CHAPTER XI.

Se a ciascuno l’interno affanno Si leggesse in fronte scritto, Quanti mai che invidia fanno Ci farebbero pietà.

METASTASIO.

Lucy could scarcely command herself so as to answer her husband, without betraying a degree of emotion which might have been prejudicial to him in his present state of weakness. He thanked her for her attention to him; he told her he had often been aware of her presence, though he had not had the power to show it. She bathed his hand with tears of joy and gratitude; and at that moment, when he was endeared to her by long watching and by deep anxiety, she felt as if Milly’s love for John could not have exceeded her’s for her husband, her guide, her protector, the father of her child.

The doctor came, and pronounced the patient convalescent; but prescribed the most perfect quiet, and the avoidance of every thing which might in any way arouse his feelings. Lucy told him of the letter she had received from the agent, and asked his opinion and advice upon the subject.

He declared it out of the question that Lord Montreville should be allowed to attend to matters of business for weeks, nay, perhaps months.

Under these circumstances, Lucy resumed her intention of opening Lord Montreville’s letters, and of acting according to the best of her judgment. Several were most uninteresting and unimportant communications, which required neither comment nor answer; some were letters of correspondence, which she laid aside as soon as she found they did not contain the papers of which she was in search. At length she came to one written in a delicate female hand, beginning, “Dearest Montreville,” and signed “Your Alicia Mowbray.”

“Alicia Mowbray!” she thought; “I never heard of her,” and her eye glanced upon words which filled her with astonishment and horror: “cruel absence,” and “consuming grief,” “counting the moments,” and “happy meeting,” and “sad parting,” and “distress for money,” and “necessary expenses,” winding up with an urgent request for a fresh supply of a hundred pounds.

Could this be intended for Lord Montreville! She looked again at the direction at the beginning of the letter. There could be no mistake: it was most assuredly addressed to her husband,—to the husband whom in health she had so dutifully studied to please,—whom in sickness she had nursed with such unwearied attention,—from whom, though exposed to all the fascinations and allurements of a London life, she had never for one moment allowed her thoughts to wander! That he, whom she had always looked upon as the appointed guardian of her honour and her morals, should have been habitually, deliberately breaking his nuptial vow, preferring to her pure and true affection the hired caresses of a mistress,—and, above all, exposing her to the eyes of the world as the neglected wife of an old profligate, old enough to be her father! The letter fell from her hand; her brain went round with the multitudinous thoughts that rushed almost simultaneously through it; but rage, indignation, and disgust superseded, for some moments, all more tender emotions.

Then came pity for herself, who had thus wasted the bloom of her early feelings, and she wept bitter tears over her blighted youth, her worthless beauty; for at this moment she suddenly became aware that she was one of the most lovely and most admired of women,—admired by all around her, except her husband,—lovely in all eyes but his!

Lucy had married almost from the school-room. Lord Montreville had drawn a veil over his own former career; he had studiously avoided initiating her into the frailties of fashionable life; he had wished to preserve the purity he found; so that she still retained that freshness of mind which refuses itself to the conviction of the existence of vice, but which, when once unwillingly convinced, sees it in all its natural deformity.

From long acquaintance with the world, the imagination becomes familiarised with what at first inspired horror; or from experience of the weakness of human nature, the temptations to which it is exposed, and the gradations by which one error often leads on to guilt, the charitable learn to pity the sinner, while they condemn the sin. But Lucy’s perceptions of right and wrong were not blunted by habitual intercourse with the faulty, nor softened by the consideration of their temptations or their repentance. She saw but the broad distinction between virtue and vice, and she looked on the latter with the indignant horror of youth. Charity is not the characteristic virtue of the young.

While she was absorbed in such new and painful reflections, there came a tap at the door, and her maid informed her that Lord Montreville was awake, and was incessantly asking for her. She started at the interruption, and, quickly dismissing the maid, stood for a few moments paralysed.

She had looked with loathing at the letter, till her tears had all retreated to their cells. She roused herself, and hastily pushing the other papers into an escrutoire, she stopped to pick up the fatal epistle.

At that moment the servant entered. She instinctively crammed it into her bosom, but as instantly pulled it forth again, as if its very touch was contamination.

Lord Montreville was so impatient for her return, that a second messenger had been despatched to hasten her. She rushed to her own apartment, where she placed the letter under lock and key, and then was obliged, with what composure she could muster, to repair to the bedside of her husband.

He greeted her with a pleased smile,—he extended his pale and emaciated hand to take her’s. “Dearest Lucy,” he said, “it seems an age since you left me; it does me good to know my kindest and best nurse is near me. I cannot bear to feel that what I love best is absent from me.”

His hand lay passively in hers; her soul recoiled from him. She could not return the pressure of his hand, she could not meet his eyes. “Falsehood upon his lips,” she thought, “when scarcely snatched from the jaws of death, when still trembling on the verge of the grave.”

She made an effort to speak, and, assuring him the doctor forbade all excitement or emotion, she begged him to compose himself to sleep.

“You will not leave me, then?”

She promised she would not, and she seated herself by the bedside. All was quiet; he gradually dozed off into a light slumber; and there she sat bewildered, confused, fancying all that had occurred must be a dream! Could he speak so kindly, so tenderly, and yet be false? Could he address her as the being he loved best, while he preferred to her this Alicia? Could he, with death staring him in the face, thus add a deliberate lie to all his other sins? Yet there existed the letter—the letter which expressed implicit reliance on his affections!

She gazed on him as he slept, and looked back to the moment when he had first recognised her, and thought, was it possible one little hour could have worked such a wondrous revolution in her mind?

The truth was, that Alicia had been a mistress of former days, on whom he had settled a handsome annuity at the very time when his absence from Lyneton had excited such surprise in the inhabitants of Rose Hill Lodge, and from whom he had then parted, as he intended for ever, but who had once more succeeded in getting him within her toils.

For some time after his marriage he had neither heard nor seen any thing of her; but when he came to London in the spring, he received from her a letter, stating that she had been robbed of the money he allowed her—that she was deeply in debt, and was threatened with an execution in her house, and with the prospect of being sent to prison. He could not do otherwise than ascertain the truth of this history, and interfere to save her from such wretchedness. She was still very handsome, in deep grief, and in great agitation at again seeing him. He relieved her immediate wants, and occasionally visited her; for which visits she expressed the greatest gratitude, and from which she contrived to extract considerable additions to her allowance. He did not thoroughly believe in her passionate devotion to him, but he could not be cruel to a person who had acquired the sort of hold over him which is obtained by long habit.

He did not consider that this renewal of his former acquaintance at all interfered with his making an excellent husband, for he treated his wife with all possible respect and attention; she had every thing that an unlimited command of money could procure her, and he imagined that the whole guilt of infidelity consisted in its coming to the knowledge, and consequently hurting the feelings, of the wife.

If he had been obliged to make his election between them, he would not have hesitated for a moment; but there was nothing, to his mind, incompatible in the two connexions.

In fact, his sentiments for Lucy had of late rather increased than diminished in warmth; for he could not but respect the singleness of heart with which she passed through the ordeal of a London season, so dangerous to a young and lovely married woman of high rank, and especially to one who was the fashion. As the mother of his son and heir, she had an additional claim on his affections that no other woman had ever possessed; and the attention with which she had nursed him had now awakened in his bosom stronger emotions of tenderness than he had thought himself capable of feeling.

The expressions which fell from his lips came straight from his heart, although, at that moment, they appeared to Lucy to be an insulting refinement of deceit.

During the hour which she passed watching his slumbers, she seemed to live a long life of bitter and confused thoughts, and she was unutterably relieved when the entrance of the physician enabled her to make her escape, and to lock herself into her room, there to meditate on the past, the present, and the future.

On looking back she remembered a thousand circumstances which to her unsuspicious mind had seemed of no import at the time, but which now proved to her that this connexion was one of some standing. She remembered having heard persons allude to debates in the House of Lords, at which he had been obliged to confess he had not been present, although he had been absent from her all the evening. She remembered how little she had seen of him during her confinement; she looked at the fatal letter, and felt certain she had often seen notes in the same hand-writing, and she became more and more indignant to think she had long been a neglected, an injured, and a duped wife. She recollected the rigid notions of female propriety which he professed; she thought the care he had taken of her morals, the censorship which he exercised over the books she read, an insulting mockery. She could almost smile in bitterness at his having forbidden her reading Delphine, and made her return Adam Blair to the library,—and at the remark he made to some one who wondered she had never yet read _La Nouvelle Heloise_—that he was surprised at any woman who had read the first three lines of the introduction owning she had read any further.

“And I was grateful to him,” she thought, “for thus watching over me. I fancied it argued affection for me, and a love of virtue in himself, while he was thus treating me like a fool, and laughing at his childish dupe! No wonder he wished to preserve the ignorance which was so convenient to him. This taste for purity in which I so rejoiced, was but the veil to conceal his own vice. And I am bound for life to this man. I must drag on a weary existence, forced, Heaven knows how unwillingly, to break my marriage vow; for how can I love, how can I honour, what I despise and condemn?”

Floods of tears came to the relief of her bursting heart and bursting head. She wept, till she was once more calm, and could look with some degree of composure upon the actual position in which she was placed.

In the first instance she resolved, although she could never again find pleasure in the performance of her duty, that she would rigidly adhere to it, that she would command all outward expression of her emotions, and that she would continue to nurse Lord Montreville, if possible, with the same devotion as before. She made up her mind that when she had succeeded in finding the papers for which the lawyer had written, she would lock up all the letters together, and when Lord Montreville was well enough to attend to his own affairs again, she would explain the circumstances under which she had been obliged to search for these papers, and give him the key of the escrutoire without any farther remark.

When she had despatched the papers, and safely deposited the letters according to her intention, she felt somewhat relieved, and was enabled to return once more to the sick room, and take her station there as usual.

Fortunately he spoke but little, and she was spared any fresh ebullitions of tenderness on his part. In the evening she repaired to the nursery, where Milly was rapturous in her congratulations upon his lordship’s wonderful improvement.

“Well, my lady, your good nursing has its reward at last! La! when first he called you by your name, and spoke so kind and tender like, Mrs. Gauzelee told me she never saw such a moving sight. And to see you, my lady, take his hand and kiss it, and my lord calling you ‘his own Lucy.’ Well! it does my old heart good to think you have known such a blessed moment; for I remember, as I pushed open the bed-room door of our log-hut, when my poor John said, ‘Why, Milly, t’an’t you,’ I thought the joy of hearing my husband’s voice speak my name again would have quite got the better of me.”

Few people like to be told they felt this or that, on such or such an occasion; still more disagreeable is it when, although they cannot disclaim the emotions attributed to them, they are conscious of experiencing those the most diametrically opposite.

Lucy held her child in her arms. She contrived to bury her face in its little bosom, and to remain bending over it, till her voice and her countenance were sufficiently under control to venture an answer: “The doctor seems to think that, with perfect quiet, Lord Montreville may soon be quite himself again.”

Milly was surprised at the cool and measured reply. Lucy’s devotion had been such, that she could not doubt the love she bore to her husband. Her lady looked ill. She thought, perhaps, she had harassed herself too much, and she entreated her to go to bed early. But no! she was resolved to watch as before.

“My actions,” she said to herself, “shall be under command, though my feelings may not be so. I will do the same I did before,” and she took her station in his darkened room, where, by the glimmer of one shaded candle, she usually passed a great part of the night in reading.

That night her eyes in vain glanced over the words, they conveyed no corresponding ideas to her mind. She imagined long conversations and explanations; she fancied reproaches, excuses, she pictured penitence and sorrow. She convinced herself that, when Lord Montreville examined his letters, and found this one opened, he would be overwhelmed with shame and self-reproach, and that he would throw himself on her mercy. She considered how it would then be her duty to act; she consulted her own heart whether she should then be able to restore him to the same place in her affections. She tried to lower her standard of manly excellence; she tried to frame to herself a less exalted scale of morals. Alas! is not this but too likely an error to fall into, as the frailties and follies of human nature open upon the young and gentle, to whom it is painful to condemn and despise their fellow-creatures?

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

VOLUME THE SECOND.