Not Without Thorns

“Eugenia,” he began, “I am sorry for my rudeness just now, but you are very unreasonable. Why can’t you write to your people, and ask them to come on the Friday? We return then. Any one but you would understand my reasons for wishing to go to Marshlands.”

“I do understand them, rather too well,” replied his wife, coldly. “As for asking my people to come on Friday, it is out of the question. My brother-in-law cannot be away on Sunday; and besides, I cannot ask my father and Sydney – neither of them strong – to come so long a journey for only two days.”

“Why for only two days?”

“Because on Monday all your friends are coming, and you do not wish mine to be here at the same time.”

“I never said anything of the kind,” exclaimed Beauchamp, angrily, aware nevertheless that he had thought something very much of the kind. It was not that he was ashamed of Mr Laurence or Sydney; he liked them both very well; but there had been a good deal of “chaff” about his Wareborough marriage, and he had imagined more. He could ill bear chaff, and his constitutional and avowed arrogance laid him peculiarly open to it in certain directions. How he had sneered and made fun of other men in the old days for being “caught” by a pretty face or a pair of bright eyes! He was not ashamed of his marriage – he was proud of his wife in herself – but on the whole, he preferred that his old friends, on their first visit, should not find the house full of his Wareborough relations-in-law. But he had not imagined that Eugenia suspected this.

“I never said anything of the kind,” he repeated, working himself into a rage. “But I warn you, Eugenia, if you don’t take care what you are about, you will drive me into thinking, and saying too, many things I never wish to think or say.”

She got up from her seat, and stood facing him.

“I know what you mean,” she said, huskily, a white despair creeping over her face. “You mean that you regret your marriage. Why did you do it at all then? – tell me. Why did you make me think you everything great and noble, to open my eyes now like this? Why did you not leave me where I was, happy and loved, instead of making me care for you? Why did you ask me to be your wife?”

“Why, indeed? You may well ask,” replied Captain Chancellor, in a bitter, contemptuous tone.

Then he turned and left the room. He put down all she had said to “temper,” of course; but some of her words had wounded and mortified him not a little.

Eugenia stood there where he had left her, in blank, bewildered misery. Only one thought glanced with any brightness through the black cloud of wretchedness which seemed to choke her.

“He did love me once,” she said to herself. “If all the rest was a dream, still he did love me once.”

And but for this, she thought she must have died.

Volume Three – Chapter Four.

“By the Spring.”

Life, that dares send
A challenge to his end,
And when it comes, say, “Welcome, friend.”

    Crashaw.
Tuesday the 22nd came, but Captain Chancellor set off on his visit to Marshlands alone. Eugenia was ill – too ill to leave her room, though better than she had been. The restrained suffering of the last few weeks, the unhealthily reserved and isolated life she had begun to live – she to whom sympathy was as the air she breathed – all had told upon her; and the excitement of the painful discussion with her husband the day of Lady Hereward’s unfortunate visit, had been the finishing stroke. After that she gave way altogether.

She was not sorry to be ill. On the whole, she felt it the best thing that could have happened to her. She was glad to be alone. She was very glad now that Sydney’s visit had been deferred. With all her haste and impulsiveness, there was in her a curious mixture of clear-headedness and reasoning power. She liked to understand things – to get to the bottom of them. Now that she had left off pretending to deceive herself with false representations – now that she had ceased to try to cheat herself into imagining she was happy – she found a strange, half-morbid satisfaction in dissecting and analysing the whole – her own character and her husband’s; the past lives of both, and the influences that had made them what they were; the special, definite causes of their discordancy.

“He is not – I see it plainly now,” she said to herself, with a curious, hopeless sort of calm, “he is not in the very least the man I imagined. That Beauchamp has never existed. Is it just, therefore, that I should blame the real one for not being what he never was?” Here she got a little puzzled, and tried to look at it from a fresh point of view. “And being what he is, and no more, why should I not make the best of it? It seems to me there is something repulsive and unworthy in the thought. I would almost rather go on being miserable. Yet I suppose many women have had to do it. I could fancy Sydney, for instance, doing it, and never letting any one suspect she had had it to do. In time, perhaps, I may find it easier, or grow callous.”

Then she would set to work to think out a new rôle for herself – that of an utterly lonely, impossibly self-reliant woman, living a life of self-abnegation, of lofty devotion to duty – unappreciated devotion, unsuspected abnegation – such as no woman has ever yet lived since women were. Seen through the softening medium of physical weakness, not amounting to actual suffering, this new way of looking at things came to have a certain attraction for her. The idea of total and lasting sacrifice of all hopes of personal happiness, all yearning for sympathy, was grand enough and impossible enough to recommend itself greatly to this ardent, extreme nature, to which anything was better than second bests, nothing so antagonistic as compromise in any form.

“I have staked my all and lost,” she said to herself with a sort of piteous grandiloquence; “there is nothing left me but duty and endurance; for though he did love me, I doubt if he does so now. I am not necessary to his happiness. He does not and cannot understand me.”

Only unfortunately there were two or three little difficulties in the way of settling down comfortably to this conclusion. In the first place, notwithstanding her love of theorising, and of idealising even the woes of her lot, Eugenia was essentially honest, and being so she could not allow to herself that her conduct had been blameless, especially in this last and most serious disagreement. She had said things which she knew would gall and irritate her husband. In the morbid excitement of the moment she owned to herself that she had even wished them to have this effect, that his behaviour might excuse the violence of her indignation. And her conduct in general – her conduct ever since their marriage – ever since, at least, the first few weeks of careless happiness – how did that now appear to her from her new point of view? She knew she had been gentle, and in a superficial sense unselfish; with but very rare exceptions she had entirely merged her own wishes in those of her husband, had opposed nothing that he had suggested. Such submission, such sinking of her own individuality, had been unnatural and forced, completely foreign to her character. And, what had been its motive? Not the highest – far from it. It had not been that she really believed that in so doing she was acting her wifely part to perfection; it had not been earnest endeavour after the best within her reach that had prompted her, but rather, a cowardly, a selfish determination to close her eyes to the facts of her life – a weak refusal to see anything she did not want to see – the old wilful cry, “All or nothing; give me all or I die” – the shrinking from owning, even to herself, the self-willed impetuosity with which she had acted – the terror of acknowledging that she had been deceived, or rather, had deceived herself.

“Yes,” she said, “I have been all wrong together. How selfish I have been too! Months ago how indignant I used to get with poor Sydney if she ever attempted, as she used to call it, to ‘clip my wings for me.’ How angry I was with papa when he suggested that we should defer our marriage till we knew a little more of each other! How selfish I was in Paris, too – selfish and unsympathising in Beauchamp’s change of fortune! Perhaps, after all, it is no more than I have deserved that he should feel as he does now.”

The reflection was a wholesome one, and its influence softening, and Beauchamp had been very kind since her illness. He might not understand her, but at times she felt it was certainly going too far to say that he no longer cared for her. He seemed to have already quite forgotten all about this last discussion, and in truth the impression it had made upon him had been by no means a deep one. “It was all a fit of temper of Eugenia’s,” he said to himself, and as one of his fixed ideas was that such a thing as a woman without a temper had never existed, he resigned himself to his fate, with the hope that his share of this unavoidable drawback to the charms of married life might be small.

Up to the last Captain Chancellor hoped that his wife would be able to accompany him to Marshlands. To do him justice, he was very reluctant to go without her.

“It is such a pity,” he said. “It would be just what I should like, for you to see a good deal of Lady Hereward. It isn’t every one that she takes to, I can tell you.”

“I like her in herself,” said Eugenia; “the only thing I dislike her for is that she is Lady Hereward. I got tired of her name before I had ever seen her.”

The moment she had said this she regretted it. Beauchamp’s brow clouded over.

“Of course,” he replied, coldly, “if you set yourself against her I can’t help it. Perhaps the best plan would be for me to write making an excuse for us both, and have done with the acquaintance. I am sick of discussions about everything I propose.”

It was hard upon her; it was so seldom, so very seldom she had opposed him in anything, or even expressed an opinion.

“I am very sorry I cannot go,” she said, “but your giving up going is not to be thought of. There is no reason for it. I am not seriously ill. There is nothing wrong with me but what a few days’ rest will set right.”

This was true. So Captain Chancellor set off for Marshlands alone, and Eugenia, solitary and suffering, spent in her own room the week she had so eagerly anticipated.

Time went on. November past, midwinter is soon at hand, and Christmas had come and gone before, contrary to the Chilworth doctor’s sanguine opinion, Mrs Chancellor was at all like herself again. It was a dreary winter to her. Had she been in good health, some reaction from the hopeless depression which had gradually taken hold of her would have been pretty sure to set in – a reaction, perhaps, of a sound and healthy nature; possibly, nevertheless, of the reverse. This, however, was not the case. At the beginning of her illness, things had looked more promising: her husband’s kindness had touched and softened her, her own reflections had pointed the right way. But as the days went on and Eugenia felt herself growing weaker instead of stronger, her clearer view of things clouded over again. It takes a great reserve of mutual trust and sympathy to stand the wearing effects of a trying though not acute illness. Beauchamp got tired of his wife’s never being well – so at least she fancied – tired of it, and then indifferent, or if not indifferent, accustomed to it. And whether this was really the case or not, there was some excuse for her believing it to be so, for the habitual small selfishness of his nature was thrown out in strong relief by circumstances undoubtedly trying.

“If people looked forward to realities, they would choose their husbands and wives differently. It is only about a year ago since I first met Beauchamp. Oh, how silly and ignorant I must have been! How perfect life – life with him – looked to me,” thought Eugenia, bitterly.

She was more than usually depressed that day. Captain Chancellor had left home to spend a week at Winsley, where a merry Christmas party was expected, and though Eugenia had no wish to accompany him, even had she been able to do so, though she had not put the slightest difficulty in the way of his going, yet his readiness to do so wounded and embittered her. For he had got into the habit of often leaving home now – never for very long at a time, certainly – never without making every arrangement for her comfort; but yet the fact of his liking to go, increased her unhappy state of mind. Everything seemed against her. During all these months she had never succeeded in seeing her own people. Another invitation had been sent to them and accepted. For Eugenia had had the unselfishness to place the deferring of their first visit in a natural and favourable light, making it appear to be quite as much her own doing as her husband’s, and a subject of great regret to both.

“Better that they should think I have grown cold and indifferent even,” she thought, “than that they should suspect the truth.” But no one except Frank had at this time thought anything of the kind.

“I won’t go, another time,” he growled. “I never heard anything so cool in my life. If it is Eugenia’s own doing, I don’t want to have anything more to say to her. If not, I pity her, but she chose her husband herself.”

And Sydney had some difficulty to smooth him down again, and to gain his consent to the acceptance of the second invitation when in course of time it made its appearance.

It was accepted, but the visit did not take place. Before the date fixed for it arrived, Mr Laurence had another attack of illness, from which he only recovered sufficiently to be moved to a milder place, where for a few weeks, Sydney, though at no small personal inconvenience, accompanied him. Something was said by her in one of her letters to Eugenia, suggestive of her joining them and taking her share in the nursing and cheering of their father; but the proposal met with no response. Loyal and true-hearted as she was, Sydney felt chilled and disappointed, and said no more. But all through the winter, in reality passed by Eugenia in loneliness, and suffering, and yearning for sympathy, which only a mistaken desire to spare her sister sorrow prevented her expressing – all these months Sydney pictured her as happy and prosperous, so free from cares herself as to be in danger of forgetting their existence in the lives of others. For the more steadily hopeless Eugenia grew, the more cheerfully she wrote. And forced cheerfulness often bears a strong resemblance to heartlessness.

“I am glad and thankful she is happy,” thought Sydney, “and she certainly must be so, for it is not in her to conceal it if she were not; but I did not think prosperity would have changed Eugenia.”

Nor would she, for any conceivable consideration, have owned to any one, least of all perhaps to her husband, that she did think so.

Mr Laurence had fortunately no misgivings on the subject of his elder daughter. She was happy, she wrote regularly and affectionately – she had twice fixed a time for him to visit her, but circumstances had come in the way. It was all quite right. He loved her as fondly as ever, with perhaps a shade more fondness than the child “who was ever with him,” whose new ties had in no wise been allowed to interfere with her daughterly devotion; it never occurred to him that Eugenia’s affection could be dimmed.

“I should like to see her,” he said sometimes – “I should like to see her very much – in her own home too. But by the spring we shall be able to arrange for it; by the spring, no doubt, I shall be more like myself again, and able to manage a little going about. We must go together, Sydney, my dear, as Eugenia wished.”

And Sydney said, “Yes, by the spring they must arrange it.” But a shadowy misgiving, that had visited her not unfrequently of late – a little, painful, choking feeling in her throat, a sudden moisture in her eyes, made themselves felt, when she looked at her father’s thin, worn face, and heard him talk about “the spring;” and she wondered, as so many loving watchers wonder, “if the doctors had told her the whole truth.”

There had always been a certain unworldliness about Mr Laurence – a gentle philosophy, an unexacting unselfishness, and of late all these had increased. Practical as he had proved himself in his far-seeing philanthropy, he was a man to whom it came naturally to live much in the unseen, to whom the thought that “to this life there is a to-morrow,” was full of encouragement and consolation – a to-morrow in more senses than the one of individual blessedness – a to-morrow when the work begun here, however poor and imperfect in itself, shall be carried on, purified, strengthened, rendered a thousand times more powerful for good – a to-morrow even for the races yet unborn in this world. All this he believed, and his life had shown that he did so. Yet many people shook their heads over his “want of religious principle,” his “dangerously lax notions,” and prophesied that no blessing could follow the labours of such a man. But such sayings little troubled Sydney’s father. He smiled with kindly tolerance, and thought to himself that some time or other such things would come to be viewed differently.

About the middle of February, Mr Laurence and his daughter returned home to Wareborough. On the last day of March, Sydney’s boy was born – a strong, handsome, satisfactory baby – with whom the young parents were greatly delighted. Sydney recovered her strength quickly, and before April was over, Mr Laurence, who had seemed much better of late, and who had taken wonderfully to his grandson, began to talk again of the often-deferred visit to Eugenia.

“It would be a nice little change for you, Sydney, and Eugenia would be so pleased to see her little nephew. Her letters are full of questions about him. I have a great, mind to write to her myself, and ask what time next month would be convenient for her to receive us. I think my doing so would please her. I should be sorry for her to think we had not taken the first opportunity of going to see her. They are sure to be at home next month?”

“Yes,” said Sydney, “I remember Eugenia’s saying in one of her letters, that they were not going to town this year. I don’t know why, for not long ago she said something about their probably buying a house in town. Well, father dear, baby and I – and Frank too, I dare say – will be ready whenever you arrange for it with Eugenia.”