During this time, while Hugh was sitting with his love under the oak trees at Monkhams, and Dorothy was being converted into Mrs Brooke Burgess in Exeter Cathedral, Mrs Trevelyan was living with her husband in the cottage at Twickenham. Her life was dreary enough, and there was but very little of hope in it to make its dreariness supportable. As often happens in periods of sickness, the single friend who could now be of service to the one or to the other was the doctor. He came daily to them, and with that quick growth of confidence which medical kindness always inspires, Trevelyan told to this gentleman all the history of his married life and all that Trevelyan told to him he repeated to Trevelyan’s wife. It may therefore be understood that Trevelyan, between them, was treated like a child.
Dr. Nevill had soon been able to tell Mrs Trevelyan that her husband’s health had been so shattered as to make it improbable that he should ever again be strong, either in body or in mind. He would not admit, even when treating his patient like a child, that he had ever been mad, and spoke of Sir Marmaduke’s threat as unfortunate. ‘But what could papa have done?’ asked the wife.
‘It is often, no doubt, difficult to know what to do: but threats are seldom of avail to bring a man back to reason. Your father was angry with him, and yet declared that he was mad. That in itself was hardly rational. One does not become angry with a madman.’
One does not become angry with a madman; but while a man has power in his hands over others, and when he misuses that power grossly and cruelly, who is there that will not be angry? The misery of the insane more thoroughly excites our pity than any other suffering to which humanity is subject; but it is necessary that the madness should be acknowledged to be madness before the pity can be felt. One can forgive, or, at any rate, make excuses for any injury when it is done; but it is almost beyond human nature to forgive an injury when it is a-doing, let the condition of the doer be what it may. Emily Trevelyan at this time suffered infinitely. She was still willing to yield in all things possible, because her husband was ill, because perhaps he was dying; but she could no longer satisfy herself with thinking that all that she had admitted, all that she was still ready to admit, had been conceded in order that her concessions might tend to soften the afflictions of one whose reason was gone. Dr. Nevill said that her husband was not mad, and indeed Trevelyan seemed now to be so clear in his mind that she could not doubt what the doctor said to her. She could not think that he was mad, and yet he spoke of the last two years as though he had suffered from her almost all that a husband could suffer from a wife’s misconduct. She was in doubt about his health. ‘He may recover,’ the doctor said; ‘but he is so weak that the slightest additional ailment would take him off.’ At this time Trevelyan could not raise himself from his bed, and was carried, like a child, from one room to another. He could eat nothing solid, and believed himself to be dying. In spite of his weakness, and of his savage memories in regard to the past he treated his wife on all ordinary subjects with consideration. He spoke much of his money, telling her that he had not altered, and would not alter, the will that he had made immediately on his marriage. Under that will all his property would be hers for her life, and would go to their child when she was dead. To her this will was more than just, it was generous in the confidence which it placed in her; and he told his lawyer, in her presence, that, to the best of his judgment, he need not change it. But still there passed hardly a day in which he did not make some allusion to the great wrong which he had endured, throwing in her teeth the confessions which she had made and almost accusing her of that which she certainly never had confessed, even when, in the extremity of her misery at Casalunga, she had thought that it little mattered what she said, so that for the moment he might be appeased. If he died, was he to die in this belief? If he lived, was he to live in this belief? And if he did so believe, was it possible that he should still trust her with his money and with his child?
‘Emily,’ he said one day, ‘it has been a terrible tragedy, has it not?’ She did not answer his question, sitting silent as it was her custom to do when he addressed her after such fashion as this. At such times she would not answer him; but she knew that he would press her for an answer. ‘I blame him more than I do you,’ continued Trevelyan, ‘infinitely more. He was a serpent intending to sting me from the first, not knowing perhaps how deep the sting would go.’ There was no question in this, and the assertion was one which had been made so often that she could let it pass. ‘You are young, Emily, and it may be that you will marry again.
‘Never,’ she said, with a shudder. It seemed to her then that marriage was so fearful a thing that certainly she could never venture upon it again.
‘All I ask of you is, that should you do so, you will be more careful of your husband’s honour.’
‘Louis,’ she said, getting up and standing close to him, ‘tell me what it is that you mean.’ It was now his turn to remain silent, and hers to demand an answer. ‘I have borne much,’ she continued, ‘because I would not vex you in your illness.’
‘You have borne much?’
‘Indeed and indeed, yes. What woman has ever borne more!’
‘And I?’ said he.
‘Dear Louis, let us understand each other at last. Of what do you accuse me? Let us, at any rate, know each other’s thoughts on this matter, of which each of us is ever thinking.’
‘I make no new accusation.’
‘I must protest then against your using words which seem to convey accusation. Since marriages were first known upon earth, no woman has ever been truer to her husband than I have been to you.’
‘Were you lying to me then at Casalunga when you acknowledged that you had been false to your duties?’
‘If I acknowledged that, I did lie. I never said that; but yet I did lie, believing it to be best for you that I should do so. For your honour’s sake, for the child’s sake, weak as you are, Louis, I must protest that it was so. I have never injured you by deed or thought.’
‘And yet you have lied to me! Is a lie no injury — and such a lie! Emily, why did you lie to me! You will tell me tomorrow that you never lied, and never owned that you had lied.’
Though it should kill him, she must tell him the truth now. ‘You were very ill at Casalunga,’ she said, after a pause.
‘But not so ill as I am now. I could breathe that air. I could live there. Had I remained I should have been well now; but what of that?’
‘Louis, you were dying there. Pray, pray listen to me. We thought that you were dying; and we knew also that you would be taken from that house.’
‘That was my affair. Do you mean that I could not keep a house over my head?’ At this moment he was half lying, half sitting, in a large easy chair in the little drawing-room of their cottage, to which he had been carried from the adjoining bed-room. When not excited, he would sit for hours without moving, gazing through the open window, sometimes with some pretext of a book lying within the reach of his hand; but almost without strength to lift it, and certainly without power to read it. But now he had worked himself up to so much energy that he almost raised himself up in his chair, as he turned towards his wife. ‘Had I not the world before me, to choose a house in?’
‘They would have put you somewhere, and I could not have reached you.’
‘In a madhouse, you mean. Yes if you had told them.’
‘Will you listen, dear Louis? We knew that it was our duty to bring you home; and as you would not let me come to you, and serve you, and assist you to come here where you are safe unless I owned that you had been right, I said that you had been right.’
‘And it was a lie you say now?’
‘All that is nothing. I can not go through it; nor should you. There is the only question. You do not think that I have been? I need not say the thing. You do not think that?’ As she asked the question, she knelt beside him, and took his hand in hers, and kissed it.‘say that you do not think that, and I will never trouble you further about the past.’
‘Yes, that is it. You will never trouble me!’ She glanced up into his face and saw there the old look which he used to wear when he was at Willesden and at Casalunga; and there had come again the old tone in which he had spoken to her in the bitterness of his wrath, the look and the tone, which had made her sure that he was a madman. ‘The craft and subtlety of women passes everything!’ he said. ‘And so at last I am to tell you that from the beginning it has been my doing. I will never say so, though I should die in refusing to do it.’
After that there was no possibility of further conversation, for there came upon him a fit of coughing, and then he swooned; and in half-an-hour he was in bed, and Dr. Nevill was by his side. ‘You must not speak to him at all on this matter,’ said the doctor. &l............