SLOW FIRES.
The new life which began for Eleanor Monckton at Tolldale Priory seemed
very strange to her. The prim respectability of the old mansion
weighed heavily upon her spirits. The best part of her existence
had been spent in a very free-and-easy and Bohemian manner: and her
improved position was at first more strange than pleasant to her.
The well-trained servants who waited upon her in respectful silence,
acknowledging her as their mistress, and obsequiously eager to give
her pleasure, were very different people to the familiar landladies
of those lodgings in which she had lived with her father, or the
good-natured shoemaker-landlord at the Pilasters.
At Hazlewood she had been only a dependent; and those who served her
had given her their service out of love for her brightness and beauty;
rendering her little benefits with frank smiles and familiar greetings.
But the mistress of Tolldale had a certain dignity to support; and new
duties to learn in her new position.
At first those duties seemed very hard to the impulsive girl, who had a
sort of instinctive contempt for all ceremonial usages and stereotyped
observances. They seemed more especially hard, perhaps, because Gilbert
Monckton expected his young wife to assume her new position as a thing
of course, and was inclined to be very jealous of any omission that
derogated from her dignity.
He was inclined to be jealous of her girlish inconstancy of thought and
action, seeing in all this an evidence that she regretted the freedom
of her girlhood. He was inclined to be jealous. That one sentence
reveals the secret of a great deal of misery which this gentleman made
for himself. He was inclined to be jealous of anything and everything,
where his young wife was concerned.
It was thus that Gilbert Monckton began his married life. It was thus
that, of his own doing, he set a breach between himself and the woman
he idolized. And when the breach was made, and the dreary gulf of
distrust and misapprehension stretched black and impassable between
this weak man and that which he loved dearest in all the world, he
could only cast himself down beside the yawning ravine and bemoan his
desolation.
I have called Gilbert Monckton a weak man advisedly. In all the
ordinary business of life, and in all the extraordinary businesses that
fell in his professional pathway, the lawyer’s clearness of perception
and power of intellect were unsurpassed by any of his compeers. Strong;
stern; decided and unyielding, where his judgment was once formed; he
was trusted as an oracle by those who had dealings with him. But in his
love for his wife he was weaker and more irresolute than any desponding
swain of five-and-twenty.
He had been deceived once by a woman whom he had loved as he now loved
Eleanor; and he could not forget that early deception. The shadow that
had fallen upon his life was not to be lifted off by any sunshine of
trust and love. He had been deceived once, and he might be deceived
again.
The wrong which a woman’s falsehood does to the man whom she betrays is
a lasting and sometimes irrecoverable wrong. The wound festers, deep
down below the outer scar; and while sympathetic friends are rejoicing
in the slow obliteration of that surface evidence of the past, the
hidden canker still endures, gaining force by time.
The secret sorrow of Gilbert Monckton’s youth had made him suspicious
of all womanly truth and purity. He watched his wife, as it had been
his habit to watch his ward, doubtfully and fearfully; even when he
most admired her, regarding her in some wise as a capricious and
irresponsible being who might at any moment turn upon him and betray
him.
He had fought against his love for his ward’s beautiful companion.
He had tried to shut his mind against all consciousness of her
fascinations; he had endeavoured not to believe in her. If she had
stayed at Hazlewood, that silent struggle might have gone on in the
lawyer’s breast for years; but her sudden departure had taken the grave
man of forty off his guard. Hurried away by an impulse, he had revealed
the secret that had been so skilfully repressed, and, for the second
time in his life, perilled his happiness upon the hazard of a woman’s
truth.
“What do I know of her more than I knew of Margaret Ravenshaw?” he
thought sometimes; “can I trust her because she looks full in my
face, with eyes that are as clear as the sky above my head? There is
generally some landmark by which a man’s character can be understood,
however practiced he may be in hypocrisy; but a woman——Bah! a woman’s
beauty defies a physiognomist. We trust and believe because we admire.
‘She can’t be wicked with such a Grecian nose,’ we say. ‘Those red,
smiling lips cannot speak anything but the truth!’”
If Gilbert Monckton’s young wife had seemed happy in her new home, he
would have accepted the fair omen, and would have sunned himself in the
brightness of her gaiety. But she was not happy; he could clearly see
that; and day and night he tormented himself with vain endeavours to
find out the cause of her uncertain spirits, her fits of abstraction,
her long pauses of thoughtful silence.
And while Mrs. Monckton’s husband was nursing all these tortures, and
every day widening the gulf of his own making, his wife, absorbed by
her own secret purpose, was almost unconscious of all else in the
world. If she saw the lawyer’s face thoughtful or gloomy, she concluded
that his moodiness arose from business anxieties with which she had
no concern. If he sighed, she set down his melancholy to the same
professional causes. A tiresome will case, a troublesome chancery
suit—something in those dusty offices had annoyed him; and that
professional something had of course no concern for her.
Eleanor Monckton had taken upon herself an unnatural office; she had
assumed an abnormal duty; and her whole life fashioned itself to
fit that unwomanly purpose. She abnegated the privileges, and left
unperformed the duties, of a wife—true to nothing except to that fatal
promise made in the first madness of her grief for George Vane’s death.
She had been more than a week at Tolldale Priory, and she had not
advanced one step upon the road which she had so desperately determined
to pursue. She had not yet seen Launcelot Darrell.
Gilbert Monckton had spent the day after his return to Berkshire in
riding about the neighbourhood, calling upon those few people with whom
he kept up any acquaintance, and informing them of his marriage with
the young lady who, a few weeks before, had been the companion of his
ward. Of course he received friendly congratulations and good wishes
from every one to whom he imparted this intelligence; and of course
when his back was turned, the same people who had tendered those good
wishes set to work to wonder at his folly, and to prognosticate all
manner of evil from his absurd and imprudent marriage.
His longest visit was paid to Hazlewood, and here his tidings afforded
real and unmixed satisfaction. Launcelot Darrell was at work in his
painting-room, and was therefore out of the way of hearing the news.
The widow was pleased to think that Eleanor’s marriage would secure her
son against the immediate danger of taking a penniless wife; and Laura
was sincerely rejoiced at the idea of seeing her friend again.
“I may come to Tolldale soon, mayn’t I, Mr. Monckton?” she asked. “Dear
Nelly, I do so long to see her! But to think of her being married to
you! I never was so surprised in my life. Why, you must be old enough
to be her father. It does seem so funny!”
Gilbert Monckton did not feel particularly grateful to his ward for
the extreme candour of these remarks, but he invited the young lady to
spend the following day with Eleanor.
“I shall be in town to-morrow,” he said, “and I dare say Mrs. Monckton
will find the Priory dull.”
“Mrs. Monckton!” cried Laura; “oh, to be sure; why, that’s Nelly, of
course! Find the Priory dull? Yes, I should think she would indeed!
Poor Eleanor, in those damp, overgrown gardens, with the high walls all
round, and the tops of the trees above the walls. How lonely she’ll be.”
“Lonely! I shall come home to dinner every day.”
“Yes, at seven o’clock; and from breakfast time till seven poor Nell
must amuse herself in the best way she can. But I’m not going to
grumble; I’m only too happy to think she will be near me.”
Mr. Monckton stood by the garden gate—that gate near which he had so
often loitered with Eleanor—listening with no very great satisfaction
to his ward’s frivolous prattle. His young wife would feel unhappy in
the dulness of her new life, perhaps. If that were to be so, it would
be proof positive that she did not love him. He could never have felt
dull or lonely in her society, though Tolldale had been some grim and
isolated habitation in the middle of an African desert.
“So you think she will be dull, Laura?” he said, rather despondently.
“Why, _of course_ she will,” answered the young lady; “but now don’t
think me inquisitive, please,” she added, in a very insinuating tone,
“but I do _so_ much want you to tell me something.”
“You want me to tell you what?” asked the lawyer, rather sharply.
Laura linked her hand through his arm, and raising herself on tiptoe,
so as to bring her rosy lips within easier reach of his ear, whispered
archly,
“Does she _really_ love you? Was it _really_ a love match?”
Gilbert Monckton started as violently as if that infantine whisper had
been the envenomed hiss of a snake.
“What do you mean, child?” he said, turning sharply upon his ward; “of
course Eleanor and I married because we loved each other? Why else
should we have married?”
“No, to be sure. Girls marry for money sometimes. I heard Mrs. Darrell
say that one of the Penwoods, of Windsor, married a horrid, old, rich
city man for the sake of his money. But I don’t think Eleanor would do
that sort of thing. Only it seems so funny that she should have been in
love with you all the time.”
“All what time?”
“Why, all the time she and I were together. How could she help talking
of you, I wonder?”
The lawyer bit his lip.
“She never talked of me, then?” he said, with a feeble attempt to make
his tone careless.
“Oh, yes, she spoke of you sometimes, of course; but not in that way.”
“Not in what way? When will you learn to express yourself clearly, Miss
Mason? Are you going to be a child all your life?”
Gilbert Monckton’s ward looked up at him with a half comic look of
terror. He was not accustomed to speak so sharply to her.
“Don’t be angry, please,” she said, “I know I don’t always express
myself clearly. I dare say it’s because I used to get other girls to do
my themes—they call exercises in composition themes, you know—when I
was at school. I mean that Eleanor didn’t talk of you as if she was in
love with you—not as I talk—not as I _should_ talk of any one if I were
in love with them,” added the young lady, blushing very much as she
corrected herself.
Miss Mason had only one idea of the outer evidences of the
master-passion. A secret or unrequited affection, which did not make
itself known by copious quotations of Percy Shelley and Letitia London,
was in her mind a very commonplace affair.
Mr. Monckton shrugged his shoulders.
“Who set you up as a judge of how a woman should speak of the man she
loves?” he said, sharply. “My wife has too much modesty to advertise
her affection for any man. By the bye, Miss Mason, would you like to
come and live at Tolldale?”
Laura looked at her guardian with unmitigated surprise.
“Come and live at Tolldale!” she said; “I thought you didn’t like me; I
thought you despised me because I’m so frivolous and childish.”
“Despise you, Laura,” cried Gilbert Monckton, “not like you! My poor
dear child, what a brute I must have been if I ever have given you
such an impression as that. I am very fond of you, my dear,” he added,
gravely, laying his hand upon the girl’s head as he spoke, and looking
down at her with sorrowful tenderness. “I am very much attached to you,
my poor dear child. If I ever seem vexed with your girlish frivolity,
it is only because I am anxious about your future. I am very, very
anxious about your future.”
“But why are you so anxious?”
“Because your mother was childish and light-hearted like you, Laura,
and she was led to do a very cruel thing for want of thought.”
“My poor mother. Ah, how I wish you would tell me about her.”
Laura Mason looked very serious as she said this. Her hands were folded
round the lawyer’s arm; her bright blue eyes seemed to grow of a more
sombre colour as she looked earnestly upward to his grave face.
“Not now, my dear; some day; some day, perhaps, we’ll talk about all
that. But not now. You haven’t answered my question, Laura. Would you
like to live at Tolldale?”
The young lady blushed crimson and dropped her eyelids.
“I should dearly like to live with Eleanor,” she said. “But——”
“But what?”
“I don’t think it would be quite right to leave Mrs. Darrell, would
it? The money you pay her is of great use to her, you know; I have
heard her say she could scarcely get on without it, especially now that
Launcelot—now that Mr. Darrell has come home.”
The blushes deepened as Laura Mason said this.
The lawyer watched those deepening blushes with considerable
uneasiness. “She is in love with this dark-eyed young Apollo,” he
thought.
“You are very scrupulous about Mrs. Darrell and her convenience,
Laura,” he said. “I should have fancied you would have been delighted
to live with your old friend and companion. You’ll come to-morrow to
spend the day with Eleanor, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes; if you please.”
“I’ll send the carriage for you, after it has taken me to Slough.
Good-bye.”
Mr. Monckton rode slowly homewards. His interview with Laura had not
been altogether agreeable to him. The girl’s surprise at his marriage
with Eleanor had irritated and disturbed him. It seemed like a protest
against the twenty years that divided his age from that of his young
wife. There was something abnormal and exceptionable in the marriage,
it seemed, then; and the people who had congratulated him and wished
him well, were so many bland and conventional hypocrites, who no doubt
laughed in their sleeves at his folly.
The lawyer rode back to Tolldale Priory with a moody and overclouded
brow.
“That girl is in love with Launcelot Darrell,” he thought. “She
betrayed her secret in her childish transparence. The young man must
be wonderfully attractive, since people fall in love with him in this
manner. I don’t like him; I don’t believe in him; I should not like
Laura to be his wife.”
Yet in the next moment Mr. Monckton reflected that, after all, a
marriage between his ward and Launcelot might not be altogether
unadvisable. The young man was clever and gentlemanly. He came of a
good stock, and had at least brilliant expectations. He might marry
Laura and go to Italy, where he could devote a few years to the
cultivation of his art.
“If the poor child is in love with him, and he returns her affection,
it would be cruel to come between them with any prudential tyranny,”
thought Mr. Monckton. “The young man seems really anxious to achieve
success as an artist, and if he is to do so he ought certainly to study
abroad.”
The lawyer’s mind dwelt upon this latter point throughout the
remainder of his ride, and when he crossed the stone-paved hall
where the cavaliers’ boots and saddles hung in the glowing light
that stole through the emblazoned windows, he had almost come to
the determination that Laura Mason and Launcelot Darrell ought to be
married forthwith. He found his wife sitting in one of the windows of
the library, with her hands lying idle in her lap, and her eyes fixed
upon the garden before her. She started as he entered the room, and
looked up at him with a bright eagerness in her face.
“You have been to Hazlewood?” she said.
“Yes, I have just come from there.”
“And you have seen——?”
She stopped suddenly. Launcelot Darrell’s name had risen to her lips,
but she checked herself before uttering it, lest she should betray
her eager interest in him. She had no fear of that interest being
misconstrued; no idea of such a possibility had ever entered her head.
She only feared that some chance look or word might betray her vengeful
hatred of the young man.
“You saw Laura—and—and Mrs. Darrell, I suppose?” she said.
“Yes, I saw Laura and Mrs. Darrell,” answered Gilbert Monckton,
watching his wife’s face. He had perceived the hesitation with which
she had asked this question. He saw now that she was disappointed in
his reply.
Eleanor was incapable of dissimulation, and her disappointment betrayed
itself in her face. She had expected to hear something of Launcelot
Darrell, something which would have at least given her an excuse for
questioning her husband about him.
“You did not see Mr. Darrell, then?” she said, after a pause, during
which Mr. Monckton had placed himself opposite to her in the open
window. The afternoon sunshine fell full upon Eleanor’s face; lighting
up every change of expression; revealing every varying shade of thought
that betrayed itself unconsciously in a countenance whose mobility was
one of its greatest charms.
“No, Mr. Darrell was in his painting-room; I did not see him.”
There was a pause. Eleanor was silent, scarcely knowing how to fashion
any question that might lead to her gaining some information about the
man whose secrets she had set herself to unravel.
“Do you know, Eleanor,” said the lawyer after this pause, during
which he had kept close watch upon his wife’s face, “I think I have
discovered a secret that concerns Launcelot Darrell.”
“A secret?”
Sudden blushes lit up Eleanor Monckton’s cheeks like a flaming fire.
“A secret!” she repeated. “You have found out a secret!”
“Yes, I believe that my ward, Laura Mason, has fallen in love with the
young man.”
Eleanor’s face changed. Her feverish eagerness gave place to a look of
indifference.
“Is that all?” she said.
She had no very great belief in the intensity of Miss Mason’s feelings.
The girl’s sentimental talk and demonstrative admiration had to her
mind something spurious in their nature; Mrs. Monckton was ready to
love Laura very dearly when the business of her life should be done,
and she could have time to love anybody; but in the meantime she gave
herself no uneasiness about Miss Mason’s romantic passion for the young
painter.
“Laura is as inconstant as the wind,” she thought. “She will hate
Launcelot Darrell when I tell her how base he is.”
But what was Eleanor’s surprise when Mr. Monckton said, very quietly:
“If the girl is really attached to this young man, and he returns her
affection—she is so pretty and fascinating, that I should think he
could scarcely help being in love with her—I don’t see why the match
should not take place.”
Eleanor looked up suddenly.
“Oh, no, no, no,” she cried; “you would never let Laura marry Launcelot
Darrell.”
“And why not, Mrs. Monckton?”
The insidious imp which the lawyer had made his bosom companion of
late, at this moment transformed himself into a raging demon, and
gnawed ravenously at the vitals of its master.
“Why shouldn’t Laura marry Launcelot Darrell?”
“Because you have a bad opinion of him. What did you say to me by the
garden-gate at Hazlewood, when Mr. Darrell first came home? You said he
was selfish, shallow, frivolous; false, perhaps. You said there was a
secret in his life.”
“I thought so then.”
“And have you ceased to think so now?”
“I don’t know. I may have been prejudiced against the young man,”
answered Mr. Monckton, doubtfully.
“I don’t think you were,” Eleanor said; “I don’t think he is a good
man. Pray, pray don’t let Laura marry him.”
She clasped her hands in her eagerness, as she looked up in her
husband’s face.
Gilbert Monckton’s brow darkened.
“What does it matter to you?” he asked.
Eleanor looked surprised at the almost angry abruptness of her
husband’s manner.
“It matters a great deal to me,” she said. “I should be very sorry if
Laura were to make an unhappy marriage.”
“But must her marriage with Launcelot Darrell be necessarily unhappy?”
“Yes; because he is a bad man.”
“What right have you to say that, unless you have some special reason
for thinking it?”
“I have a special reason.”
“What reason?”
“I cannot tell you—now.”
The ravenous demon’s tooth grew sharper than usual when Eleanor said
this.
“Mrs. Monckton,” the lawyer said, sternly, “I am afraid that there can
be very little happiness in store for you and me if you begin your
married life by keeping secrets from your husband.”
Gilbert Monckton was too proud to say more than this. A dull despair
was creeping into his breast, a sick loathing of himself and of his
folly. Every one of those twenty years which made him his young wife’s
senior rose up against him, and gibed and twitted him.
What right had he to marry a young wife, and believe that she could
love him? What justification could he find for his own folly in taking
this girl from poverty and obscurity, and then expecting that she
should feel any warmer sentiment than some feeble gratitude to him for
having given her an advantageous bargain? He had given her a handsome
house and attentive servants, carriages and horses, prosperity and
independence, in exchange for her bright youth and beauty, and he was
angry with her because she did not love him.
Looking back at that interview in the Pilasters—every circumstance of
which was very clear to him now, by the aid of a pair of spectacles
lent him by the jealous demon, his familiar—Mr. Monckton remembered
that no confession of love had dropped from Eleanor’s lips. She had
consented to become his wife, nothing more. She had, no doubt—in
those moments of maidenly hesitation, during which he had waited so
breathlessly—deliberately weighed and carefully balanced the advantages
that were to be won from the sacrifice demanded of her.
Of course the perpetual brooding upon such fancies as these very much
tended to make Gilbert Monckton an agreeable and lively companion for
an impulsive girl. There is something remarkable in the persistency
with which the sufferer from that terrible disease called jealousy
strives to aggravate the causes of his torture.