Chapter XXXVIII

At Blessington no one goes to church twice. It is the bounden duty of every Christian man, woman, and child to go to church in the morning; it is the duty of only the clergyman, the school-children, and the organist to go to church in the afternoon. The old people sleep side by side in the blaze of the saloon-fire; being, both of them, happily deaf, they are undisturbed by each other's grunts and snores.

Since the beginning of St. John's visit, the north drawing-room has been made over to him and his betrothed to be affectionate in, so that they may enjoy, uninterrupted, those fits of affection to which all engaged people are supposed, and sometimes unjustly supposed, to be liable. Whether they have reached the requisite pitch of warmth on the afternoon I speak of is, to say the least, doubtful; but, all the same, in the north drawing-room they are. Constance leans back in an armchair, rather listless. She is fond of work, and it is not right to work on Sunday: her feet repose on a foot-stool before her--her eyes are fixed upon them: she is thinking profoundly whether steel buckles a size smaller than the ones she is at present wearing would not be more becoming to the feet. St. John sits by the table; his left hand supports his head; his right scribbles idly, on a bit of paper, horses taking impossible fences, prize pigs, ballet-girls, little skeleton men squaring up at one another. He, too, is thinking--but not of shoe-buckles. He has got something to say to Miss Blessington--something unpleasant, unpolite; and he cannot, for the life of him, imagine how to begin to say it. Chance favours him. Miss Blessington, happening to look up, catches her lover's eyes fixed, with an expression she had never before seen in them--not on herself, as she, for the first second imagines, but (as a second glance informs her) on some object outside the window. Her gaze follows his, and lights upon "nobody very particular--only poor Miss Craven!" who, with head rather bent, is trudging by towards the garden. "How ill that girl looks!" she says, pettishly. "I really believe those sort of people take a pleasure in looking as sickly and woebegone as possible, in order to put one out of spirits,"

The opening he has been looking for has come. "Constance," ho says, bending his head, and speaking in a low voice, "what fatuity induced you not to send me word when you found that that girl was here?"

"You forbad me ever to mention her name to you," she answers, coldly; "and, to tell you the truth, I thought it was a good thing that you should see her. If you had not met again, you might have carried a sentimental recollection of her throughout life, which you can hardly do now that you have seen with your own eyes how completely she has lost her beauty."

St. John lifts his head, and stares at her in blank astonishment. "Lost its beauty!"--that

"Face that one would see,
And then fall blind, and die, with sight of it,
Held fast between the eyelids."

"Lost her beauty!" he repeats, in a sort of stupefaction.

"Well," she replies, languidly, "why do you repeat my words? You know I never admired her much. I never can admire those black women, but that is a matter of taste, of course. It is not matter of taste, however--it is matter of fact, that whatever good looks she once had are gone--_gone_."

Gerard smiles contemptuously. "I do believe that you women lose the sight of your eyes when you look at one another."

"What do you mean?" she asks, with some animation. "Is it possible that you don't agree with me as to her being quite _passée?_"

"I think her, as I always thought her," he answers, steadily, "the loveliest woman I ever beheld; a little additional thinness or paleness does not affect her much. Hers is not mere skin beauty: as you say, tastes differ, and I like _those black women_."

"That is a civil speech to make to me!" she answers, reddening--an insult to her appearance or her clothes being the one weapon that has power to pierce the scales of her armour of proof.

St. John smiles again. "When we engaged to marry one another, did we also engage to think each other the handsomest specimens of the human animal Providence ever framed?"

"It is, at least, not usual for a man to express an open preference for another woman to the girl to whom he is engaged."

"It is no question of _preference_," he answers, quietly. "I had no thought of drawing any comparison between you and Miss Craven at the moment; I was not thinking of you."

"You said she was _the_ loveliest girl you had ever seen!" objects Constance, pouting.

"So I did--I do think her so," he rejoins, calmly. "If there is some defect in my eyes, hindering me from seeing things as they are, it is my misfortune, not my fault. Cannot you be content," he asks, banteringly, "with being the _next loveliest?_"

She turns away her head, too indignant to answer.

He changes his tone. "Constance," he says, gravely, "when I proposed to you, did not I tell you, honestly, what I could give you and what I could not? Love (odd as it may sound between engaged people), and the blind admiration that accompanies love, I had not got to offer you; this is true, is not it?"

"Perfectly true," she answers, resentfully; "and as I am not, nor ever was, one of those inflammable young ladies, who think that _burning_, and _consuming_, and _melting_ are essential to married happiness, I did not much regret its absence. I have always been brought up to think," she continues, having recourse to the high moral tone which is her last sure refuge, "that respect and esteem are the best basis for two people to go upon, and I think so still."

"But do you and I respect and esteem one another?" he asks, half-cynically, half-mournfully. "Is it possible that I can respect you, who, though you did not care, or affect to care, two straws about me personally--though you knew, at the time I asked you to marry me, that I was madly in love with another woman--were yet willing to give yourself to me, soul and body--to be bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, because I was a good _parti_, as the vile phrase goes? And as for me," he ends, in bitter self-contempt, "what is there in all my idle wasted life, from beginning to end, that any one can respect or esteem?"

"Has this struck you now for the first time?" she asks, drily. "I am not aware of any change in our relative circumstances since our marriage was arranged; I suppose our feelings towards each other are much what they were then, when you were troubled with none of these scruples."

"And what _were_ our feelings then?" he asks, bitterly; "what brought us together? Was not it that our properties dovetailed conveniently into one another, as Sir Thomas says--that it was advisable for both of us to marry some one--that we were of suitable age, and had no positive distaste for one another: was not this so?"

"I suppose so," she answers, sulkily.

"And yet," he continues, sternly, "although I had laid bare to you all my wretched story--although you were well aware that I was utterly without the safeguard of any love to yourself--you yet let me fall into this temptation--the cruelest I could have been exposed to--without a word of warning. Was this fair? Was this right?"

"Since you put me on my defence," she answers, with anger, "I must repeat to you what I said before, that it seemed to me the best method of curing you of your ill-placed fancy for Esther Craven--a fancy which she repaid with such disgraceful deceit and duplicity--was to let you see for yourself what a wreck she had become!"

"You meant well, perhaps," he rejoins, with a sigh that is more than half a groan; "but it was terribly mistaken--terribly ill-judged; it has done us both an irreparable injury."

"I am not aware that it has done me any injury whatever," she answers, coldly, mistaking his meaning

"I was not alluding to you," he replies, curtly.

She makes no rejoinder, and he, rising, begins to walk up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. He has made his meaning clear enough, surely, and yet she does not appear to see it. As she continues resolutely silent, he stops opposite to her, and speaks earnestly, and yet with some embarrassment, as one who knows that what he says will be unpleasing to his listener.

"Constance, I must tell you the truth, though I suppose it is hardly of the complexion of the pretty flattering truths or untruths that you have been used to all your life. But, at least, it is better that you should hear it now, than that we should tell it one another a year hence, with mutual, useless recriminations; there is no use in disguising the fact that you and I do not feel towards each other as husband and wife should feel."

"Pshaw!" she says, pettishly, turning her head aside; "we feel much the same as other people do, I daresay."

"If," he continues, very gravely, "marriage were a temporary connection, that lasted a year--five years say--or that could be dissolved at pleasure, there might be no great harm in entering upon it with the sort of negative liking, the absence of repugnance for one another, which is all that we can boast; but since it is a bargain for all time, and that there is no getting out of it except by the gate of death or disgrace, I think we ought both to reflect on it more seriously than we have yet done before undertaking it."

"It is rather late in the day to say all this," retorts she, indignantly. "You have known me all my life; you must have been well aware that I never could enter into those highflown, romantic notions, which I have heard you yourself ridicule a hundred times. These objections should have occurred to you before you proposed to me, and not now, when we have been engaged two months, and when our marriage has been discussed as a settled thing by all our acquaintance."

"You are right," he answers, quietly. "They should have occurred to me before; but, in justice to myself, I must say that they would never have occurred to me: I should have remained in the same state of supine indifference to everything in which I came here, had not you yourself thrown me in the way of Esther Craven."

She sits upright in her chair; her pale, handsome face paler, harder than usual, in her great anger. "The drift of this long tirade, when translated into plain English, is, I suppose, that you wish to marry Esther Craven instead of me?"

He is silent.

"Is it so?" she repeats, her voice raised several notes above its wonted low key.

"When I am engaged to one woman," he answers, slowly, reluctantly, yet steadily, "I hope I am not dishonourable enough willingly to harbour the thought of marriage with any other."

The Gerard diamonds flash before her mind's eye: they are so big, and numerous--necklace, aigrette, stomacher. The idea of seeing them gleam restless in Esther's hair, on Esther's fair neck, is insupportable to her. She will not release him, ardently as he wishes it; she will hold him by a strong chain that will not snap--his honour.

"I am glad to hear it," she answers, coldly. "In common fairness to me, you could hardly have entertained such an idea. It is a great disadvantage to a girl to be engaged, to have her engagement as widely known as mine has been, and then to have it broken off; people never think the same of her again."

He turns to the window, to hide his bitter disappointment. "Very well," he answers, calmly; "things will remain as they are, I suppose, then? I only thought it right to warn you how small a chance of happiness there is in a marriage so loveless as ours: for the rest you must blame yourself."