“The little bird now to salute the morn   Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
  The leaves still lying at the mossy root;
  And there a silly chirruping cloth keep
  As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep.
  Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
  And sad for winter too soon coming on.”
 
DRAYTON.
 
“Perhaps the wind
  Waits so in winter for the summers dead,
  And all sad sounds are nature’s funeral cries,
  For what has been and is not?”
 
THE SPANISH GYPSY.
 
 
 
TO-MORROW then, I suppose, will see us at the Manor Farm,” said Geoffrey the last evening of their travels.
 
Marion noticed he did not speak of his dwelling as “home,” and she looked up quickly, for she fancied there was a slight, a very slight quiver in his voice. But no, it must have been only fancy. He sat at the table arranging his fishing book, apparently engrossed in its contents.
 
“I suppose so,” she replied indifferently.
 
“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “that you will not find the house in particularly good order. That is to say it has not been ‘done up’ for ages. I meant to have had some of the rooms refurnished, but there was so little time before,” here he dropped a fly, and had to stoop down to look for it on the carpet, “before we were married,” he went on with a change in his voice, “that I deferred doing so, thinking you might like to choose the furniture yourself. So as soon as we are settled I hope you will order whatever you like for the rooms in which you will take an interest. The drawing-room and dining-room. There is a nice little room up stairs too which I think you might like as a sort of boudoir, or whatever it is called. It opens out of the pleasantest of the bedrooms, the one which I think you will probably choose for your own. I am very anxious that you should arrange all just as you wish, and of course I shall not in the least interfere with any of your plans. I shall keep my own old rooms just as they were; they will do very well without doing up. Indeed my old den would never be comfortable again if it were meddled with.”
 
This was a long speech for the present Geoffrey to make, for he had grown very silent of late. When alone with his wife, that is to say: outsiders would probably have perceived no change in him.
 
“Thank you,” said Marion in a tone that was meant to be cordial. “I am sure it will all be very nice. The house is very old, is it not?” she went on, wishing to show some interest in the subject.
 
“Yes,” he replied, “very old, some parts of it in particular. I wish it were my own—at least,” he went on, “I used to wish it. Now I don’t know that I care much to own it.”
 
“I always thought it was your own,” said Marion with some surprise. “I thought your father bought it long ago.”
 
“No,” answered Geoffrey, “he only got it on a long lease. It will be out in a few years now. I got a hint once that Lord Brackley would not object to selling it when the lease is out, but I don’t know that I should care to buy it. As likely as not I shall leave no—,” but the rest of his words were too low for Marion to catch.
 
“Then you have no land in Brentshire?” she enquired.
 
“Not a rood,” he replied, “nor anywhere else. The old place that belonged to my grandfather, for I had a grandfather, though Miss Tremlett would probably tell you I hadn’t, was over at the other side of the country but neither my father nor I cared about it—it was ugly and unproductive—and before he died my father advised me to accept the first good offer I got for it. So I sold it last year very advantageously indeed. The purchase money is still in the old bank. I should invest it somehow I suppose, for it’s too large a sum to leave in a country bank. But all I have is there, and I really don’t know what else to do with it. I have always had a sort of idea I should buy another place. The bank is as safe as can be of course—I am actually a sleeping partner in it still. But I believe they don’t want to keep me. That new man they took in lately has such heaps of money, they say, and he’s making all sorts of changes.”
 
“Your father would not have liked that,” said Marion.
 
“No indeed,” replied Geoffrey. “Any sort of change, he always thought, must be for the worse.” He was talking more naturally and heartily than had been the case for some time, in the interest of the conversation, appearing temporarily to forget the sad change that had come over their relations. But suddenly he recollected himself. With an entire alteration of manner he went on. “I am forgetting that these personal matters can have no interest for you. I beg your pardon for troubling you with them. Still perhaps,” he added thoughtfully, “it is as well for you to understand these things, however uninteresting, they may be.”
 
Marion looked and felt hurt.
 
“Geoffrey,” she said reproachfully, “you go too far.”
 
He turned sharply and looked at her. But her face was bent over her book, and she did not see the wistful entreaty in his gaze. He said nothing aloud: but to himself he murmured. “Too far Ah, no! No more half gifts for me, which in the end are worse than none. But she did not mean it, poor child! Even now she understands me less than ever. As if her kindness, her pity, were not far harder to bear than her scorn.”
 
The next day they returned Brentshire.
 
Geoffrey as thankful when it was over; and they had settled down into a sort of commonplace routine, and to a great extent independence of each other in their daily lives. It was grievously hard upon him—this broken-spirited, heartless “coming home.” Harder to bear, I think, than if his joyous anticipations had been cut short by death itself. For had it been a dead bride he was thus bringing home, he would not have felt so far, so utterly separated from her, in all that constitutes the real bitterness of disunion, as he felt himself now from his living, unloving wife—the pale, cold Marion, whose terrible words still rang in his ears. “I did love him even then with all the love of my nature, and, oh, Geoffrey, I love him now.”
 
They both, though they did not allude to it, dreaded intensely the first visit to Miss Veronica. By tacit agreement they did not pay it together, by tacit agreement too, they decided that the secret of their fatal “mistake,” should, if possible, be concealed from the affectionate and unselfish friend, who, to some extent, was responsible for their having committed it. But they reckoned without their host! Veronica’s perceptions, naturally acute, and rendered still more so by her reflective life and in her present case by her loving anxiety, were not so easily to be deceived. Though no word of misgiving escaped her, she yet saw too clearly that Geoffrey’s gaiety was forced—that Marion’s expressions of content and satisfaction wore not genuine—that neither of the two confided in her as of old. She was the last person in the world to take offence or be hurt by their silence. That its motive was to spare her pain she divined by instinct. Still on the whole, I think it was a mistake. Poor Veronica suffered, I believe, more acutely from the mystery surrounding her friends’ evident alienation from each other, than would have been the case had they taken her into their confidence and related to her the whole of the strange and exceptional history. On their side both Geoffrey and Marion paid no light price for the reserve they thought it their duty to maintain. For the first time since childhood Geoffrey felt himself forced to shun the society of the friend to whom he had carried every grief and perplexity, every interest, every joy of his life. And to Marion likewise, it was no small trial to be deprived at this critical time, of the wisest woman friend she had ever known; of the gentle sympathy which during the many dreary months of her Mallingford life, had never failed her.
 
The Manor Farm was one of those rather anomalous habitations, half farm, half gentleman’s house, of which in some of the agricultural counties one sees so many. With no special characteristics of its own, save perhaps that it was somewhat quaint, and decidedly old fashioned: hardly picturesque and not exactly ugly; it was the sort or house that takes its colouring mainly from the lives of its inhabitants. All dwellings are not of this description: there are venerable walls which we cannot but associate with gloom and solemnity, however merry may have been the voices, however ringing the laughter which there we may have heard resound; there are “rose-clad” cottages, which our memory refuses to depict save as smiling in the sunshine, though our sojourn therein may have been of the most sorrowful, and the brightness without seemed but to mock the aching hearts and tear-laden eyes within. But the Manor Farm was by no means an impressive abode. It was comfortable already, and with a little trouble might have been made pretty: but alas, at this time there was no grace or sweetness in the heart of the young girl who came with reluctant steps to be its mistress, whose youth and brightness had been swamped in the deep waters through which she had passed.
 
Unconsciously she was entering on a new phase in her experience. The first effect of her again meeting with Ralph had been to revive in her the consciousness of his irresistibly strong personal influence. For a time she felt very near to him; as if indeed she only lived in the immaterial union with him which she had before imagined was at an end. This did not surprise her. It seemed to her that the bar on her side of a loveless marriage was in point of fact no bar at all: whereas so long as she had believed in his union to another, she had felt herself more utterly divided from him than by death itself. Woman’s indefensible logic, no doubt, but so she felt, and so she expressed it to herself. She was wrong—mistaken to a great extent—she had been drifting away from Ralph. Only his actual presence, his personal influence had recalled her: of which he himself was conscious when he deliberately resolved utterly to sever himself from her life; by no species of intercourse or communication, however apparently innocent or irreproachable, to keep alive in her the consciousness of an influence so fatal to her prospects of peace as the wife of another man.
 
I hardly think this first phase of her suffering, though acute almost to agony, was after all the worst. There is a great compensatory power in strong excitement—the after days of grey depression are to my thinking the most to be dreaded. On these she was now entering; for though she knew it not, the full strength of his immediate influence was already beginning to fade. The entering on a new life, the return to scenes with which he was in no wise associated, had much to do with this. Still, at times the first sharp agony returned to her; but generally when roused by some external agency. The sight of any silly trifling thing associated with him—a book out of which he had read to her, hand-writing resembling his, even little details of dress recalling him—all had power to stab her. Ah, yes! Even to the day of her death she felt that the scent of honeysuckle would be to her unendurable, for that fatal day in his excitement Ralph had plucked a spray off the luxuriant branches overhanging the old arbour, and ruthlessly crushing it in his hands, the strong, almost too sweet perfume had reached her as she sat before him.
 
But these acute sensations gradually grew to be of rarer occurrence; very possibly, had her new life at the Manor Farm been fuller and more congenial, had Geoffrey been more experienced, less humble, and perhaps less unselfish, at this crisis things might have mend. By allowing her to see that, notwithstanding all that had passed he yet loved her as fervently as before, that yet she was to him a very necessity of his being; the husband might gradually have drawn her out of herself and eventually led her at once to cling to and support, the man who truly, as he had once said, found “life without her” a very mockery of the word.
 
But Geoffrey could not do this. He pitied her too much; he hated himself for what he had brought upon her. He went to the extreme of fancying himself actually repulsive to her. He guarded himself from the slightest word or sign of familiarity or affection, imagining that the revulsion these would engender would drive them yet further and more hopelessly apart.
 
“At least,” he thought, “she shall live in peace. All I can now do to please her is to keep out of her way and not disgust her by constantly reminding her of her bondage.” So, though his whole existence was full of her, though her slightest wish was immediately, though unobtrusively, attended to, he yet left her to herself, maintaining an appearance of such indifference to her and adsorption in his independent pursuits, that the girl was almost to be excused for imagining that Geoffrey was “more of a farmer than a man,” incapable of very refined or long-lived affection, and that, after all, so far as he was concerned, what had happened did not so much matter. “He would have been pretty sure to get tired of me before long in any case,” was the reflection with which she threw off all sense of responsibility with respect to him, and stifled for the time the pangs of reproach for the blight which through her had fallen on his sunny life.
 
There was little society of any desirable kind in the neighbourhood of the Manor Farm. The other side of the county was much more sociable, but about Brackley there were few resident county families—the great man of the place a permanent absentee. Besides which the Baldwins’ position had been a somewhat anomalous one, lying rather on the border lands, for the father’s status as banker in Mallingford naturally connected him with the little town, while at the same time it induced a species of acquaintance with the out-lying districts. Geoffrey’s rooted aversion from earliest childhood to anything in the shape of office or desk, or indeed to indoor occupation of any kind, had led to the removal to the Manor Farm some time before the old man’s death. Hunting, shooting, and so on, with the sons of the few squires in the neighbourhood, had brought about the sort of bachelor friendliness between him and these families which was pleasant enough so far as it went, but committed the other side to nothing in respect of the future Mrs. Baldwin. Had he married quite in his own sphere, or slightly beneath him, he would have sunk, as a Benedick, into peaceful obscurity. But when it was known that his bride, though poor, was a daughter of the well-known Hartford Vere, himself a cadet of one of the “best” Brentshire families, mammas began to think they must really call at the Farm, and “show a little attention to her, poor young thing!” To which disinterested amiability on the part of their spouses, papas, being in general more liberal-minded in such matters, made, of course, no objection.
 
So Marion received some visitors, of whom the Copleys of the Wood were the only ones in whom she felt the slightest interest. A moderate amount of invitations to dreary dinner-parties, or still more trying “candle visits,” followed. Geoffrey thought it right to accept them, so, feeling that to her, change of scene was but the replacing of one kind of dulness by another, Marion agreed to his decision, and they went.
 
It was really not lively work, but the dreariness no doubt lay chiefly in herself. For after all there were sensible, kindly people among their entertainers, and though the world “is not all champagne, table-beer is not to be despised.” Not certainly when we are young and fresh, and vigorous; inclined, as youth should be, to the use of rose-coloured spectacles, and to mistaking electro-plate for the genuine article. But young Mrs. Baldwin was censorious because unhappy, difficult to please because dissatisfied with herself. People were kindly inclined to her. They knew she had long been motherless, and of late fatherless as well, her only brother separated from her by half the world, her present position, though the wife of “as fine a fellow as ever breathed,” far lower, socially speaking, than originally she might have aspired to. Altogether a good deal of kindness, really genuine so far as it went, might have been received by her, had she encouraged it. But she did not, “could not,” she told herself. So her new acquaintances felt repelled, naturally enough, and she, sensitive to a fault, felt she was not liked, and drew back still further into her shell of cold reserve. “Pride,” of course, it was called. And “what has she to be proud of?” next came to be asked, when the poor girl’s name was brought on the tapis.
 
After one of these visits she was invariably more depressed than before. She was not hardened to feeling herself disliked, nor callous to the womanly mortification of knowing she had not been seen to advantage. She fancied she was growing ugly; she knew she had grown unamiable, and she was angry with herself, while yet she was bitter at others. Geoffrey above all. When in company, he looked so well and in such good spirits, that at times Marion thought she almost hated him. Truly she was hard to please! Had he allowed himself to appear depressed, or in any way different from his former well-known joyous self, she would in her heart have accused him of indelicacy, of obtruding upon her regardless of her feelings, the pain she had brought upon him, the wreck she had made of his life.
 
And the season too was against her. Autumn again, nature’s dying hour, when all around was but too much in harmony with her desolate life, but too apt to foster the morbid unhealthiness which was fast enveloping her whole existence.
 
The jog-trot dullness of her daily life came to have a strange fascination for her. Its regularity seemed to be beating time to some approaching change, some crisis in her fate. For that some such was at hand, she felt convinced. The present was too unendurable, too essentially unnatural to be long, continuance.
 
So, in the intervals of her irritation at her husband, she lived, to all appearance, contentedly enough, in the death-in-life monotony so fatal to all growth and healt............