Girlhood and Womanhood<br />The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes by Sarah Tytler (snow like ashes series TXT) 📕

She would be in the saddle ten hours during a long day's hunt, as the autumn advanced and the meets assembled, and within an hour of alighting at the door of Ashpound, she would have exchanged muddy bottle-green or Waterloo blue cloth for glistening white satin, and be stepping into the carriage with Gervase to be present at one of their wedding parties.

There was something positively great in the intentness with which the woman pursued her end of the man's salvation; the vigilance with which she ever kept sight of the wounded quarry she was to rescue and to restore. The neighbourhood watched the struggle with interest, admiration, hostile criticism, not very delicate diversion. Only to John Fitzwilliam Baring the struggle was a matter of indifference—rather of repugnance. He would have liked Die to be more feminine and more helpless.

Would Die slacken in her energy and devotion? Would Gervase be able to bear his cure much longer?

Beyond the honeymoon, and with the feeling decidedly growing, Gervase Norgate was gratified by his wife's sacrifice of herself in every respect, and long before he grew accustomed to it and felt easy under it, he was touched by it. He liked her company too, for he was fond of society, and had been lonely since his father and mother died. She was an observant, intelligent woman, high-minded and pure-hearted, and vastly superior to his late satellites. She was eager to suit herself to him, and made herself as [Page 316]free with him as she could be, as far as he knew, with any one. At this season Gervase Norgate was attracted to something warmer, sweeter, more intimate in their intercourse. He enjoyed her quick remarks and shrewd conclusions. He was pleased with, and proud of the new blossoming of her beauty under the combined influences of an open-air life, constant occupation, and a powerful object. He was willing to wait till more tender feelings should awaken between them. It looked as if Gervase Norgate had turned over a new leaf: his cheek lost its dull, engrained red, or its pallor; his lips grew firmer; his eyes clearer and cooler; he raised his head, and threw off something of the slouch of his shoulders and the swing and uncertainty of his walk.

"How well you look in that pretty dress, Diana!" he would say; "I declare you are as brave a figure as any in my Lord's picture-gallery. Let me fetch you a cluster of monthly roses, though I am not fit to hold the candle to you." Or, "Come, Die, let us have a stroll and a smoke in the garden." Or, "Sit still for another game, will you? My hand is just in and my luck beginning. I know you are never tired. Mrs. Gervase, you are a trump—the ace of trumps."

Ignorant spectators might have set them down for a good, happy, well-met young couple, with regard to whom it would be simply and equally appropriate to wish "God bless them."

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III.—HAZARD.

Diana did not slacken in her devotion, but there came a [Page 317]limit to the endurance of Gervase. The gleam of success was but the gleam before the overcast.

First, Gervase was conscious of being nettled by the distance which existed between him and Diana. And certainly, to be sensible of his arm being arrested by an unseen obstacle when he thought to put it round his own wife's waist, to collapse in the mere idea of asking her to give him a kiss, never to have felt so fully the dissipated, degraded fool he had been, as he felt then, was not a pleasant sensation. It may sound immoral, but it seemed as if, had Gervase been more depraved, there would have been more hope for him, since he would have appreciated the gulf between him and his guardian less.

Then the old craving returned like a death thirst. The old, wild, worthless, low companions, were cognisant, as if by instinct, of a relapse. Eager to hail its signs, and profit by them, they waylaid him at the 'Spreading Ash,' with "Hey, don't you dare to swallow a single glass in your own village, to give custom to your villager, man?" They waylaid and gathered round him in the market-place of Market Hesketh, with "Well met, Mr. Gervase Norgate. Lord! are you alive still? for we had doubted it. Don't speak to him to detain him, you fellows; don't you see Mrs. Gervase has her eye upon him, and is craning her neck to discover what is keeping him? Off with you, sir, since you are a husband, a reformed rake, and a church-goer. If you had gone and joined the Methodists, you might have been a preacher yourself by this time. Oh! we don't want to spoil sport and balk your good intentions; but, by George, Gervase, we never thought you would [Page 318]have been the man to be tied so tight to a woman's apron-string. You must spare us one more carouse for old friendship's sake, my boy, just to try what it is like again, and hear all the news. Ah! your teeth are watering; come along; Madam is not to swallow you up entirely."

They got him away from his wife, and made him leave her sitting an hour in the carriage, with a pair of young horses pawing and rearing and endangering her very life in the yard of the 'Crown.' They made him send her home without him, and kept him till they had nothing more to say than "Heave the poor devil into a gig, and drive him up to his own door and put him down there. It is the best you can do for him,—the fool was always so easily upset; and it will do for her at the same time—give her something to hold her cursed high white head in the air and turn up her nose for; serve her impudence right for taking it upon her to act as private policeman to Jarvie." They sent him home to her, a beast who had been with wild beasts. They did it for the most part heedlessly, in jollity and jeering; but they did it not the less effectually. The wild beast of sensuality had him again; not one devil, but seven, had entered into him; and reigning king over the others, an insensate devil of cruel jealousy of his wife, of his gaoler, resenting her efforts, defying her pains.

Diana did not take Gervase Norgate's backsliding to her very heart, was not wounded to death by it as if she had loved him. But she did not give him up. She was a tenacious woman, and Gervase Norgate's salvation was her one chance of moral redemption from the base barter [Page 319]of her marriage. She did not reproach him: she was too proud a woman, too cold to him, to goad and sting him by reproaches. They might have served her end better than the terrible aggravation of her silence. She was just too, and she did not accuse him unduly. She said to herself, "He is a poor, misguided fellow, a brute where drink is concerned: when I married him, that was as clear as day. I have no right to complain, though he resume his bad courses." Still she left no stone unturned; she was prepared, as before, to ride and walk and play with him at all hours; she ignored his frequent absences and the condition in which he came back, as far as possible. She abetted old Miles in clearing away, silently and swiftly, the miserable evidences of mischief. She smuggled out of sight, and huddled into oblivion, battered hats, broken pipes and sticks, stopperless flasks, cracked, smoky lanterns—concealing them with a decent, decorous, sacred duplicity even from Aunt Tabby, who trotted across the country on her father's old trotting mare, took her observations, and departed, shaking her head and moralizing on the text, "Cast not your pearls before swine."

Diana sat at her forlorn post in the billiard-room, or by the cribbage-board, or at the piano which Gervase had got for her. She had some small skill to play and sing to him, and was indefatigable in learning the simple tunes and songs he liked. And night after night she was left alone, unapproached, uncalled for; or else Gervase stumbled in from the dining-room or from an adjournment to the village tavern, where he was the acknowledged king and emperor, bemussed, befumed, giddy, hilarious, piteously [Page 320]maudlin, or deliriously furious. She stooped to smile and answer his random ravings and to comply with his demands. If she escaped actual outrage and injury in his house and hers, it was not because she did not provoke him, for there was nothing in his wife which Gervase hated so heartily, resented so keenly, as her refraining from contradicting him. But below the grossness and sin of the poor lout and caitiff there was a fund of sullen, latent manliness and kindness, which held him back from insulting the defenceless woman—for all her pride and purity—who was his wife, just as it had held him back from dallying with and caressing her as his mistress.

The neighbourhood which had furnished both a dress-circle and a pit to witness Diana's spectacle, was not astonished at the fate of the adventure. Its success would have been little short of a miracle, and these were not the days of faith in miracles; so the neighbourhood did not pity Mrs. Gervase Norgate, for she had been foolhardy at the best, and her fortune or misfortune had only been what ought to have been expected. For that matter Mrs. Gervase Norgate would not have thanked the world for its pity, though it had been lavishly vouchsafed.

There was one point on which Diana did not hesitate to contradict Gervase, and persisted in contradicting him. She would not suffer him, if she could help it, to frequent Newton-le-Moor, or to consort with Mr. Baring. For to go to Newton-le-Moor was to go among the Philistines; and lawless as Gervase was in his own person, it should never be with his wife's consent that he should go and be plundered by her own flesh and blood—his errors rendering him but a safer and a surer prey.

[Page 321]Gervase was standing restless and indignant by the low bow-window of his wife's drawing-room, opening on the flower-garden, which had been laid out in their honeymoon, and in which she continued to take pleasure, though the wealth of glowing autumn geraniums and verbenas had given place to the few frosted winter chrysanthemums. It was but the middle of the day, and he had risen and had his cup of tea laced with brandy and crowned with brandy, so that the jaded man was comparatively fresh, but irritable to the last nerve, each jarring nerve twanging like harpstrings, sending electric thrills of vexation and rage over his whole body at the cross of every straw.

Diana, who had been up and busy for hours, was sitting at her desk; her brow, whatever cares lurked behind it, unruffled and white; a seemly, reasonable, refined woman, aggrieved every day she lived, but scorning to betray a knowledge of the grievance.

"Don't go to Newton, above all by yourself, Gervase," the wife was entreating, gravely and earnestly. "I am afraid my father may take the opportunity of trying to get money from you. He has entered horses for the Thorpe stakes: he will seek to make you enter them, and you told me yourself May and Highflyer were not fit to run this year. Or he will seek to lead you into some other transaction in horse-flesh, or have you into the house to play billiards and remain to dinner and cards all night, and there is always high play at Newton. My father is a needy man, and needy men are tempted to be unscrupulous; at least his code implies few scruples, where the letter of the laws of honour is complied with."

[Page 322]"It comes ill off your hand to say so," observed Gervase harshly. Undoubtedly he spoke no more than the truth, and such a life as Gervase Norgate's was not a school for magnanimity.

Die winced a little; and she was a woman whose fair cheek so rarely blushed, that her blushing was like another woman's crying. Die never cried; Gervase Norgate had never wrung a tear from her, or seen her shed a tear.

"Well, it was hard for me to say it," she admitted, with an accent of reproach in her equable tones; "but there the wrong and the shame are, and I owe it to myself and to you to warn you."

"I wonder how much I owe your being here to Newton-le-Moor being little better than a not very reputable gambling-house," exclaimed Gervase rudely.

She looked