MORNING CLOUDS.
----The little rift within the lute----
Sutton brought back his bride in April, all the better, as it appeared,
in health and spirits for her two months' expedition. The beautiful rose
of her cheeks had a tinge of brown which spoke only of healthy exercise
in the open air. Everybody pronounced her prettier, brighter and more
charming than ever. She was in the highest spirits to be back, and
Sutton seemed pleased to bring her and to be once more amongst old
friends.
To all who saw them, except Felicia's observant eye, they seemed
everything which a newly-wedded pair should wish to be. But Felicia felt
less confident of their happiness. Whether Maud's letters had
unconsciously sounded a little note of distress, or whether it was that
she knew both their natures so well and how they ought to harmonise,
that the least approach to discord caught her ear--something, at any
rate, made her aware of the existence of a subtle disquietude between
Maud and her husband. The discovery, or rather the suspicion, filled her
with a distress which she attempted in vain to ignore. She found herself
joining languidly and insincerely in the chorus of gratulation which the
Dustypore community set up over the happy couple. When Mrs. Vereker came
to call, rustling in the loveliest of new dresses, and poured out a
little stream of gossiping remarks--how pretty it was to see them
together, and what a charming lover Sutton made, and was not Maud a
picture of a girl-wife?--Felicia responded with a coldness which puzzled
her visitor and which Felicia was conscious of trying in vain to
conceal. Something, her fine instinct told her, was amiss. One alarming
symptom was the obvious relief which Maud found in her society, and the
profuse tenderness and affection which she displayed whenever there was
no one else to see. She lavished on her a sort of unconscious fondness,
for which Felicia looked in vain in her behaviour to her husband. With
him her affection seemed constrained, conscious, too deferential to be
natural and happy. There was about Maud, when she and Felicia were alone
together, a joyous self-abandonment to animal high spirits, which was
for ever flowing out into some pretty childish act of fun or affection,
but which vanished at the appearance of Sutton or any other onlooker.
She became a girl again--she sang, she danced, she got into the wildest
games with the children--she let off her excitement and mirth in a
thousand natural acts. Then Jem would come in, and it all seemed to die
away. When visitors arrived, and Felicia had presently more on her hands
than was at all to her taste, Maud would seem to enjoy it and to get
amused and interested; then, as the door closed upon the strangers, she
would come and throw her arms round Felicia and caress her, as if her
one feeling about the visit was that it had been an inconvenient
restraint on love which was wanting every moment to express itself in
some outspoken fashion; 'I love you the best, the best of all,' she
would say impetuously.
'Of all women,' Felicia put in.
'Of all women and of all men too, except Jem,' Maud answered; 'yes, and
I believe I love you better even than Jem; anyhow, I love you.'
More than once, too, Felicia detected little manoeuvres on Maud's part
to walk or drive with her and to quit her husband's society in order to
do so. Altogether Felicia felt frightened, anxious and sad about her
friends: and Vernon, who always knew her melancholy moods and could
generally guess their cause, in vain endeavoured to console her with the
assurance that all was right and that Sutton's had been a wise and happy
choice.
The truth was that the march had not been altogether a success. A great
authority on such matters has said that people often endanger the
permanent happiness of married life by putting too severe a strain upon
it at its outset. Now a two-month's _tête-à-tête_ is a serious strain.
Life wants something besides mere affection to make it run smoothly: it
wants the ease and comfort of familiarity, the freedom of tastes
ascertained to be congenial, the pleasant usages of common action. The
first year of wedded life is, no doubt, a series of experiments in
getting on; two wheels, however nicely fitted, are likely to rub a
little at some point of contact or other. And then Paradise itself would
lose its charm if it were all the same; and the days on Maud's first
journey had a distracting resemblance. Her eyes ached with the
interminable horizon of dust and sand, the scrubby brushwood, the lonely
crumbling tomb, the rare clumps of palms, the scuffling, bellowing herds
of cattle. Sutton's cook, whom his master in his simple tastes believed
a prodigy of culinary skill, used to send up the same dishes with
depressing monotony, and, do what she would, Maud could not like them.
Then some marches were over terribly rough ground, and her Arab made
stumbles that took her breath away, though she was ashamed to say so.
But it was not the little things which really mattered. Her husband's
very nobility of nature oppressed her. A hundred times she had felt how
good he was, how true, how really great, how chivalrous in his devotion,
how tenderly considerate, and yet--and yet--something more unheroic
would perhaps have been sometimes a relief. When the most ineffably
stupid young officers rode across from some neighbouring station and
plunged with cheerful volubility into the gossip of last season at
Elysium, there was, Maud felt, something welcome in the humbler
companion and the more trivial theme. Then, too, the solitary days
oppressed her. Sutton had often outlying posts to visit and would
accomplish them by starting off three or four hours before Maud was
awake and making a _detour_, so as to meet her at their new
halting-place at breakfast. On these mornings Maud had the company of an
escort of troopers, her greyhound Punch, and her own thoughts, which
were apt to get gloomy. Even Punch, she fancied, thought it a bore, and
went along in a dejected fashion. Sometimes Sutton's work could not be
so quickly disposed of, and he would be detained till the evening, and
then the solitary day seemed sad and interminably long. More than once
the tears had come unbidden to her eyes. Did Sutton forget her? Never
for an instant, her heart told her clearly enough; but he did not
perhaps sufficiently realise the wants and wishes, the flickering,
uncertain spirits, the wayward moods, the causeless melancholy of one
who, though invested with the dignities of womanhood, was in character
and powers in reality still a child.
Then, though Sutton was never in the slightest degree imperative, and
though her every spoken wish was law, Maud was conscious sometimes of
being kept in better order than she liked and being forced up to a
standard which was inconveniently high. Her husband spoke little of his
tastes; no word from him ever assumed the resemblance of a command; yet
Maud not unfrequently felt that a secret pressure was constraining her
to something that was not exactly congenial; she knew with an almost
distressing distinctness what her husband liked and disliked, and the
knowledge was something of a burden. She was conscious when she hurt
him; sometimes from mere waywardness she chose to do it, but she hurt
herself in the process as much as him. She had given him her heart and
made him all her world, and was glad to have done so. None the less
there was sometimes an undefined pang about her self-devotion; she
became restless, anxious, uncertain in her moods, and the tears seemed
to lie near the surface and would spring to light, in unwary moments, at
trifles too slight to cause their flow.
Then on some matters her husband's tastes and hers were by no means in
harmony. On one occasion Desvoeux had seized the opportunity of the
Agent's camp being in the neighbourhood and had ridden across and
travelled a couple of marches with them. Maud had looked forward to
seeing him with pleasure and greeted his arrival with marked animation.
The visit turned out as pleasant as she had expected; but the pleasure
was marred by a secret conviction of her husband's disapproval. Nothing
could quench Desvoeux's light-heartedness or impede the easy flow of his
amusing small-talk. Sutton, however, did not seem to find it amusing,
and assumed, quite unconsciously, a dignified air, which Maud felt to be
rather awful, though Desvoeux was, as usual, imperturbable in his
gaiety. His spirits, however, were better, and she was more at her ease
to be infected by them when Sutton was not by. It vexed her to the heart
to know that it was so, but so she knew it was.
The morning that Desvoeux went away was one of Sutton's busy days, and
Maud was alone when their guest bade her farewell. 'Good-bye,' she said,
with a sort of sigh; 'how I wish you could have stopped and ridden with
me this morning! I shall be alone all day and feel that I am going to
have a fit of low spirits.'
'And so am I,' said Desvoeux, 'a very bad fit indeed, which will last
till next time we meet. Good-bye.'
Maud saw him turning pale, as he used to do when he got excited, and
heard the eager tremble in his voice. He held her hand for an instant as
if he could not bear to give it up, and looked at her with a look that
was earnest and reproachful and, Maud felt, very, very sad. Then
Desvoeux had left without another word, but how eloquent may silence
sometimes be!
Was she smiling or crying, and did she really want his company; and was
she neglected and miserable? Desvoeux had galloped away with his heart
in a tumult from queries such as these, cursing the cruel fate which
obliged him to be at his master's camp, full thirty miles away, with
endless boxes of despatches ready for disposal before to-morrow morning.
Thus it was that Maud's early married life had not been without its
morning clouds and sorrows. Then, as people do when they are unhappy,
casting about for a cause of her unhappiness, she began to reproach
herself. The old doubts of her fitness, her worthiness for her position,
her power to retain her husband's love, began to haunt her. 'Ah me!' she
sometimes felt inclined to cry, 'I fear that I am no true wife.' And yet
she knew that, not even if her inmost thoughts were read, could she
bring any charge of doubtful love or allegiance against herself.
Sutton's men had, she had often heard, begun to worship him when his
exploits in the Mutiny had raised their enthusiasm to its height. Maud
felt that she could understand the feeling; in fact, she did worship him
with all her being. But then worship is not all that is wanted for a
happy married life. Maud, at any rate, felt it delightful to be with
Felicia once again.