Christian's Mistake Part 19

"I fear so, and not a creditable one. But I am certain of one thing. She does not love him--she only wants to marry him."

"A distinction with a difference," said Dr. Grey, smiling. "And you don't agree with her, my dear?"

"I should think not!"

Again Dr. Grey smiled. "How fiercely she speaks! What a tiger this little woman of mine could be if she chose. And so she absolutely believes in the old superst.i.tion that love is an essential element of matrimony."

"You are laughing at me."

"No, my darling, G.o.d forbid. I am only--happy."

"Are you really, really happy? Do you think I can make you so--I, with all my unworthiness?"

"I am sure of it."

She looked up in his face from out of his close arms, and they talked no more.

Chapter 10.

_"Get thee behind me, Satan!

I know no other word: There is a battle that must be fought, And fought but with the sword--

_"The clear, sharp, stainless, glittering sword Of purity divine: I'll hew my way through a host of fiends, If that strong sword be mine."_

"I wish Mrs. Grey, you would learn to hold yourself a little more upright, and look a little more like the master's wife--a lady in as good a position as any in Avonsbridge--and a little less like a Resignation or a Patience on a monument."

"I am sure I beg your pardon," said Christian, laughing "I have not the slightest feeling either of resignation or patience. I am afraid I was thinking over something much more worldly--that plan about Miss Bennett's new situation of which I have just been telling you"--told as briefly as she could, for it was not very safe to trust Miss Gascoigne with any thing. "Also of the people we met last night at the vice chancellor's."

"And that reminds me--why don't you go and change your dress? I hate a morning-gown, as I wish you particularly to look as respectable as you can. We are sure to have callers to-day."

"Are we? Why?"

"To inquire for our health after last night's entertainment. It is a customary attention; but, of course, you can not be expected to be acquainted with these sort of things. Besides, one gentleman especially asked my permission to call today--a man of position and wealth, whose acquaintance--"

"Oh, please tell me about him after I come back," said Christian, hopelessly, "and I will go and dress at once."

"Take that boy with you. He never was allowed to be in the drawing- room. Get up, Arthur," in the sharp tone in which the most trivial commands were always conveyed to the children, which, no doubt, Miss Gascoigne thought--as many well-meaning parents and guardians do think--is the best and safest a.s.sertion of authority. But it had made of Let.i.tia a cringing slave, and of Arthur a confirmed rebel, as he now showed himself to be.

"I won't go, Aunt Henrietta! I like this sofa. I'll not stir an inch!"

"I command you! Obey me, sir!"

Arthur pulled an insolent face, at which his aunt rose up and boxed his ears.

This sort of scene had been familiar enough to Christian in the early days of her marriage. It always made her unhappy, but she attempted no resistance. Either she felt no right or she had no courage. Now, things were different.

She caught Miss Gascoigne's uplifted hand, and Arthur's, already raised to return the blow.

"Stop! you must not touch that child. And, Arthur, how can you be so naughty! Beg your aunt's pardon, immediately!"

But Arthur began to sob and cough--that ominous cough which was their dread and pain still. It did not touch the heart of Aunt Henrietta.

"We shall see who is mistress here. I will at once send for Dr. Grey.

Maria, ring the bell."

Poor Aunt Maria, the most subservient of women, was about to do it, when fate interfered in the shape of Barker and a visiting card, which changed the whole current of Miss Gascoigne's intentions.

"Sir Edwin Uniacke! the very gentleman I was speaking of. I shall be delighted to see him. Show him up immediately."

Which was needless, for he had followed Barker to the door. There he stood, a graceful, well-appointed, fas.h.i.+onable young man, with not a hair awry in his black curls, not a shadow on his handsome face, perfectly satisfied with himself and his fortunes--a little flushed, perhaps, it might be, with what he would call the "pluckiness" of coming thus to "beard the lion in his den," to visit the master of his late college. All men have some good in them, and the good in this man was, that, if a scapegrace, he was not a weak villain, not a coward.

"How kind of you! I am delighted to find a young gentleman so punctual in his engagements with an old woman," said Miss Gascoigne, with mingled dignity and _empress.e.m.e.nt._ "Sir Edwin Uniacke, my sister, Miss Grey; Mrs. Grey, my sister-in-law."

Certainly Aunt Henrietta's "manners" were superb.

Arthur lay crying and coughing still, but his luckless condition before visitors was covered over by these beautiful manners, and by the flow of small-talk which at once began, and in which it was difficult to say who carried off the position best, the young man or the elderly woman.

Both deserved equal credit from that "world" to which they both belonged.

Presently a diversion was created by Christian's rising to carry Arthur away.

"You need not go," said Miss Gascoigne. "Ring for Phillis. The child has been ill, Sir Edwin, and Mrs. Grey has made herself a perfect slave to him."

"How very--ahem!--charming!" said Sir Edwin Uniacke.

Phillis appeared, but Arthur clung tighter than ever to his step-mother's neck. Nor did she wish to release him.

"I thank you, no. I can carry him quite easily," she replied to Sir Edwin's politely offered help, which was, indeed, the only sentence she had attempted to exchange with him. With her boy in her arms she quitted the room, and did not return thither all the afternoon.

It was impossible she could. Without any prudishness, without the slightest atom of self-distrust or fear to meet him, every womanly feeling in her kept her out of his way. Here was a young man whom she had once ignorantly suffered to make love to her, nay, loved in a foolish, girlish way; a young man whom she now knew--and he must know she knew it--no virtuous girl could or ought to have regarded with a moment's tenderness. Here was he insulting her by coming to her own house--her husband's house, without the permission of either.

Had he been humble or shamefaced, she might have pitied him, for all pure hearts have such infinite pity for sinners. She would have wished him repentance, peace, and prosperity, and gone on her way, as he on his, each feeling very kindly to the other, but meeting, and desiring to meet, no more. Now, when he obtruded himself so unhesitatingly, so unblus.h.i.+ngly, on the very scene of his misdoings and disgrace, pity was dried up in her heart, and indignation took its place.

"How dare he?" she thought, and nothing else but that. There was not one reviving touch of girlish admiration, not one thrill of self-complacent emotion, to see, what she could not help seeing, under his studiedly courteous manner, that he had forgotten, and meant her to feel he had forgotten, not a jot of the past. Whatever the episode of Susan Bennett might mean--if, indeed, such a man was not capable of carrying on a dozen such little episodes--his manner to Christian plainly showed that he admired her still; that he saw no difference between the pretty maiden Christian Oakley and the matron Christian Grey, and expressed this fact by tender tones and glances, alas! only too familiarly known by her of old. "How dared he?"

Christian was a very simple woman. She knew nothing at all of that fas.h.i.+onable world which, in its _blase_ craving for excitement, delights, both in life and in books, to tread daintily on the very confines of guilt. She was not ignorant. She knew what sin was, as set forth in the Ten Commandments, but she understood absolutely nothing of that strange leniency or laxity which now-a-days makes vice so interesting as to look like virtue, or mixes vice and virtue together in a knot of circ.u.mstances until it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong.

Christian Grey was a wife. Therefore, both as wife and as woman, it never occurred to her as the remotest possibility that she could indulge in one tender thought of any man not her husband, or allow any man to lift up the least corner of that veil of matronly dignity with which every married woman, under whatever circ.u.mstances she has married or whatever may befall her afterward, ought to enwrap herself forever.

"When I am dead," says Shakspeare's Queen Katherine,

_"Let me be used with honor. Strew me over With maiden flowers, that all the world may know I was a chaste wife to my grave."_

But Christian thought of something beyond the world. The 'honor' lay with herself alone; or, like her marriage vow, between herself, her husband, and her G.o.d. She was conscious of no dramatic struggles of conscience, no picturesque persistence in duty: she arrived at her end without any ethical or metaphysical reasoning, and took her course just because it seemed to her impossible there could be any other course to take.

It was a very simple one--total pa.s.siveness and silence. The young man could not come to the Lodge very often, even if Miss Gascoigne invited him ever so much, and was really as charmed with him as she appeared to be. And no wonder. He was one of those men who charm every body--perhaps because he was not deliberately bad, else how could he have attracted Christian Oakley? He had that rare combination of a brilliant intellect, an esthetic fancy, strong pa.s.sions, and a weak moral nature, which makes some of the most dangerous and fatal characters the world ever sees.

But, be he what he might, he could not force his presence upon Christian against her will. "No, I am not afraid," she said to herself; "how could I be--with these?"