THREATENING.
Geoffrey Ludlow felt considerable anxiety about his wife after the day
of their inauspicious visit to Lord Caterham; and as anxiety was quite
a foreign element in Geoff's placid temperament, it did not sit well
upon him, and it rendered him idle and desultory. He could not make
up his mind as to the true source of his anxiety,--the real spring
of his discomfort. Margaret's health was very good; her naturally
fine physique shook off illness easily and rapidly, and her rare
beauty was once more irradiated with the glow of health and strength.
Yet Geoffrey's inquietude was not lessened. He loved this strange
woman--this woman who compelled admiration, indeed, from others, but
won love only from him with passionate and intense devotion. But he
was ill at ease with her, and he began to acknowledge to himself that
it was so. He knew, he felt, that there was some new element, some
impalpable power in their lives, which was putting asunder those who
had never been very closely united in real bonds of sympathy and
confidence, with an irresistible, remorseless hand,--invisible and sure
as that of Death.
There are no words to tell what this good fellow suffered in his
kindly, unselfish, simple way, as day by day the conviction forced
itself upon him that the woman he had so loved, the woman for whom he
lived, and worked, and thought, and hoped, was more and more divided
from him by some barrier--all the more impassable because he could
not point to it and demand an explanation of its presence, or utter a
plea for its removal. He would sit in his painting-room quite idle,
and with a moody brow--unlike the Geoff Ludlow of old times--and think
and puzzle himself about his wife; he would sometimes work, in short
desultory fits of industry, desperately, as though putting thought
from him by main force; and then he would meet Margaret, at meals or
other times of association, with so indifferent an assumption of being
just as usual, that it was wonderful she did not notice the change in
her husband. But Geoffrey did not interest her, and Margaret did not
observe him with any curiosity. The state of mind of this ill-assorted
pair at this time was very curious, had there been any one to
understand and analyse it.
"What can it be?" Geoffrey would ask himself. "I cannot make it out.
She does not take any interest in any thing. I thought all women loved
their children at least, and the coldest warmed to their infants; but
she does not."
Geoffrey had ceased to wonder at Margaret's coldness to him. She had
always been cold, and latterly her reserve and silence had increased.
She made no effort to hide the _ennui_ which wholly possessed her; she
made no attempt to simulate the interest in his occupations which she
had never felt in more than a lukewarm degree. His perceptions were not
very quick; but when he did see a thing, he was apt to understand and
reason upon it, and he reasoned upon this now; he pondered upon it and
upon his marriage, and he wondered when he remembered the joy and hope
with which he had entered upon the pretty, comfortable new home and the
quiet industrious life. What had come to it all? What had changed it,
and yet left it the same? He had not failed in any duty to this woman;
he had not given her less, but more than he had promised; for he was
much better off than he had hoped to be, and she had the command of
every shilling he earned. Never had an unkind word, a negligent act,
a failure in the tenderest of household kindnesses, recorded itself
in her memory against this man, who was her preserver, her protector,
her husband. Surprise, trouble, vague apprehension, above all, the
bewilderment of inexplicable wrong, were in Geoffrey's mind; but not a
touch of bitterness against her. He remembered the story she had told
him, and the promise he had pledged to her, and his generous heart
rested in the assurance she had then given him, and sought no farther.
His was not the nature which would count up the items in the bargain
between them, and set down the large balance that really existed on
his side. What had he given her? To answer this question aright,
knowledge must have been had of her whole life and all its depths of
suffering, of actual physical want sounded; all her love of luxury,
all her incapacity to bear privation, all her indolence, her artistic
sensuousness, her cultivated power of enjoyment, must have been known
and weighed.
He had given her ease, security, respectability,--a name, a home
which was comfortable to the verge of luxury, which included all
that any woman could reasonably desire who had voluntarily accepted
a life upon the scale which it implied--a home to which his industry
and his love constantly added new comforts and decorations. Geoffrey
never thought of these things,--he did not appraise them; nor did
his generous heart dwell upon the sacrifice he had made, the risk
he had incurred, in short, upon the extraordinary imprudence of
his marriage. His nature was too magnanimous, and not sufficiently
practical for such considerations he thought of nothing but the love
he had given her,--the love she did not seem to understand, to care
for,--and he wondered, in his simple way, why such love, so deep and
quiet, so satisfied with home and her, could not make her more happy
and cheerful. Poor Geoffrey, calm and peace were the conditions of
life in which alone he could find or imagine happiness, and they were
just those which were detestable to Margaret. It is possible that,
had she been caught from the depths of her degradation and despair
in the grasp of a nature stronger and more violent than her own, the
old thrall might have fallen from her, and she might have been swayed
by the mingled charm and authority, the fierceness, the delight, the
fear of a great passion, so preoccupying that she would have had no
time for retrospect, so entrancing that she would have been forced to
live in the present. But the hand that had raised her from the abyss
was only gentle and tender; it lacked the force which would have wrung
submission from her afterwards, the power to imply that it could wound
as well as caress,--and its touch had no potency for that perverted
nature. What had she given him? Just her beauty,--nothing more. She
was his wife, and she cared for him no more than she cared for the
furniture of her rooms and the trinkets in her jewel-case (poor things,
she thought, which once would have been unworthy of her wearing, but
chosen with all Geoff's humble science, and bought with the guerdon of
many a day of Geoff's hard work); he was her child's father; and the
child bored her a little more unendurably than all the rest. Indeed,
all the rest was quiet--which at least was something--but the child was
not quiet; and Geoffrey made a fuss about it--a circumstance which lent
a touch of impatience to her distaste. He talked about the infant,--he
wanted to know if she thought her boy's eyes were like her own? and
whether she would like him to be an artist like his father? He talked
about the boy's eyes, and Lionel's electric glances were haunting her
troubled soul; he babbled about the boy's future, when she was enduring
the tortures of Tantalus in her terrible longing for the past.
The child throve, and Geoffrey loved the little creature with a
vigilant affection curious and beautiful to see. When he felt that the
hopes he had built upon the infant, as a new and strong tie between
himself and Margaret, as a fresh source of interest, something to
awaken her from her torpidity, were not destined to be realised, he
turned, in the intensity of his disappointment and discomfiture, to the
child itself; and sought--unconsciously it may be, at least unavowedly
to himself--to fill up the void in his heart, to restore the warmth to
his home, through the innocent medium of the baby. The child did not
resemble his mother, even after the difficult-to-be-discovered fashion
of likenesses in babyhood. When he opened his eyes, in the solemn and
deliberate way in which young children look out upon the mysterious
world, they did not disclose violet tints nor oval-shaped heavy lids;
they were big brown eyes, like Geoffrey's, and the soft rings of downy
hair, which the nurse declared to be "the beautifullest curls she ever
see on an 'ead at 'is age," were not golden but dark brown. Geoffrey
held numerous conferences with the nurse about her charge, and might be
found many times in the day making his way with elaborate caution, and
the noiseless step which is a characteristic of big men, up the nursery
stair; and seen by the curious, had there been any to come there,
gazing at the infant lying in his cradle, or on his nurse's knee, with
a wistful rueful expression, and his hands buried in the pockets of his
painting-coat.
He never found Margaret in the nursery on any of these occasions, and
she never evinced the slightest interest in the nursery government,
or responded to any of his ebullitions of feeling on the subject. Of
course the servants were not slow to notice the indifference of the
mother, and to comment upon it with unreserved severity. Margaret
was not a favourite at any time--"master" being perfection in their
minds--and her cold reserve and apathy impressing the domestics, who
could not conceive that "a good home" could be despicable in even the
most beautiful eyes, very unfavourably.
Margaret was arraigned before the domestic tribunal, unknown to
herself; though, had she known it, the circumstance would have made no
impression upon her. Her cold pride would at all times have rendered
her indifferent to opinion; and now that indifference, weariness,
and distaste had entire possession of her, she had not even cared to
hide the dreary truth from her husband's mother and sister. What had
become of her resolutions with regard to them? Where were her first
impulses of gratitude? Gone--sunk in the Dead Sea of her overmastering
passion--utterly lost beneath the tide of her conscienceless
selfishness. She could not strive, she could not pretend, she could not
play any part longer. Why should she, to whom such talk was twaddle
of the trashiest description, try to appear interested because she
had given birth to Geoffrey's child? Well, there was the child; let
them make much of it, and talk nonsense to it and about it. What was
Geoffrey's child to her, or Geoffrey's mother, or--she had gone very
near to saying Geoffrey himself either, but something dimly resembling
a pang of conscience stopped her. He was very good, very honest, very
kind; and she was almost sorry for him,--as nearly sorry as she could
be for any but herself; and then the tide of that sorrow for herself
dashed over and swept all these trifling scraps of vague regret, of
perhaps elementary remorse, away on its tumultuous waves.
She was cursed with such keen memory, she was haunted with such a
terrible sense of contrast! Had it been more dreadful, more agonising,
when she was a wanderer in the pitiless streets,--starving, homeless,
dying of sheer want; when the bodily suffering she endured was so great
that it benumbed her mind, and deadened it to all but craving for food
and shelter? The time of this terrible experience lay so far in the
past now, that she had begun to forget the reality of the torture;
she had begun to undervalue its intensity, and to think that she had
purchased rescue too dear. Too dead--she, whose glance could not fall
around her without resting on some memorial of the love she had won;
she, whose daily life was sheltered from every breath of ill and care!
She had always been weary; now she was growing enraged. Like the
imprisoned creatures of the desert and the jungle, in whom long spells
of graceful apathetic repose are succeeded by fierce fits of rebellious
struggle, she strove and fought with the gentle merciful fate which
had brought her into this pretty prison and supplied her with dainty
daily fare. It had all been bearable--at least until now--and she had
borne it well, and never turned upon her keeper. But the wind had set
from the lands of sun and fragrance, from the desert whose sands were
golden, whose wells were the sparkling waters of life and love, and she
had scented the old perfume in the breeze. All the former instincts
revived, the slight chain of formal uncongenial habit fell away, and
in the strength of passion and beauty she rebelled against her fate.
Perhaps the man she loved and longed for, as the sick long for health
or the shipwrecked for a sail, had never seen her look so beautiful
as she looked one day, when, after Mrs. Ludlow and her daughter, who
had come to lunch at Elm Lodge, had gone away, and Geoffrey, puzzled
and mortified more than ever, had returned to his painting-room, she
stood by the long window of the drawing-room, gazing out over the trim
little space which bloomed with flowers and glowed in the sunshine,
with eyes which seemed indeed as if their vision cleft distance and
disdained space. Her cheeks, usually colourless, were touched with
a faint rose-tinge; and the hurry and excitement of her thoughts
seemed to pervade her whole frame, which was lighted by the rays of
the afternoon sun, from the rich coils of her red-gold hair to the
restless foot which tapped the carpet angrily. As she stood, varying
expressions flitted over her face like clouds; but in them all there
was an intensity new to it, and which would have told an observer that
the woman who looked so was taking a resolution.
Suddenly she lifted her hands above her head to the full extent of her
arms, then tore the twisted fingers asunder with a moan, as if of pain
or hunger, and letting them fall by her side, flung herself into a
chair.
"Have you heard any thing of Lord Caterham lately?" asked Mrs. Geoffrey
Ludlow of her husband, a few days after his mother's visit, just as
Geoffrey, having breakfasted, was about to retire to his painting-room.
She asked the question in the most careless possible manner, and
without removing her eyes from the _Times_, which she was reading; but
Geoffrey was pleased that she should have asked it at all,--any sign of
interest on Margaret's part in any one for whom he cared being still
precious to Geoffrey, and becoming rarer and more rare.
"No, dear," he replied; "Annie said she would write as soon as Lord
Caterham should be well enough to see me. I suppose I may tell her,
then, that she may come and see you. You are quite well now, Margaret?"
"O yes, quite well," she replied; and then added, with the faintest
flicker of colour on her cheek, "Lord Caterham's brother is not at
home, I believe. Have you ever seen him?"
"Captain Brakespere? No, net I. There's something wrong about him. I
don't understand the story, but Annie just mentioned that Lord Caterham
had been in great distress about him. Well, Margaret, I'm off now to
the Esplanade."
He looked wistfully at her; but she did not speak or lift up her eyes,
and he went out of the room.
If there was trouble of the silent and secret kind in Geoffrey's
home, there was also discontent of the outspoken sort at his mother's
cheerful house in Brompton.
Mrs. Ludlow was wholly unprepared to find that Margaret cared so little
for her child. It was with no small indignation that she commented upon
Margaret's demeanour, as she and her daughter sat together; and deeper
than her indignation lay her anxiety, and a vague apprehension of evil
in store for her darling son.
"She is sulky and discontented,--that's what she is," repeated Mrs.
Ludlow; "and what she can want or wish for that she has not got passes
my comprehension."
Miss Ludlow said that perhaps it was only accidental. She would be
sorry to think Margaret had such faults of temper to any confirmed
degree. It would be dreadful for dear old Geoff, who was so
sweet-tempered himself, and who never could understand unamiable
persons. But she added she did not think Geoff perceived it. She was
sure he would never think that Margaret was not fond of the child.
"O yes, he does perceive it," said Mrs. Ludlow; "I can see that very
plainly; I saw it in his face when he came up to the nursery with us,
and she never offered to stir; and did you not notice, Til, that when I
asked her what the doctor said about vaccinating baby, she looked at me
quite vacantly, and Geoffrey answered? Ah, no; he knows it well enough,
poor fellow; and how ever he is to get through life with a woman with a
bad temper and no heart, I'm sure I can't tell."
Geoffrey had never relaxed in his attention to his mother. In the
early days of his marriage, when he had persuaded himself that there
was nothing in the least disappointing in Margaret's manner, and that
he was perfectly happy; in those days to which he looked back now, in
the chill dread and discomfort of the present, as to vanished hours
of Paradise, he had visited his mother, sent her presents, written
short cheery notes to her and Til, and done every thing in his power
to lesson their sense of the inevitable separation which his marriage
had brought about. His love and his happiness had had no hardening
or narrowing effect upon Geoffrey Ludlow. They had quickened his
perceptions and added delicacy to his sympathies. But there was a
difference now. Geoffrey felt unwilling to see his mother and sister;
he felt that their perception of Margaret's conduct had been distinct,
and their disapproval complete; and he shrank from an interview which
must include avoidance of the subject occupying all their minds. He
would not willingly have had Margaret blamed, even by implication by
others; though there was something more like anger than he had ever
felt or thought he could feel towards her in his gentle heart, as he
yielded to the conviction that she had no love for her child.
Thus it happened that Geoffrey did not see his mother and sister for a
week just at this time, during which interval there was no change in
the state of affairs at home. He wrote, indeed, to Til, and made cheery
mention of the boy and of his picture, which was getting on splendidly,
and at which he was working so hard that he could not manage to get
so far as Brompton for a day or two yet, but would go very soon; and
Margaret sent her love. So Geoffrey made out a letter which might have
been written by a blundering schoolboy--a letter over which his mother
bent sad and boding looks, and Til had a "good cry." Though Geoffrey
had not visited them lately, the ladies had not been altogether
deprived of the society of men and artists. The constancy with which
Charley Potts paid his respects was quite remarkable; and it fell
out that, seeing Matilda rather out of spirits, and discerning that
something was going wrong, Charley very soon extracted from Til what
that something was, and they proceeded to exchange confidences on the
subject of Geoffrey and his beautiful wife. Charley informed Matilda
that none of "our fellows" who had been introduced to Mrs. Geoffrey
liked her; and as for Stompff, "he hates her all out, you know," said
the plain-spoken Charley; "but I don't mind that, for she's a lady, and
Stompff--he--he's a beast, you know."
When Geoffrey could no longer defer a visit to his mother without the
risk of bringing about questions and expostulations which must make the
state of things at home openly known, and place him in the embarrassing
position of being obliged to avow an estrangement for which he could
assign no cause, he went to Brompton. The visit was not a pleasant
one, though the mother and sister were even more demonstrative in
their affectionate greeting than usual, and though they studiously
avoided any reference to the subject in their minds and in his. But
this was just what he dreaded; they did studiously avoid it; and by
doing so they confirmed all his suspicions, they realised all his
fears. Geoffrey did not even then say to himself that his marriage was
a mistake, and his mother and sister had discovered it; but had his
thoughts, his misgivings been put into words, they must have taken
some such shape. They talked energetically about the child, and asked
Geoff all sorts of feminine questions, which it would have affected
a male listener rather oddly to have heard Geoff answer with perfect
seriousness, and a thorough acquaintance with details. He had several
little bits of news for them; how Mr. Stompff, reminiscent of his
rather obtrusive promise, had sent the clumsiest, stumpiest, ugliest
lump of a silver mug procurable in London as a present to the child,
but had not presented himself at Elm Lodge; how Miss Maurice had been
so delighted with the little fellow, and had given him a beautiful
embroidered frock, and on Lord Caterham's behalf endowed him with a
salver "big enough to serve himself up upon, mother," said Geoff, with
his jolly laugh: "I put him on it, and carried him round the room for
Annie to see."
Beyond the inevitable inquiries, there was no mention made of Margaret;
but when his mother kissed him at parting, and when Til lingered a
moment longer than usual, with her arms round his neck, at the door,
Geoffrey felt the depth and bitterness of the trouble that had come
into his life more keenly, more chillingly than he had felt it yet.
"This shall not last," he said, as he walked slowly towards home, his
head bent downwards, and all his features clouded with the gloom that
had settled upon him. "This shall not last any longer. I have done all
I can; if she is unhappy, it is not my fault; but I must know why. I
cannot bear it; I have not deserved it. I will keep silence no longer.
She must explain what it means."