HUSBAND AND WIFE.
The return of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Frere to England had been almost
simultaneous with the double catastrophe of Mr. Guyon's death and
Katharine's flight. They had returned to Hester's house in Palace
Gardens, and had no intention of leaving London during the winter.
Gordon was excessively tired of Continental life, and had conceded to
fashion rather than consulted his own inclination by spending his
honeymoon out of England. Hester, who had never seen any foreign
country until after her marriage, had been enchanted with every
thing, and would have prolonged her stay with much pleasure, but that
she had perceived her husband's weariness, and desire to find himself
in England again. Gordon was too essentially sweet-tempered and
good-humoured to thwart any one, or to press his own wishes unduly;
but his wife was as keen of perception as she was devotedly attached
to him, and she read him like a book. A glance at the page, on which
incipient boredom was written, was enough for her. With admirable tact
and grace she discovered a score of good and sufficient reasons for
returning to England; and no one would have guessed, who saw her step
gaily into the railway-train at the Embarcadère du Nord, that she was
experiencing a keen disappointment, and renouncing a pleasure to which
she had ardently aspired. Quiet and persistent self-will, which never
failed in its object, but rarely hurt other people in attaining it,
was a strong characteristic of Hester; but the stronger had come
in--Love, the conqueror, the invincible--and self-will had promptly
surrendered. There was a good deal of unconscious selfishness in
Gordon Frere's nature--the light, airy, pleasant selfishness which is
frequently combined with a large capacity for enjoyment and
constitutional indolence, but which in his case would have been easily
dispelled on any given occasion by a remonstrance, and never made
itself offensive. To this quality his wife's excessive love was
particularly calculated to minister, detrimentally to his general
character; for her devotion knew no bounds. It was not unnatural that,
having departed from the rule and practice of her previous life, by
allowing a passion to gain possession of her, Hester should have
departed from it by the widest possible divergence. It would have been
touching as well as curious to watch the subjugation of the proud,
calculating, intellectual woman to the love that filled her whole soul
and ruled her whole life. From her wedding-day to that which saw her
return to London, and her acquisition of the knowledge of Mr. Guyon's
death, by a note despatched from Lady Henmarsh's half-dismantled house
in Cavendish Square, on the chance of her arrival, she had never
bestowed a thought on Middlemeads, on the embarrassments of Robert
Streightley, or the equivocal confidence which existed between herself
and Daniel Thacker. She had indeed thought much and often of
Katharine--thought of her with exultation; occasionally with a touch
of pity, when she satisfied her jealous, passionate soul that no
remembrance of her, except in the most ordinary casual way, ever
cropped up in Gordon Frere's mind. Hester was destined to learn the
truth of a certain proverb about "the letting in of water;" for having
opened the floodgates for the admittance of love, she had no power to
stop the tide, and the tumbling waves of jealousy thundered in the
distance. But, as Hester was, above all things, a reasonable woman,
the danger was still far off; indeed, its foretaste was sweet. She
liked to assure herself that she had no rival with her husband, whose
character, in all but one or two points, she really did understand as
thoroughly as she believed she understood it on all. She liked to
remember that his was a light, gay--if it must be so called, shallow
nature; that all traces of a former rule had passed away, and the
sceptre of this kingdom was securely in her hand. How safely she would
hold it! how tender and watchful her rule should be! She felt, when
this great love laid its grasp upon her, as though she grew ever so
many years older in its hold. She mentally compared herself with her
husband, and smiled at the difference which existed between them,
though her years were fewer by many than his. She utterly laid aside,
she completely forgot, her hatred of Robert and Katharine--that hatred
which had grown on her unperceived, which she had never deliberately
fostered, but had acknowledged, nevertheless, with the strange candour
in self-judgment which characterised her. She made no mistake in her
estimate of her husband's feelings towards her. She did not look for
more than he could give; but she knew exactly how much was comprised
in that _all_, and she joyfully and rightly believed that she
possessed it. She knew that Gordon could no more give her the same
amount and intensity of love that she gave him than he could read the
same books which she read, or be moved by the same impulses, the same
associations of thought and feeling. She never repined at the
knowledge, she never wished him other than he was; his handsome,
refined face was a constant delight to her; she sunned herself in the
light and warmth of his joyous, kind, careless, life-enjoying
disposition; she watched him with an intense secret pride; in short,
she loved him in all the depth and strength of that word of
inexhaustible meaning. He loved her, in return, honestly, heartily,
and after his careless, joyous fashion. He thought her very handsome
and "deuced clever," and was fond of mentioning the latter article of
his creed. "Knows every thing, my dear old fellow, and reads every
thing, and can talk of every thing; not a bit blue, you know--not in
the least; can't bear that sort of thing. Not a bit of show-off in
her, I assure you, but a first-rate head, and a splendid woman of
business."
As Gordon Frere had, in acquiring wealth and its responsibilities, by
no means acquired a taste for business of any kind, and had developed
no practical talents whatever, except for getting out of life all the
enjoyment attainable by large means, youth, high spirits, and a
splendid constitution, it was fortunate for the prosperity and good
management of the Frere _ménage_ that its mistress merited the
commendation he delighted to bestow. They were both singularly free
from littleness of character; and there was not the least danger of
jarring susceptibilities being disturbed by the fact that Hester owned
all the wealth, and kept the management of affairs in her own hands.
Gordon Frere was not a man who could understand the petty pride and
that kind of egotism which make a man married to a rich woman
perpetually uneasy because she is rich, and perpetually desirous of
reminding her and the world that he is the legal proprietor of herself
and her money. Hester Frere was not the sort of person to understand
that, having given him herself, a woman could estimate her money more
highly in the transaction, and aim at keeping her husband mindful of
the secondary and comparatively insignificant concession. In the case
of these two persons, therefore, wealth had fewer snares than it
ordinarily spreads to insure the troubling of peace, and the
destruction of self-respect, in marriages of this kind.
It was Gordon's happy, pleasant way to like every body, instinctively,
and to be difficult to persuade into disliking them, even when he had
discovered for himself, or been convinced by others, that certain
persons were not estimable or admirable. Thus, he liked Mr. Thacker,
and never thought whether he was not just a little vulgar and
presumptuous; whether there was not something about him suggestive of
a pronounced talent for scheming, and a remarkably low estimate of his
fellow-creatures. He liked Ellen Streightley, and never asked himself
whether she was not rather silly, and did not border on the tiresome
as a companion. The nearest approach he had ever made to such an idea
was when he proudly thought of the advantages which Ellen must derive
from Hester's society, and concluded that it was "a splendid thing for
her, by Jove!" It did not occur to him to remember that his wife's
intimate friend was Mrs. Streightley's sister-in-law, and that it was
presumable that his once-adored Katharine's influence was also
available for her benefit. He did not feel so cordially towards Lady
Henmarsh as might have been desired, it is true; but then he had known
her in the old times; he had habitually spoken of her as "the old
cat;" he had prided himself immensely on detecting under the veneer of
fashion the ingrained vulgarity of her mind, and, like all persons
when exercising a talent which they possess in an infinitesimal
degree, he was very proud of his perspicacity in this instance, and
felt that he was bound, in consistency, never to like Lady Henmarsh.
"It isn't as if she really cared about Hester," he would say to
himself, or to the friend with whom he was almost as confidential;
"but she doesn't, you know; she only cares to make Hester give parties
for her purposes--parties by which the old cat pays off all her own
obligations; and to have the use of Hester's carriage, and the
advantage of Hester's popularity--for every one likes my wife.--I
understand her. I'm a sharp fellow in some things, dear old boy,
though I never could take to pens and parchment, and look wise and
bilious, like you." And Charley Yeldham thought what an enviable
nature was this young man's, and what a pity it would be to disturb
his serenity by any revelations, supposing it ever came within his
power to make them. Perhaps it may appear that Yeldham's cogitations
were needless, and that Frere's was not the kind of serenity to be
disturbed by any discovery which only touched the past; but this was
not so. The one or two points on which Hester did not know her
husband's character were precisely those on which his old chum and
faithful friend understood him best.
No unmanly laziness, no idle abandonment to the mere surface follies
of existence, dictated Gordon Frere's ignorance of the details of the
management of his wife's fortune. He knew she was, as he said, "a
deuced clever woman, and a first-rate hand at business," and he simply
acted, having no meanness in him, on his belief. He never thought at
all about the nature of the investments in which his wife's money was
placed, neither did he ever think about her former relations with the
Streightleys; and had he known that Robert was Hester's debtor to the
large amount, which she had advanced to him through Thacker, he would
not have seen in the transaction any thing beyond the merest ordinary
matter of business.
Gordon Frere was excessively shocked by the intelligence of Mr.
Guyon's death. Not that he had any regard for him; indeed, rather
because he had not, and because he knew him better (though far from
thoroughly) than most of Mr. Guyon's friends, who had not had
"business" transactions with the departed gentleman, knew him; and
such a death, come to after such a fashion, had a grim and painful
effect on a mind which was not callous or irreverent, only frivolous
and untrained.
Hester had only waited to impart the intelligence conveyed by Lady
Henmarsh's note to her husband before she went to offer her
condolences to her _ci-devant_ chaperone, who had urgently requested
to see her. But in her manner of telling him there was something that
jarred upon Gordon's sensibility. Coldness and curiosity were in her
tone, and he did not like it. The event was terrible in itself, and
had terrible meaning to Lady Henmarsh and to Katharine Streightley.
Gordon thought honestly of the latter as his wife's friend, not as the
woman he had loved; and he winced at the little touch of unwomanliness
which Hester betrayed. He understood her very incompletely; and though
he knew she loved him, he did not know that she loved no one in the
world but himself--and herself. The good-natured fellow did not get
over the novel sense of annoyance with his wife easily; and to divert
the pain of it, he thought he would go and look in on Yeldham, and
talk over things with him. But he did not succeed in this. When he
reached the Temple, he found Yeldham hopelessly immersed in a
consultation with an inexorable solicitor; and the fiat went forth, in
a whisper at the door, "heavy case, my dear fellow, and quite
impossible to spare five minutes; see you to-morrow, any time." So
Gordon went away, in sufficient discontent, and less in love with law
and hard work than ever; and so it fell out that not from him, but
from Robert, did Yeldham hear the news of Mr. Guyon's death, and that
the next interview between the friends was destined to be of a painful
and memorable nature.
Hester did not see Gordon Frere, after her visit to Lady Henmarsh,
until late in the afternoon; and then they were not alone, so that
there was no conversation between them on the additional circumstances
which had transpired. In the mean time Hester had seen Thacker, and
made communications to him of which the result has been shown in the
preceding chapter. Of all these circumstances Gordon Frere was
profoundly ignorant. He had left a card for Mrs. Streightley during
the afternoon, and made the customary inquiry, to which the
well-taught servant had made the invariable answer; and Gordon had
turned away from the door without learning that a second calamity,
infinitely outweighing the first, had fallen upon the household. When
he saw his wife again, she was engaged with visitors; and though he
remarked that her face was somewhat flushed, and that she was less
gracefully easy in her manner than usual, he imputed these uncommon
appearances to the agitating nature of her visit to Lady Henmarsh, and
he was rather pleased to think she had not taken the dreadful
occurrence, which had affected him powerfully, quite so easily as he
had at first supposed. They were not alone at dinner, and Aunt
Lavinia, in the pleasure of seeing her niece again after her absence,
had affectionately accompanied her to her dressing-room; so that she
had had many hours in which to think over the events of the day before
she had an opportunity of discussing them with Gordon. During these
hours Hester's bad angel had surely been in the ascendant; and
Hester's good sense had failed her for once, in the temptation of
success, in the consciousness of power where she had been powerless
and of superiority where she had been dominated. For once she lost
sight of that which was generally the first, the greatest object of
her attention, her husband's approbation, and made the first false
step in a career which had hitherto been marked by circumspection.
Gordon ran lightly up the stairs, after he had carefully consigned
Aunt Lavinia to the carriage and the special care of the servants, and
found his wife standing by the fire, whose light was shining on the
folds of her velvet dress, and on the few well-chosen jewels she wore.
There was a flush of excitement in her face, which added to its
beauty, but which made Gordon look at her with surprise. Before he
could ask her if any thing had happened, she said, in an eager voice:
"Have you heard the news?"
"No; what news? Any thing more about Mr. Guyon?"
"No; there's only one more event possible for him, and it is to take
place on Thursday. Have you heard nothing of the Streightleys?"
"No; I called there to-day. What's the matter, Hester? is any thing
wrong with Katharine?" His face was pale, and his voice hurried.
Hester started at the word. Why did she not remember; why did she not
take warning? Who can tell? It was but another illustration of "the
letting in of water." In a harsh voice, through her set teeth, she
answered him:
"Yes, there is something wrong with 'Katharine,' as you call
her--something very wrong. The bubble has burst--she has run away from
her husband!"
"Good God!" was Gordon's only answer; but the tone in which he uttered
the exclamation angered Hester, and hardened her.
"Yes," she went on, "there is no doubt about it; I have it on the best
authority--Mr. Streightley's own. She has left her husband at a nice
time, too--on a proper filial occasion--when her father's dead body is
unburied."
Gordon looked at her; and had she been wise she would have taken
warning, she would have seen the dawning of a suspicion that she was
different to that he had believed her, in that look, and paused before
she flung into the gulf of a new and cruel passion the gem of all her
treasures, whose pricelessness she knew well. But she was not wise,
and she mistook the meaning of that look; she did not know that its
sorrow and its misgiving were for her; she gave them to another, in
her excited fancy, and she rushed upon her ruin.
"You are deeply concerned, Gordon, are you not, and very anxious to
learn all the particulars? You shall hear all I know." He was standing
close to her as she spoke, and they were looking steadily at one
another.
"I am indeed, Hester," he replied mildly. "I trust there is some
terrible mistake; tell me what you have heard."
"There is no mistake; Mrs. Streightley has run away from her husband,
leaving a letter for him, like the young ladies in the plays, who
elope with a lover when 'Gardy' wants to marry them; only in this case
there is no lover, I believe, or he is so very well hidden that nobody
knows who he is."
Still Gordon looked at her, but now there was relief in his face.
"Thank God there is no infamy in this," he said; "though I deserve to
be shot for having believed for a moment there could be infamy in any
act of Katharine Guyon's."
"Katharine _Streightley's_, you mean," said Hester with a sneer; "it
strikes me there is some little infamy in her conduct as it is, though
there may be no lover in the case."
"No," said Gordon Frere, in a tone of manly decision, "there is no
such thing. Misery and misunderstanding, possibly mischief, there may,
there must be, but no infamy, no disgrace. I will never hear it said
or hinted. This will be set right, I am convinced."
"You are as sanguine as you are chivalrous, Gordon," said Hester; "but
there is a little difficulty in setting such matters right, either in
the private or the public sense. Mr. Streightley is very generous, we
all know, and he gave his wife the love she did _not_ marry him for,
as well as the money she _did_; but he may have his wrongs as well as
his faults, and----"
"Why are you so hard and bitter, Hester?" said Gordon, in a quick,
unsteady voice. "How have these people offended you? They have always
been your friends, have they not? I thought you had known them
intimately for years, and always received kindness from them--I am
sure you have told me so--and now you speak of their trouble in this
sneering way. When you told me of poor old Guyon's death, I was
shocked at your want of feeling; and now, God forgive me, but I am not
able to resist the suspicion there is something horribly like gladness
in your heart. How can this be? What is it all? What has Robert
Streightley, what has Katharine done, that you should regard their
misery as you do?" He took her hand gently; he looked at her with pity
in his clear blue eyes. She saw the "pity," and it maddened her; she
did not see that he was thinking of her as much as of that other whom
she hated. What! _he_ had reproved her, and on Katharine's account;
the first cloud that had obscured the glorious light of her wedded
happiness, the first ripple on the ocean of her unimaginable bliss,
had come through _her!_ In an instant, in one pang of exceeding agony,
her fancy transported her to the gay garden where she had first seen
this man, who was now _hers_; this man whom she loved with all the
intensity of a nature whose power and passion she herself was only
beginning to understand. In one of those terrible spasms of feeling,
which, when we think of them afterwards, make us understand the
mystery of eternity, she lived through one memorable day again. She
saw the sunshine and the flowers; she felt the perfumed air; she heard
the strains of music; she saw the flitting crowd, the gay groups, the
fluttering dresses, the rich colours, the young faces; she heard the
sounds of talking and laughter, and the soft rustling and flapping of
the flower-tents; she saw Katharine and her party, Mr. Guyon and
Streightley, and Yeldham, and she saw Gordon Frere; he was walking
beside Katharine, and looking at her as lovers look: had he ever so
looked at _her_, his wife,--she who loved him with a love in which she
now knew there were untold possibilities of suffering, she who lived
only to love him? In the instant during which this vision filled her
brain, and wrung her heart, Hester Frere lived through hours of
anguish; and yet there was not a perceptible pause between her
husband's question and her reply. She spoke it with her hand in his,
with her eyes on his, with her face growing paler and harder with
every word:
"You do well to ask me such questions," she said; "you do well to
suspect me of such feelings. This is as it should be; this is what I
should have expected. Perhaps _you_ can answer for Mrs. Streightley's
purpose in this flight; perhaps _you_ know why she found her home
intolerable, and the bondage into which she sold herself for money
unendurable. You answer glibly for her, there is no infamy in her
flight--indeed, are you sure there was no infamy in her marriage? Are
you sure this is the first time she has deceived Robert Streightley?"
She loosed her hand from his hold, and sat down, panting for breath.
Gordon still stood, and looked at her; but his face had darkened, and
an angry look had come into his eyes. He spoke very slowly, and cold
fear came upon Hester, as he said,
"Explain yourself, if you please. Such unwomanly, such base
insinuations shall have no reply from me. Say what you think,--ask
what you wish to know, plainly; but first, let me say this--that I
have been utterly mistaken in you; that I believed you a woman
incapable of a meanness, and honoured you as such----"
"Yes," said Hester, in a voice so low that it was hardly audible,
"_honoured me!_--I believe you; but you loved _her_. Yes; don't start
and stammer, and seek to deny it," for Gordon, in sheer astonishment,
had started, and tried to speak. "It is useless; I know all. I know
how she played with you, and jilted you, and threw you over for the
rich man, whom she despised. Do you think because I was only a
music-teacher, and not 'in society,' I never heard what society talked
about, and had no eyes to see? I tell you, I read your secret and hers
the first time I ever saw your face; and I read it again, when I, the
new heiress, and the 'great prize of the season,' went up the
staircase at Mrs. Pendarvis's ball with you, and _she_ came down with
the _millionnaire_ for whom she had discarded you. I don't know why
this woman has left her husband, but I can guess; perhaps you _do_
know. I don't care."
"Hush, Hester!" said Frere, and his tone forced her into silence.
"Beware lest you reveal to me more of your nature than I can endure.
Never venture to speak such words to me again. I am ignorant of
Katharine's movements, as you know as well as I do; but I would stake
my life on her honour, and I trust her motives, as I trust her
actions. If there be, as there must be, a serious misunderstanding
between her and Streightley, I pity him with all my heart. I know
little of him; but as I have come to know that little, I have learned
to respect and esteem him. I will help him to the utmost of my power."
"Will you?" said Hester, with a sneer. "Your will and your power are
both likely to be taxed. Mrs. Streightley timed her departure well;
she had got all there was to be had out of her great marriage. Robert
Streightley is a ruined man!"
Gordon Frere turned a shade paler as he said, quietly,
"Is this true, Hester? are you sure?"
"It is perfectly true, and I am perfectly sure," she replied.
"Then how do _you_ know it?"
She laughed a low quiet laugh.
"Ah, that is _my_ secret," she said.
"So be it," he replied. "And now, understand me. You have taunted me
with my love for Katharine Guyon, and her rejection of me. I avow
both. I loved her dearly, and I believed she loved me. I asked her to
be my wife, and she rejected me. I don't question her motives; I only
know that I suffered the keenest misery in consequence. But I say to
you, as I would say to any other, who dared to accuse me of sullying
the purity of Katharine Streightley by an unauthorised word or look or
wish, that it is a base and dastardly lie. She has been to me, since
her marriage, as distant as a star,--an object of admiration and
reverence indeed, but no more, as she never can be less. Now--I
would do any thing in the world to prove to her, and to her husband,
that I am the warmest of her friends and the most devoted of her
servants.--And now, Hester, one word of ourselves. You are not a
foolish woman, speaking random words and swayed by every gust of
temper. I presume you have not so spoken to-night; and I give all you
have said its weight of sober seriousness. I think you would have done
better to have left these words unsaid; but remember this, they can
never be unsaid now, and the fruit they are likely to bear will be no
sweeter to your taste than to mine. I am going to see Yeldham in the
morning, and will breakfast with him. Good-night."
So he left her, and she let him go without a word. The time crept on,
and still she sat beside the fire, with the flickering light upon her
jewels and her velvet dress, with her dark eyes stern and fixed, and
her hands clasped and motionless. It was not until a servant came to
ask if the lights might be put out, that she roused herself, and went
upstairs to her room. There she found her maid, shivering and yawning
in the protracted weariness of waiting.
She dismissed the woman at once, who went out of the room, not without
having looked sharply at her mistress. Hester caught the look, and
when she was alone, went to her dressing-table, and gazed fixedly at
the reflection of her face in the glass.
"Yes," she said; "I am to lose that too, I suppose--power over my
feelings first, then over my words, lastly over my features,--and
become the weak thing I have always despised. Fool! fool!"