amuse his leisure.

Why _should_ he love me? Because I am his wife? Nay, nay! who ever loved because it was their duty? who ever succeeded in putting love in harness, and _driving_ him? Sooner than be the object of such up-hill conscientious affection, I had far rather be treated with cold indifference--active hatred even. Because I am young? That seems no recommendation in his eyes! Because I love him? He does not believe it.

Once or twice I have tried to tell him so, and he has gently pooh-poohed me.

Sometimes it has occurred to me that, perhaps, if I had him all to myself, I might even yet bring him back to me--might reconcile him to my paucity of attractions, and persuade him of my honesty; but what chance have I, when every day, every hour of the day if he likes to put himself to such frequent pain, he may see and bitterly note the contrast between the woman of his choice and the woman of his fate--the woman from whom he is irrevocably parted, and the woman to whom he is as irrevocably joined. And I think that hardly a day pa.s.ses that he does not give himself the opportunity of inst.i.tuting the comparison.

Not that he is unkind to me; do not think that. It would be impossible to Roger to be unkind to any thing, much more to any weakly woman thing that is quite in his own power. No, no! there is no fear of that. I have no need to be a grizzle. I have no cross words, no petulances, no neglects even, to bear. But oh! in all his friendly words, in all his kindly, considerate actions, what a _chill_ there is! It is as if some one that had been a day dead laid his hand on my heart!

How many, _many_ miles farther apart we are now, than we were when I was here, and he in Antigua; albeit then the noisy winds roared and sung, and the brown billows tumbled between us! If he would but _hit_ me, or box my ears, as Bobby has so often done--a good swinging, tingling box, that made one see stars, and incarnadized all one side of one's countenance--oh, how much, _much_ less would it hurt than do the frosty chillness of his smiles, the uncaressing touch of his cool hands!

I have plenty of time to think these thoughts, for I am a great deal alone now. Roger is out all day, hunting or with his agent, or on some of the manifold business that landed property entails, or that the settlement of Mr. Huntley's inextricably tangled affairs involves. Very often he does not come in till dressing-time. I never ask him where he has been--never! I think that I know.

Often in these after-days, pondering on those ill times, seeing their incidents in that duer proportion that a stand-point at a little distance from them gives, it has occurred to me that sometimes I was wrong, that not seldom, while I was eating my heart out up-stairs, with dumb jealousy picturing to myself my husband in the shaded fragrance, the dulcet gloom of the drawing-room at Laurel Cottage, he was in the house with me, as much alone as I, in the dull solitude of his own room, pacing up and down the carpet, or bending over an unread book.

I will tell you why I think so. One day--it is the end of March now, the year is no longer a swaddled baby, it is shooting up into a tall stripling--I have been straying about the brown gardens, _alone_, of course. It is a year to-day since Bobby and I together strolled among the kitchen-stuff in the garden at home, since he served me that ill turn with the ladder. Every thing reminds me of that day: these might be the same crocus-clumps, as those that last year frightened away winter with their purple and gold banners. I remember that, as I looked down their deep throats, I was humming Tou Tou's verb, "J'aime, I love; Tu aimes, Thou lovest; Il aime, He loves."

I sigh. There was the same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind. Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again. A sense of fatigue at the infinite repet.i.tions of life comes over me. If Nature would but make a little variation! If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the flowers their order, so that there might be something of unexpectedness about them! But no! they walk round and round forever in their monotonous leisure.

I am stooping to pick a little posy of violets as these languid thoughts dawdle through my mind--blue mysteries of sweetness and color, born of the unscented, dull earth. As I pa.s.s Roger's door, having reentered the house, the thought strikes me to set them on his writing-table. Most likely he will not notice them, not be aware of them: but even so they will be able humbly to speak to him the sweet things that he will not listen to from me. I open the door and listlessly enter. If I had thought that there was any chance of his being within, I should not have done so without knocking; indeed, I hardly think I should have done it at all, but this seems to me most unlikely. Nevertheless, he is.

As I enter, I catch sudden sight of him. He is sitting in his arm-chair, his elbows leaned on the table before him, his hand pa.s.sed through his ruffled hair, and his gray eyes straying abstractedly away from the neglected page before him. I see him before he sees me. I have time to take in all the dejection of his att.i.tude, all its spiritless idleness.

At the slight noise my skirts make, he looks up. I stop on the threshold.

"I--I thought you were out," say I, hesitatingly, and reddening a little, as if I were being caught in the commission of some little private sin.

"No, I came in an hour ago."