Part 69 (2/2)

”Oh, please let me go up-stairs with you and arrange my hat, mamma,”

said Gwendolen, suddenly putting up her hand to her hair and perhaps creating a desired disarrangement. Her heart was swelling, and she was ready to cry. Her mother _must_ have been worse off, if it had not been for Grandcourt. ”I suppose I shall never see all this again,” said Gwendolen, looking round her, as they entered the black and yellow bedroom, and then throwing herself into a chair in front of the gla.s.s with a little groan as of bodily fatigue. In the resolve not to cry she had become very pale.

”You are not well, dear?” said Mrs. Davilow.

”No; that chocolate has made me sick,” said Gwendolen, putting up her hand to be taken.

”I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling,” said Mrs. Davilow, rather timidly, as she pressed the hand to her bosom.

Something had made her sure today that her child loved her--needed her as much as ever.

”Oh, yes,” said Gwendolen, leaning her head against her mother, though speaking as lightly as she could. ”But you know I never am ill. I am as strong as possible; and you must not take to fretting about me, but make yourself as happy as you can with the girls. They are better children to you than I have been, you know.” She turned up her face with a smile.

”You have always been good, my darling. I remember nothing else.”

”Why, what did I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr.

Grandcourt?” said Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve to be playful, and keep no more on the perilous edge of agitation. ”And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself.” She tossed up her chin, and reached her hat.

”G.o.d forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your happiness by itself is half mine.”

”Very well,” said Gwendolen, arranging her hat fastidiously, ”then you will please to consider that you are half happy, which is more than I am used to seeing you.” With the last words she again turned with her old playful smile to her mother. ”Now I am ready; but oh, mamma, Mr.

Grandcourt gives me a quant.i.ty of money, and expects me to spend it, and I can't spend it; and you know I can't bear charity children and all that; and here are thirty pounds. I wish the girls would spend it for me on little things for themselves when you go to the new house.

Tell them so.” Gwendolen put the notes into her mother's hands and looked away hastily, moving toward the door.

”G.o.d bless you, dear,” said Mrs. Davilow. ”It will please them so that you should have thought of them in particular.”

”Oh, they are troublesome things; but they don't trouble me now,” said Gwendolen, turning and nodding playfully. She hardly understood her own feeling in this act toward her sisters, but at any rate she did not wish it to be taken as anything serious. She was glad to have got out of the bedroom without showing more signs of emotion, and she went through the rest of her visit and all the good-byes with a quiet propriety that made her say to herself sarcastically as she rode away, ”I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt.”

She believed that her husband had gone to Gadsmere that day--had inferred this, as she had long ago inferred who were the inmates of what he had described as ”a dog-hutch of a place in a black country;”

and the strange conflict of feeling within her had had the characteristic effect of sending her to Offendene with a tightened resolve--a form of excitement which was native to her.

She wondered at her own contradictions. Why should she feel it bitter to her that Grandcourt showed concern for the beings on whose account she herself was undergoing remorse? Had she not before her marriage inwardly determined to speak and act on their behalf?--and since he had lately implied that he wanted to be in town because he was making arrangements about his will, she ought to have been glad of any sign that he kept a conscience awake toward those at Gadsmere; and yet, now that she was a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to Gadsmere was like red heat near a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity in her own eyes--this humiliation of being doomed to a terrified silence lest her husband should discover with what sort of consciousness she had married him; and as she had said to Deronda, she ”must go on.”

After the intense moments of secret hatred toward this husband who from the very first had cowed her, there always came back the spiritual pressure which made submission inevitable. There was no effort at freedoms that would not bring fresh and worse humiliation. Gwendolen could dare nothing except an impulsive action--least of all could she dare premeditatedly a vague future in which the only certain condition was indignity. In spite of remorse, it still seemed the worst result of her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself; and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs.

Glasher was aware of the fact which caused it. For Gwendolen had never referred the interview at the Whispering Stones to Lush's agency; her disposition to vague terror investing with shadowy omnipresence any threat of fatal power over her, and so hindering her from imagining plans and channels by which news had been conveyed to the woman who had the poisoning skill of a sorceress. To Gwendolen's mind the secret lay with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in the horrible letter which implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband, as much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt.

Something else, too, she thought of as more of a secret from her husband than it really was--namely that suppressed struggle of desperate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grandcourt could not indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers, to him nonexistent. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.

CHAPTER XLV.

Behold my lady's carriage stop the way.

With powdered lacquey and with charming bay; She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair.

Her arduous function solely ”to be there.”

Like Sirius rising o'er the silent sea.

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