"With weary Days thou shalt be clothed and fed."
Captain Winstanley never again alluded to the dressmaker's bill. He was
too wise a man to reopen old wounds or to dwell upon small vexations.
He had invested every penny that he could spare, leaving the smallest
balance at his banker's compatible with respectability. He had to sell
some railway shares in order to pay Madame Theodore. Happily the shares
had gone up since his purchase of them, and he lost nothing by the
transaction; but it galled him sorely to part with the money. It was as
if an edifice that he had been toilfully raising, stone by stone, had
begun to crumble under his hands. He knew not when or whence the next
call might come. The time in which he had to save money was so short.
Only six years, and the heiress would claim her estate, and Mrs.
Winstanley would be left with the empty shell of her present
position--the privilege of occupying a fine old Tudor mansion, with
enormous stables, and fifteen acres of garden and shrubberies, and an
annuity that would barely suffice to maintain existence in a third-rate
London square.
Mrs. Winstanley was slow to recover from the shock of her husband's
strong language about Theodore's bill. She was sensitive about all
things that touched her own personality, and she was peculiarly
sensitive about the difference between her husband's age and her own.
She had married a man who was her junior; but she had married him with
the conviction that, in his eyes at least, she had all the bloom and
beauty of youth, and that he admired and loved her above all other
women. That chance allusion to her wrinkles had pierced her heart. She
was deeply afflicted by the idea that her husband had perceived the
signs of advancing years in her face. And now she fell to perusing her
looking-glass more critically than she had ever done before. She saw
herself in the searching north light; and the north light was more
cruel and more candid than Captain Winstanley. There were lines on her
forehead--unmistakable, ineffaceable lines. She could wear her hair in
no way that would hide them, unless she had hidden her forehead
altogether under a bush of frizzy fluffy curls. There was a faded look
about her complexion, too, which she had never before discovered--a
wanness, a yellowness. Yes, these things meant age! In such a spirit,
perchance, did Elizabeth of England survey the reflection in her
mirror, until all the glories of her reign seemed as nothing to her
when weighed against this dread horror of fast-coming age. And luckless
Mary, cooped up in the narrow rooms at Fotheringay, may have deemed
captivity, and the shadow of doom, as but trifling ills compared with
the loss of youth and beauty. Once to have been exquisitely beautiful,
the inspiration of poets, the chosen model of painters, and to see the
glory fading--that, for a weak woman, must be sorrow's crown of sorrow.
Anon dim feelings of jealousy began to gnaw Pamela's heart. She grew
watchful of her husband's attentions to other women, suspicious of
looks and words that meant no more than a man's desire to please.
Society no longer made her happy. Her Tuesday afternoons lost their
charm. There was poison in everything. Lady Ellangowan's flirting ways,
which had once only amused her, now tortured her. Captain Winstanley's
devotion to this lively matron, which had heretofore seemed only the
commoner's tribute of respect to the peeress, now struck his wife as a
too obvious infatuation for the woman. She began to feel wretched in
the society of certain women--nay, of all women who were younger, or
possibly more attractive, than herself. She felt that the only security
for her peace would be to live on a desert island with the husband she
had chosen. She was of too weak a mind to hide these growing doubts and
ever-augmenting suspicions. The miserable truth oozed out of her in
foolish little speeches; those continual droppings that wear the
hardest stone, and which wore even the adamantine surface of the
Captain's tranquil temper. There was a homoeopathic admixture of this
jealous poison in all the food he ate. He could rarely get through a
_tête-à-tête_ breakfast or dinner undisturbed by some invidious remark.
One day the Captain rose up in his strength, and grappled with this
jealous demon. He had let the little speeches, the random shots, pass
unheeded until now; but on one particularly dismal morning, a bleak
March morning, when the rain beat against the windows, and the deodoras
and cypresses were lashed and tormented by the blusterous wind, and the
low sky was darkly gray, the captain's temper suddenly broke out.
"My dear Pamela, is it possible that these whimpering little speeches
of yours mean jealousy?" he asked, looking at her severely from under
bent brows.
"I'm sure I never said that I was jealous," faltered Pamela, stirring
her tea with a nervous movement of her thin white band.
"Of course not; no woman cares to describe herself in plain words as an
idiot; but of late you have favoured me with a good many imbecile
remarks, which all seem to tend one way. You are hurt and wounded when
I am decently civil to the women I meet in society. Is that sensible or
reasonable, in a woman of your age and experience?"
"You used not to taunt me with my age before we were married, Conrad."
"Do I taunt you with it now? I only say that a woman of forty,"--Mrs.
Winstanley shuddered--"ought to have more sense than a girl of
eighteen; and that a woman who had had twenty years' experience of
well-bred society ought not to put on the silly jealousies of a
school-girl trying to provoke a quarrel with her first lover."
"It is all very well to pretend to think me weak and foolish, Conrad.
Yes, I know I am weak, ridiculously weak, in loving you as intensely as
I do. But I cannot help that. It is my nature to cling to others, as
the ivy clings to the oak. I would have clung to Violet, if she had
been more loving and lovable. But you cannot deny that your conduct to
Lady Ellangowan yesterday afternoon was calculated to make any wife
unhappy."
"If a wife is to be unhappy because her husband talks to another woman
about her horses and her gardens, I suppose I gave you sufficient cause
for misery," answered the Captain sneeringly. "I can declare that Lady
Ellangowan and I were talking of nothing more sentimental."
"Oh, Conrad, it is not _what_ you talked about, though your voice was
so subdued that it was impossible for anyone to know what you were
saying----"
"Except Lady Ellangowan."
"It was your manner. The way you bent over her, your earnest
expression."
"Would you have had me stand three yards off and bawl at the lady? Or
am I bound to assume that bored and vacuous countenance which some
young men consider good form? Come, my dear Pamela, pray let us be
reasonable. Here are you and I settled for life beside the domestic
hearth. We have no children. We are not particularly well off--it will
be as much as we shall be able to do, by-and-by, to make both ends
meet. We are neither of us getting younger. These things are serious
cares, and we have to bear them. Why should you add to these an
imaginary trouble, a torment that has no existence, save in your own
perverse mind? If you could but know my low estimate of the women to
whom I am civil! I like society: and to get on in society a man must
make himself agreeable to influential women. It is the women who have
the reins in the social race, and by-and-by, if I should go into
Parliament----"
"Parliament!" cried his wife affrightedly. "You want to become a Member
of Parliament, and to be out at all hours of the night! Our home-life
would be altogether destroyed then."
"My dear Pamela, if you take such pains to make our home-life
miserable, it will be hardly worth preserving," retorted the Captain.
"Conrad, I am going to ask you a question--a very solemn question."
"You alarm me."
"Long ago--before we were married--when Violet was arguing with me
against our marriage--you know how vehemently she opposed it--"
"Perfectly. Go on."
"She told me that you had proposed to her before you proposed to me.
Oh, Conrad, could that be true?"
The heart-rending tone in which the question was asked, the pathetic
look that accompanied it, convinced Captain Winstanley that, if he
valued his domestic peace, he must perjure himself.
"It had no more foundation than many other assertions of that young
lady's," he said. "I may have paid her compliments, and praised her
beauty; but how could I think of her for a wife, when you were by? Your
soft confiding nature conquered me before I knew that I was hit."
He got up and went over to his wife and kissed her kindly enough,
feeling sorry for her as he might have done for a wayward child that
weeps it scarce knows wherefore, oppressed by a vague sense of
affliction.
"Let us try to be happy together, Pamela," he pleaded, with a sigh,
"life is weary work at best."
"That means that you are not happy, Conrad."
"My love, I am as happy as you will let me be."
"Have I ever opposed you in anything?"
"No, dear; but lately you have indulged in covert upbraidings that have
plagued me sorely. Let us have no more of them. As for your
daughter"--his face darkened at the mention of that name--"understand
at once and for ever that she and I can never inhabit the same house.
If she comes, I go. If you cannot live without her you must learn to
live without me."
"Conrad, what have I done that you should talk of such a thing? Have I
asked you to let Violet come home?"
"No, but you have behaved mopishly of late, as if you were pining for
her return."
"I pine for nothing but your love."
"That has always been yours."
With this assurance Mrs. Winstanley was fain to content herself, but
even this assurance did not make her happy. The glory and brightness
had departed from her life somehow; and neither kind words nor friendly
smiles from the Captain could lure them back. There are stages in the
lives of all of us when life seems hardly worth living: not periods of
great calamity, but dull level bits of road along which the journey
seems very weary. The sun has hidden himself behind gray clouds, cold
winds are blowing up from the bitter east, the birds have left off
singing, the landscape has lost its charm. We plod on drearily, and can
see no Pole Star in life's darkening sky.
It had been thus of late with Pamela Winstanley. Slowly and gradually
the conviction had come to her that her second marriage had been a
foolish and ill-advised transaction, resulting inevitably in sorrow and
unavailing remorse. The sweet delusion that it had been a love-match on
Captain Winstanley's side, as well as on her own, abandoned her all at
once, and she found herself face to face with stern common-sense.
That scene about Theodore's bill had exercised a curious effect upon
her mind. To an intellect so narrow, trifles were important, and that
the husband who had so much admired and praised the elegance of her
appearance could grudge the cost of her toilet galled her sorely. It
was positively for her the first revelation of her husband's character.
His retrenchments in household expenses she had been ready to applaud
as praiseworthy economies; but when he assailed her own extravagance,
she saw in him a husband who loved far too wisely to love well.
"If he cared for me, if he valued my good looks, he could never object
to my spending a few pounds upon a dress," she told herself.
She could not take the Captain's common-sense view of a subject so
important to herself. Love in her mind meant a blind indulgence like
the Squire's. Love that could count the cost of its idol's caprices,
and calculate the chances of the future, was not love. That feeling of
poverty, too, was a new sensation to the mistress of the Abbey House,
and a very unpleasant one. Married very young to a man of ample means,
who adored her, and never set the slightest restriction upon her
expenditure, extravagance had become her second nature. To have to
study every outlay, to ask herself whether she could not do without a
thing, was a hard trial; but it had become so painful to her to ask the
Captain for money that she preferred the novel pain of self-denial to
that humiliation. And then there was the cheerless prospect of the
future always staring her in the face, that dreary time after Violet's
majority, when it would be a question whether she and her husband could
afford to go on living at the Abbey House.
"Everybody will know that my income is diminished," she thought.
"However well we may manage, people will know that we are pinching."
This was a vexatious reflection. The sting of poverty itself could not
be so sharp as the pain of being known to be poor.
Captain Winstanley pursued the even tenor of his way all this time, and
troubled himself but little about his wife's petty sorrows. He did his
duty to her according to his own lights, and considered that she had no
ground for complaint. He even took pains to be less subdued in his
manner to Lady Ellangowan, and to give no shadow of reason for the
foolish jealousy he so much despised. His mind was busy about his own
affairs. He had saved money since his marriage, and he employed himself
a good deal in the investment of his savings. So far he had been lucky
in all he touched, and had contrived to increase his capital by one or
two speculative ventures in foreign railways. If things went on as well
for the next six years he and his wife might live at the Abbey House,
and maintain their station in the county, till the end of the chapter.
"I daresay Pamela will outlive me," thought the Captain; "those
fragile-looking invalid women are generally long lived. And I have all
the chances of the hunting-field, and vicious horses, and other men's
blundering with loaded guns, against me. What can happen to a woman who
sits at home and works crewel antimacassars and reads novels all day,
and never drinks anything stronger than tea, and never eats enough to
disturb her digestion? She ought to be a female Methuselah."
Secure in this idea of his wife's longevity, and happy in his
speculations, Captain Winstanley looked forward cheerfully to the
future: and the evil shadow of the day when the hand of fate should
thrust him from the good old house where he was master had never fallen
across his dreams.