HILE Hugh showed Nelly the way to the Lady’s Well with that mixture of brotherly tenderness and a dawning emotion of a much warmer kind, which is the privileged entrance of their age into real love and passion; and while Will made his with silent vehemence and ardour to Carlisle, Winnie was left very miserable in the Cottage. It was a moment of reaction after the furious excitement of the previous day. She had held him at bay, she had shown him her contempt and scorn, she had proved to him that their parting was final, and that she would never either see or listen to him again; and the excitement of doing this had so supported her that the day which Aunt Agatha thought a day of such horrible trial to her poor Winnie, was, in short, the only day in which she had snatched a certain stormy enjoyment since she returned to the Cottage. But the day after was different. He was gone; he had assented to her desire, and accepted her decision to all appearance, and poor Winnie was very miserable. For the moment all seemed to her to be over. She had felt sure he would come, and the sense of the continued conflict had buoyed her up; but she did not feel so sure that he would come again, and the long struggle which had occupied her life and thoughts for so many years seemed to have come to an abrupt end, and she had nothing more to look forward to. When she realized this fact, Winnie stood aghast. It is hard when love goes out of a life; but sometimes, when it is only strife and opposition which go out of it, it is almost as hard to bear. She thought she had sighed for peace for many a long day. She had said so times without number, and written it down, and persuaded herself that was what she wanted; but now that she had got it she found out that it was not that she wanted. The Cottage was the very home of peace, and had been so for many years. Even the growth of young life within it, the active minds and varied temperaments of the three boys, and Will’s cloudy and uncomfortable disposition, had not hitherto interfered with its character. But so far from being content, Winnie’s heart sank within her when she realized the fact, that War had marched off in the person of her husband, and that she was to be “left in peace”—horrible words that paralysed her very soul.
This event, however, if it had done nothing else, had opened her mouth. Her history, which she had kept to herself, began to be revealed. She told her aunt and her sister of his misdeeds, till the energy of her narrative brought something like renewed life to her. She described how she had herself endured, how she had been left to all the dangers that attend a beautiful young woman whose husband has found superior attractions elsewhere; and she gave such sketches of the women whom she imagined to have attracted him, as only an injured wife in a chronic state of wrath and suffering could give. She was so very miserable on that morning that she had no alternative but to speak or die; and as she could not die, she gave her miseries utterance. “And if he can do you any harm—if he can strike me through my friends,” said Winnie, “if you know of any point on which he could assail you, you had better keep close guard.”
“Oh, my dear love!” said Aunt Agatha, with a troubled smile, “what harm could he do us? He could hurt us only in wounding you; and now we have you safe, my darling, and can defend you, so he never can harm us.”
“Of course I never meant you,” said Winnie. “But he might perhaps harm Mary. Mary is not like you; she has had to make her way in the world, and no doubt there may be things in her life, as in other people’s, that she would not care to have known.”
Mary was startled by this speech, which was made half in kindness, half in anger; for the necessity of having somebody to quarrel with had been too great for Winnie. Mrs. Ochterlony was startled, but she could not help feeling sure that her secret was no secret for her sister, and she had no mind for a quarrel, though Winnie wished it.
“There is but one thing in my life that I don’t wish to have known,” she said, “and Major Percival knows it, and probably so do you, Winnie. But I am here among my own people, and everybody knows all about me. I don’t think it would be possible to do me harm here.”
“It is because you don’t know him,” said Winnie. “He would do the Queen harm in her own palace. You don’t know what poison he can put on his arrows, and how he shoots them. I believe he will strike me through my friends.”
All this time Aunt Agatha looked at the two with her lips apart, as if about to speak; but in reality it was horror and amazement that moved her. To hear them talking calmly of something that must be concealed! of something, at least, that it was better should not be known!—and that in a house which had always been so spotless, so respectable, and did not know what mystery meant!
Mary shook her head, and smiled. She had felt a little anxious the night before about what Percival might be saying to Wilfrid; but, somehow, all that had blown away. Even Will’s discontent with his brother had taken the form of jealous tenderness for herself, which, in her thinking, was quite incompatible with any revelation which could have lowered her in his eyes; and it seemed to her as if the old sting, which had so often come back to her, which had put it in the power of her friends in “the regiment” to give her now and then a prick to the heart, had lost its venom. Hugh was peacefully settled in his rights, and Will, if he had heard anything, must have nobly closed his ears to it. Sometimes this strange feeling of assurance and confidence comes on the very brink of the deadliest danger, and it was so with Mary at the present moment that she had no fear.
As for Winnie, she too was thinking principally of her own affairs, and of her sister’s only as subsidiary to them. She would have rather believed in the most diabolical rage and assault than in her husband’s indifference and the utter termination of hostilities between them. “He will strike me through my friends,” she repeated; and perhaps in her heart she was rather glad that there still remained this oblique way of reaching her, and expressed a hope rather than a fear. This conversation was interrupted by Sir Edward, who came in more cheerfully and alertly than usual, taking off his hat as soon as he became visible through the open window. He had heard what he thought was good news, and there was satisfaction in his face.
“So Percival is here,” he said. “I can’t tell you how pleased I was. Come, we’ll have some pleasant days yet in our old age. Why hasn’t he come up to the Hall?”
There was an embarrassed pause—embarrassed at least on the part of Miss Seton and Mrs. Ochterlony; while Winnie fixed her eyes, which looked so large and wild in their sunken sockets, steadily upon him, without attempting to make any reply.
“Yes, Major Percival was here yesterday,” said Aunt Agatha with hesitation; “he spent the whole day with us—— I was very glad to have him, and I am sure he would have gone up to the Hall if he had had time—— But he was obliged to go away.”
How difficult it was to say all this under the gaze of Winnie’s eyes, and with the possibility of being contradicted flatly at any moment, may be imagined. And while Aunt Agatha made her faltering statement, her own look and voice contradicted her; and then there was a still more embarrassed pause, and Sir Edward looked from one to another with amazed and unquiet eyes.
“He came and spent the day with you,” said their anxious neighbour, “and he was obliged to go away! I confess I think I merited different treatment. I wish I could make out what you all mean——”
“The fact is, Sir Edward,” said Winnie, “that Major Percival was sent away.... He is a very important person, no doubt; but he can’t do just as he pleases. My aunt is so good that she tries to keep up a little fiction, but he and I have done with each other,” said Winnie in her excitement, notwithstanding that she had been up to this moment so reticent and self-contained.
“Who sent him away?” asked Sir Edward, with a pitiful, confidential look to Aunt Agatha, and a slight shake of his head over the very bad business—a little pantomime which moved Winnie to deeper wrath and discontent.
“I sent him away,” said Mrs. Percival, with as much dignity as this ebullition of passion would permit her to assume.
“My dear Winnie,” said Sir Edward, “I am very, very sorry to hear this. Think a little of what is before you. You are a young woman still; you are both young people. Do you mean to live here all the rest of your life, and let him go where he pleases—to destruction, I suppose, if he likes? Is that what you mean? And yet we all remember when you would not hear a word even of advice—would not listen to anybody about him. He had not been quite sans reproche when you married him, my dear; and you took him with a knowledge of it. If that had not been the case, there might have been some excuse. But what I want you to do is to look it in the face, and consider a little. It is not only for to-day, or to-morrow—it is for your life.”
Winnie gave a momentary shudder, as if of cold, and drew her shawl closer around her. “I had rather not discuss our private affairs,” she replied: “they are between ourselves.”
“But the fact is, they are not between yourselves,” said Sir Edward, who was inspired by the great conviction of doing his duty. “You have taken the public into your confidence by coming here. I am a very old friend, both of yours and his, and I might do some good, if you let me try. I dare say he is not very far from here; and if I might mediate between you——”
A sudden gleam shot out from Winnie’s eyes—perhaps it was a sudden wild hope—perhaps it was merely the flash of indignation; but still the proposal moved her. “Mediate!” she said, with an air which was intended for scorn; but her lips quivered as she repeated the word.
“Yes,” said Sir Edward, “I might, if you would have confidence in me. No doubt there are wrongs on both sides. He has been impatient, and you have been exacting, and—— Where are you going?”
“It is no use continuing this conversation,” said Winnie. “I am going to my room. If I were to have more confidence in you than I ever had in any one, it would still be useless. I have not been exacting. I have been—— But it is no matter. I trust, Aunt Agatha, that you will forgive me for going to my own room.”
Sir Edward shook his head, and looked after her as she withdrew. He looked as if he had said, “I knew how it would be;” and yet he was concerned and sorry. “I have seen such cases before,” he said, when Winnie had left the room, turning to Aunt Agatha and Mary, and once more shaking his head: “neither will give in an inch. They know that they are in a miserable condition, but it is neither his fault nor hers. That is how it always is. And only the bystanders can see what faults there are on both sides.”
“But I don’t think Winnie is so exacting,” said Aunt Agatha, with natural partisanship. “I think it is worse than that. She has been telling me two or three things——”
“Oh, yes,” said Sir Edward, with mild despair, “they can tell you dozens of things. No doubt he could, on his side. It is always like that; and to think that nothing would have any effect on her!—she would hear no sort of reason—though you know very well you were warned that he was not immaculate before she married him: nothing would have any effect.”
“Oh, Sir Edward!” cried Aunt Agatha, with tears in her eyes: “it is surely not the moment to remind us of that.”
“For my part, I think it is just the moment,” said Sir Edward; and he shook his head, and made a melancholy pause. Then, with an obvious effort to change the subject, he looked round the room, as if that personage might, perhaps, be hidden in some corner, and asked where was Hugh?
“He has gone to show Nelly Askell the way to the Lady’s Well,” said Mary, who could not repress a smile.
“Ah! he seems disposed to show Nelly Askell the way to a great many things,” said Sir Edward. “There it is again you see! Not that I have a word to say against that little thing. She is very nice, and pretty enough; though no more to be compared to what Winnie was at her age—— But you’ll see Hugh will have engaged himself and forestalled his life before we know where we are.”
“It would have been better had they been a little older,” said Mary; “but otherwise everything is very suitable; and Nelly is very good, and very sweet——”
Again Sir Edward sighed. “You must know that Hugh might have done a very great deal better,” he said. “I don’t say that I have any particular objections, but only it is an instance of your insanity in the way of marriage—all you Setons. You go and plunge into it head foremost, without a moment’s reflection; and then, of course, when leisure comes—— I don’t mean you, Mary. What I was saying had no reference to you. So far as I am aware, you were always very happy, and gave your friends no trouble. Though in one way, of course, it ought to be considered that you did the worst of all.”
“Captain Askell’s family is very good,” said Mary, by the way of turning off too close an inquiry into her own affairs; “and he is just in the same position as Hugh’s father was; and I love Nelly like a child of my own. I feel as if she ought to have been a child of my own. She and Will used to lie in the same cradle——”
“Ah, by the way,” said Sir Edward, looking round once more into the corners, “where is Will?”
And then it had to be explained where Will had gone, which the old man thought very curious. “To Carlisle? What did he want to go to Carlisle for? If he had been out with his fishing rod, or out with the keepers, looking after the young pheasants—— But what could he want going into Carlisle? Is Percival there?”
“I hope not,” said Mary, with sudden anxiety. It was an idea which had not entered into her mind before.
“Why should you hope not? If he really wants to make peace with Winnie, I should think it very natural,” said Sir Edward; “and Will is a curious sort of boy. He might be a very good sort of auxiliary in any negotiation. Depend upon it that’s why he is gone.”
“I think not. I think he would have told me,” said Mary, feeling her heart sink with sudden dread.
“I don’t see why he should have told you,” said Sir Edward, who was in one of his troublesome moods, and disposed to put everybody at sixes and sevens. “He is old enough to act a little for himself. I hope you are not one of the foolish women, Mary, that like to keep their boys always at their apron-strings?”
With this reproach Sir Edward took his leave, and made his way placidly homeward, with the tranquillity of a man who has done his duty. He felt that he had discharged the great vocation of man, at least for the past hour. Winnie had heard the truth, whether she liked it or not, and so had the other members of the family, over whom he shook his head kindly but sadly as he went home. Their impetuosity, their aptitude to rush into any scrape that presented itself—and especially their madness in respect to marriage, filled him with pity. There was Charlie Seton, for example, the father of these girls, who had married that man Penrose’s sister. Sir Edward’s memory was so long, that it did not seem to him a very great stretch to go back to that. Not that the young woman was amiss in herself, but the man who, with his eyes open, burdened his unborn descendants with such an uncle, was worse then lunatic—he was criminal. This was what Sir Edward thought as he went quietly home, with a rather comfortable dreary sense of satisfaction in his heart in the thought that his own behaviour had been marked by no such aberrations; and, in the meantime, Winnie was fanning the embers of her own wrath, and Mary had sickened somehow with a sense of insecurity and unexplainable apprehension. On the other hand, the two young creatures were very happy on the road to the Lady’s Well, and Will addressed himself to his strange business with resolution: and, painful as its character was, was not pained to speak of, but only excited. So ran the course of the world upon that ordinary summer day.