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Chapter V.

‘… That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore
Save one, one only when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.’

Wordsworth.

A whole week gave Mr. Moresby time to accustom himself to the idea of his wife's departure. In the house everything went on as usual. His wife did not relax from any of her duties; visitors came and went, and were duly entertained; she took her place at the head of his table, and played the part of the graceful hostess as faultlessly as ever. When they were alone she never referred to the agreement concluded between them; but he knew her better than to believe that she purposed receding from it. Quietly he carried out his determination to largely increase her allowance. Poor man! he had indeed always gone to work with money when he had tried to win her affections.

It would be better, he thought, and she did not object to it, that at first she should go as on a visit that had been promised long before to a distant page 60 relative of hits in the country. It was hoped by Mr. Moresby—Mrs. Moresby did not waste a thought on the matter—that this visit, if his wife did not falter in her resolution, would give a better appearance, to their separation in the eyes of the world (meaning by this the few score of souls who had their affairs in remembrance), and that, supposing she should alter her purpose, she might return home quietly at the end of a few weeks, none being the wiser for her temporary absence.

But, thanks to Maid Maria, it was somewhat too late to think of masks and disguises. Let your servants become acquainted with a matter you would fain conceal, and you may consider it as advertised in a paper of wide circulation. Maria told Fanny the nursery-maid, and Fanny told a magnificent footman who bloomed in the hall of the next house, and he told certain chosen comrades of his own. Moreover, Maria told her admirer, a meek, inoffensive clerk in a grocery store, and it preyed upon him so that he was obliged to tell his landlady. Not satisfied yet, Maria told her bosom friend, who was maid to Mrs. Lovat, a very intimate friend of Mrs. Moresby Mrs. Lovat became possessed of the secret before the rising of another sun, and paid a whole round of calls upon the strength of it, mentioning it as a thing she had heard but really hoped wasn't true, and which it would be a pity to repeat. Several persons spoke of it to several others in the same discriminating manner. What more was page 61 needed? The Times or Daily News could not have done the business half so well.

In such a case it is almost a pity one cannot be one's own advertiser. It is better, at any cost, to give the whole truth to the public than to allow them to swallow a garbled and exaggerated version. The lady whose name rumour suddenly became so free with had made no enemies if she had not made friends. She had been the object of a great deal of that lukewarm affection which is so prevalent in society. Unfortunately nothing sours so rapidly as this. She had been above suspicion or slander, and happily she remained above it now. But it is dangerous to be above your neighbours. To be wiser, better, handsomer than they, may prove a fatal mistake, when the days of adversity come upon you. Envy so often lurks behind admiration, and envy is always on the watch for its opportunity. It was all the worse for Mrs. Moresby that she was superior in intellect and beauty of person, that her life had been a blameless one, and that she was strict and even austere in her habits and opinions. All these excellent qualities were so many offences against those who had them not. Many very bitter things can be said without descending to anything evil enough to be particularised as slander. Such were said very abundantly.

The day came that she intended to be the last spent in her husband's house. The morning passed as usual. Mr. Moresby did not go to his office as page 62 on other days, but remained at home, ostensibly writing in his room. It was a fine day; bright and warm for the time of year. After lunch Mrs. Moresby went out into the garden, leading her little boy by the hand. The garden was large, for the house was old, and one day had been quite in the country. Then it had fields about it. Bare and barren they were, but in process of time they grew gold for their owners; every acre produced its crop of yellow sovereigns, a rich harvesting on lands whose yields of yellow corn had been few and far between. The city swallowed them up, and most likely would have swallowed up the old house as well, if its march had not been stayed by the walled-in pleasure-grounds;—these were not to be encroached on, and not to be sold, even at a price that would have paved them with sovereigns.

Within the high stone wall was an ancient garden, whose long straight walks had been trodden by so many feet for the last century or more that grass or weeds had much ado to thrust their rootlets through the hardened soil. There were clipped hedges, and unfortunate stiff little shrubs, fashioned into globes and hour-glasses, and trees which, from the same cause, had assumed yet more monstrous shapes. And there was a summer-house, damp and cold,—no gay or romantic ladies sought its shelter now,—and a sun-dial which had kept its faithful watch for many a long year. The plants of the garden were mostly old-fashioned things, which gardeners disdain page 63 to grow, and which no one cares to see at flower shows nowadays. Daffadowndillys, jonquils, and wallflowers, ‘carnations and streaked gillyflowers,’ had life leases here. Such vagabond fellows as ragged Robins, batchelor's buttons, and borage had thrust themselves in; widow-wail and gardener's garters were in opposite corners, and there was some rare fine honesty. There, by the wall, what tufts of purple loosestrife and straggling leopard's bane; and upon it, what a thick growth of stonecrop, of woundwort, of feverfew, and, properly enough, pellitory of the wall. Shall we speak of herbs? Here was everything scented and aromatic, from sweet basil and lavender to southernwood and rosemary, and everything bitter and pungent from horehound and wormwood to camomile and rue. There were finer tenants, though, than all these. In the summertide, when the damask and cabbage roses were all ablow, when the hollyhocks looked over the wall, and the foxgloves strained after them, what a glow of colour, what a scented air in the quaint old garden!

Mr. Moresby had wished to modernise it, but his wife had begged that it might be let alone. He had altered everything on the other side of the house, where there had been a maze of shrubberies, and an orchard celebrated for producing no fruit. Here his hothouses had been built, and here were grown flowers and fruit, over which his gardeners were as proudly fierce as the dragons that guarded the golden apples of antiquity.

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Mrs. Moresby spent many solitary half-hours in her flower-garden. It was bereft of bud or blossom now, and the trees were leafless. So had it been when she first came to her husband's house. The dreariness of those days was present in her memory yet. She saw herself, a girl of seventeen, sitting in her room amidst its new ‘finery’—such was the contemptuous expression she used in thought—and watching the drizzling rain, like mist mingled with smoke, drift over the house, and the raindrops trickle down the window-panes. Probably out of sympathy, now and then, a tear would slowly roll down her cheek. She had been a great baby then, she thought, with a strong sense of her present superiority. Then, a kind word suddenly spoken, an unexpected reminder of home, would bring tears to her eyes. She never cried now; she had proved the futility and the foolishness of tears. At this point of her reflections she saw her husband coming towards her, and stopped to wait for him.

‘I came to seek you, Mrs. Moresby,’ he said stiffly, ‘because I find it necessary to leave home this night on business that cannot be delayed. Nothing of interest to you, so I need not take up your time by explaining. I presume you will not be here when I return?’

‘No,’ she answered, in a voice scarcely audible.

‘Then I have merely to say good-bye. There is no need for further discussion between us; everything has been prepared for this. You know what page 65 to do in case you need anything from me. You know you are as free to come back, if you should ever will it so, as you are to go. If you have a want you have only to make it known.’

‘Thank you. You have done more for me than I wished. I have nothing more to ask.’

‘Very well. Then we have only to say goodbye.’

They shook hands in a methodical, business-like manner. It was like two acquaintances parting, only neither dared look the other in the face.

‘If you must think ill of me, don't let the boy,’ said Mr. Moresby.

‘Oh no,’ said his wife, colouring deeply, ‘I would not have it so.’

‘Good-bye, little fellow,’ said Mr. Moresby, stooping to kiss the child.

The boy shrunk back, with a frightened look, and hid his face in the folds of his mother's dress.

‘You have made him hate me already,’ said Mr. Moresby bitterly. ‘Good-bye once more. I hope we may meet again more pleasantly than we part.’

She never looked up to see him go. Her boy began to cry, and did not receive the notice which he expected as a reward for putting himself to such trouble. Some minutes had gone before she was aware that her husband had not left the garden, but was watching her from the end of the long walk. Something in his appearance, the stooping figure, the worn face turned towards her, with a gaze that page 66 was pathetic in its intensity, almost moved her to follow him. She had some uneasy consciousness that there was a better way than the one she had chosen, if she could only find it. Should she change at the last moment? He was hard and cold; he was angry with her; but he was her husband after all. Perhaps it was her duty to go to him now, and make some acknowledgment of her fault. Ah, she had done that before. She felt her face flush at the remembrance of her humiliation. Mr. Moresby was neither generous nor meek to those who made submission before him. She would go—no, she would not. The memory of past taunts and bitter words crowded too quickly into her mind. There never had been peace between them—there never could be. Yet she vacillated; was there nothing she could do?

Too late! He had gone when, urged by some uncontrollable impulse, she ran to the end of the walk and called after him, and listened in vain for the sound of returning footsteps. She went into the house, and sterner, harsher thoughts returning to her mind, helped to strengthen her resolution.