Once, when after delay a tobacconist addressed an account to her care, and she timidly reproached the cigar-smoker for a lapse of memory that might almost seem undignified, she was answered with chaffing, laughing, joviality.
"Well, my dear, if you"re so afraid of our credit going down, there"s an easy way out of the difficulty. Write a cheque yourself, and clean the slate for me."
But one must make allowances. This was a favourite phrase of hers, and it helped the drift of her calmer thoughts. As he said so often, youth has its characteristic faults. Want of thought is not necessarily want of heart.
Perhaps when he began to work, he might improve. There was no doubt that he possessed the capacity for work. He _had_ worked, hard and well. Many a good horse that has not shied or swerved when kept into its collar will, if given too much stable and too many beans, show unsuspected vice and kick the cart to pieces. And the cure for your horse, the medicine for your man, is work.
Of course he had many redeeming traits. One was his jollity--not often disturbed, if people would humour him. Comfort, too, in the recollection that he treated her with respect--never consciously insulted her--in public.
Sometimes when the shadows and the flickering glow drowsily slackened in their dance, and sleep with soft yet heavy fingers at last pressed upon her eyelids, she was willing to believe that all her fiery thought and shadowy dread was but morbid nonsense occasioned by the queer state of her nerves, and by nothing else.
Truly, during this period of her extreme weakness, she was physically incapable of standing up to him; there was no fight left in her. For a time at least, she could not attempt to protect herself, or anyone else who looked to her for protection.
It pained her, but she was unable to interfere, when he roughly repulsed Gordon Thompson.
They were sitting at luncheon, with the servant going in and out of the room; she heard the street door open and shut; there was a sound of hob-nailed boots, and then came the familiar whistle--like a ghostly echo from the past.
"Who the devil"s that?"
"I--I think it must be my Linkfield cousin."
"Oh, is it?" And Marsden jumped up, and went out to the landing.
"Jen-ny! Jen-ny! You up there?"
The farmer stood at the bottom of the steep stairs, and Marsden was at the top, looking down at him. Mrs. Marsden heard nearly the whole of the conversation, but dared not, could not interfere.
"Any dinner for a hungry wayfarer?"
Gordon Thompson, furious at the marriage, had missed many mid-day meals; but now he came to pick up the severed thread of kindness. However, he was not confident; his whistle had been feeble, tentative, and the ascending note of his voice quavered. In order to propitiate, he had brought from Linkfield a market-gardener"s basket with celery and winter cabbages. The present would surely make them glad to see him.
"What do you want here? No orders are given at the door. We buy our vegetables at Rogers"s in High Street. Don"t come cadging here. Get out."
Marsden wickedly pretended to mistake him for an itinerant greengrocer.
"Mayn"t I go up?... Is it to be cuts? Am I not to call on my cousin?"
"Who"s your cousin, I"d like to know."
"Jen-ny Thompson."
"No one of that name lives here."
"Jen-ny Marsden then. I say--it"s all right. You"re him, I suppose.
Well, I"m Gordon Thompson--your wife"s cousin."
"My wife never had a cousin of that name. Before she married me, she married a man called Thompson--though she didn"t marry all his humbugging beggarly relations."
"Oh, I say--don"t go on like that. Don"t make it cuts."
"Thompson--your cousin--is in the cemetery, if you wish to call on him.
He has been there a long time--waiting for you;" and Marsden laughed.
"The s.e.xton will tell you where to find him.... Go and plant your cabbages out there. We don"t want "em here."
He returned to the luncheon table in the highest good-humour.
"There, old girl, I"ve ridded you of _that_ nuisance. You won"t be bothered with _him_ any more."
Mrs. Marsden could not answer. She could not even raise her eyes from the table-cloth. But when her husband offered to give her a rare afternoon treat by taking her for a run in his small two-seated car, she looked up; and, meekly thanking him, accepted the invitation.
As the car carried them slowly through the market-place, neatly threading its way among laden carts and emptied stalls, she saw cousin Gordon standing, rueful and disconsolate, outside the humble tavern at which it was the custom of the lesser sort of farmers to dine together on market-day. Had Gordon dined, or had anger and resentment deprived him of appet.i.te and spared his ill-filled purse?
She would not think of it. She turned, and watched her husband"s face.
It was hard as granite while with concentrated attention he manipulated the steering wheel, moved a lever, or sounded his brazen-tongued horn--the signal of danger to anyone who refused to get out of his road.
Almost immediately, they were in the open country, whirling past bare fields and leafless copses, leaping fiercely at each hill that opposed them, and swooping with a shrill, buzzing triumph down the long slopes of the valleys.
"Now we are travelling," said Marsden joyously.
She nodded her head, although she had not caught the words; and presently he shouted close to her ear.
"Moving now, aren"t we? Doesn"t she run smooth?"
"Yes, yes. Capital."
The wind, breaking on the gla.s.s screen, sang as it swept over them; hedge-rows, telegraph poles, and wayside cottages hurried towards them, rising and growing as they came; long stretches of straight road, along which Mr. Young"s horses used to plod for half an hour, were s.n.a.t.c.hed at, conquered, and contemptuously thrown behind, almost before one could recognize them.
That pretty country-house which she had always admired pa.s.sed her; and, pa.s.sing, seemed like a faintly tinted picture in a book whose pages are turned too fast by careless hands. Naked branches of high trees, broad eaves and nestling windows, weak sunlight upon latticed gla.s.s, and pale smoke rising from cl.u.s.tered chimneys--that was all she saw. A few dead leaves pretended to be live things, scampered beside the long wall; a few dead thoughts revived in her mind, and swiftly she recalled her old fancies, the dream of the future, Enid and herself living together so quietly beneath the grey roof;--and then the pretty house with its pretty grounds had been left far behind. It had lost its brief aspect of reality as completely as a half-forgotten dream.
"There, we"ll go easy now." They were approaching a village, and he reduced the speed. "You"re a good plucked "un, Jane;" and he glanced at her approvingly. "You don"t funk a little bit of pace."
They stopped at an inn, thirty miles from Mallingbridge, and drank tea--that is to say, Mrs. Marsden drank tea and Mr. Marsden drank something else, for the good of the house.
Then, after a cigar, he lighted his lamps, and drove her home through the greyness, the dusk, and the dark. And for the three hours or so that she was with him, for the whole time that this outing lasted, she was almost happy.
XV
The nervous distress had gone--with extraordinary suddenness; and a curiously unruffled calm filled her mind. Nothing matters. This is not _all_.
She was a deeply religious woman, but quite unorthodox in the letter of her faith. There might be as many rituals as there are social communities, a different altar for every day of the year; but, however you dressed the eternal glory and the limitless power in garments taken from the poor wardrobe of man"s imagination, the veritable G.o.d was unchanged, unchanging. And her toleration of the diverse opinions of others enabled her to worship as comfortably under the high-vaulted magnificence of a Catholic cathedral as within the narrow shabbiness of a Wesleyan chapel. The perfume of swinging censers did not cloud her brain, nor the ugliness of white-washed walls grieve her eyes--any consecrated place of prayer was good enough to pray in.
But for the sake of old a.s.sociations, by reason of its familiar homeliness, its air of solidity without pomp, and a simplicity that yet is not undignified, she loved this parish church of St. Saviour"s; and it was here, sitting through the long undecorated service, that mental equanimity was most strangely if temporarily restored to her. Although not partic.i.p.ating, she stayed for the celebration of the communion; and while the mystic, symbolic rites were performed, she neither prayed nor meditated. For her it was a blank pause,--no thought,--nothing; but nevertheless she became aware of a deepening perception of rest and peace, and the feeling that she had been uplifted--raised to a spiritual height from which she could look down on the common pains of earth, and see their intrinsically trivial character.
Our life, be it what it may, does not end here. This is not all.