Arminell, a social romance/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI.
HOW SALTREN TOOK IT.
Mrs. Saltren, as already said, as Marianne Welsh, had been good-looking and vain, when lady's-maid to the dowager Lady Lamerton, the mother of the present lord. She had never been in the Park with Arminell's mother, as she had pretended. She had been lady's-maid only to the dowager, and had left her precipitately and married Saltren a year before the marriage of my lord. She had been vain, and thought much of; her good looks were gone, her vanity had not departed with them. Her vanity had been wounded by the loss of her husband's esteem. She had harboured anger against him for many years because of his fantastic ideas, and straight-laced morality. No one is perfect, she argued, and Saltren, who pinned his religion on the Bible, ought to have been the first to admit this. The just man falleth seven times a day, and she had tripped only once in forty-two years—over fifteen thousand days. If she could but raise the veil and look into her husband's past life, argued she, no doubt she would see comical things there. What if she had tripped? Were not the ways of the world slippery? Did she make them slippery? Had she created the world and set it all over with slides? And if a person did slip, was it becoming of such a person to lie whimpering where she had fallen? Did not that show lack of spirit? For her part, after that slight lapse, she had hopped on her feet, shaken her skirts, and warbled a tune.
It is a fact patent to every one, that the further we recede from an object, the smaller it appears. For instance, the dome of St. Paul's when we stand in St. Paul's Churchyard, looks immense. But as we stand on Paul's Wharf, waiting for a steamer, we always discover that the small intervening distance has diminished the dome to the size of a dish-cover. As we descend the river, the cupola decreases in proportion as we widen our distance from it, till it is reduced to an inconsiderable speck, and finally sinks beyond the range of our vision. It is precisely the same with our faults. At the moment of their commission, from under their shadow, they look portentous and actually oppress us; but they become sensibly reduced in bulk the farther we drift down life's stream from them. What immeasurably weighed on us yesterday, measurably burden us to-day, and to-morrow are perceptible; but the day after cease to discomfort us. Not so only, but as we draw further from our past fault, we look back on it with a sort of fond admiration, tinged with sadness; we lounge over the bulwarks of our boat, opera-glass in hand, and consider it as we consider the dome of St. Paul's, as an adjunct not altogether regrettable in the retrospect; for, consider how uniform, how insufferable would be the landscape, without breaks in the sky line.
Now Mrs. Saltren was embarked on the same voyage with Stephen, her husband, and naturally expected that the same object which at one moment had obscured their sun, but which rapidly diminished in size and importance and signification to her eyes, should equally tend to disappear from his. When, however, she found that it did not, she was offended, and harboured the conviction that she was herself the injured party. Why were not Stephen's eyes constituted as the eyes of other men? She had good occasion to take umbrage at the perversity of his vision. She had admitted at one time, faintly, and with a graceful curtsey, a pretty apology, and with that reluctance which a woman has to confess a fault, that her husband had been an injured man; but now, after the lapse of over twenty years, their relative positions were reversed. The cases are known of girls who have swallowed packets of needles. These needles inside have caused at first uneasiness and alarm for the consequences; but when they gradually, and in succession, work out, some at the elbows, some at the finger ends, some at the nose, and in the end come all away, they cease to trouble, and become a joke. It is so with our moral transgressions. When committed, they plunge us in an agony of remorse and fear; but gradually they work out of us, point or head foremost, and finally we get rid of them altogether. Now Marianne Welsh and Stephen Saltren had swallowed a packet of needles between them, and they were all her needles which had entered him. She did not retain hers long, but as they worked out of her, they worked into him and transfixed his heart, which bristled with them, like a christening pin-cushion. This, of course, was particularly annoying to her. To forgive and to forget is a Christian virtue, and Saltren, she argued, was no better than a heathen, for all his profession, because he neither forgot nor forgave.
When Mrs. Saltren made the announcement to her brother and husband, that a cruel fraud had been committed on her, she had acted without premeditation, stung to the confession by her galled vanity at her brother's disrespectful tone, and with an indefined, immatured desire of setting herself to rights with her husband.
The story had been contemptuously cast back in her face by James Welsh; and it was with some surprise and much satisfaction, that she saw her husband ready to accept it without question. Captain Saltren had not offered to accompany his brother-in-law to the station, which was four miles distant; he could hardly wait with patience his departure. No sooner was Welsh gone, than Saltren grasped his wife's arm, and said in his deepest tones, "Tell me all, Marianne, tell me all!"
"I ought," said Mrs. Saltren, recovering herself from the confusion which she felt, when her brother ridiculed her story, "I ought at this day to wear a coronet of diamonds. I was loved by a distinguished nobleman, with ardour. I cannot say I loved him equally; but I was dazzled. His family naturally were strenuously opposed to our union; but, indeed, they knew nothing at all about it. He entreated me to consent to have our union celebrated in private. He undertook to obtain a special licence from the Archbishop. How was I to know that my simplicity was being imposed upon? I was an innocent, confiding girl, ignorant of the world's deceit; and extraordinarily good-looking."
"And you did not reckon on the wickedness of the aristocracy. Go on."
But Marianne paused. She was not ready to fill up the details, and to complete her narrative without consideration.
"Do not keep me in torture!" protested Saltren; his face was twitching convulsively.
"How could I help myself?" asked Marianne. "It was not my fault that I had such an exquisite complexion, such abundant, beautiful hair, and such lovely eyes; though, heaven knows, little did I know it then, or have I thought of, or valued it since. My beauty is, to some extent, gone now, but not altogether. As for my teeth, Stephen, which were pearls—I had not a decayed one in my jaws then; but after I married you they began to go with worry, and because you did not trust me, and were unkind to me!"
"Marianne," said Saltren, "you deceived me—you deceived me cruelly. You told me nothing of this when I married you."
"I was always a woman of delicacy, and it was not for me to speak. I had been deceived and was deserted. Only when too late did I find how wickedly I had been betrayed, and then, when you came by and found me in my sorrow and desolation, I clung to your hand; I hoped you would be my consolation, my stay, my solace, and I—I——" She burst into tears. "I have been bitterly disappointed. I have found you without love, churlish, sullen, holding me from you as if I were infected with the plague, not ready to clasp me as an unhappy, suffering woman, that needed all the love and pity you could give."
"Not one word did you tell me of all this. You let me marry you in unsuspicion that before you had loved another."
"Not at all, Stephen," she said, "I have already assured you that I did not love the man whom I so foolishly and unfortunately trusted."
"Why have you not told me this story long ago? Why have you left me in the dark so long?"
"Your own fault, Stephen, none but yours. If you had shown me that consideration which becomes a professing Christian, I might have been encouraged to open my poor, tired, fluttering heart to you; but I was always a woman of extreme delicacy, and very reserved. You, however, were distant, and cold, and jealous. Then my pride bade me keep my tragic story to myself."
Saltren stood before her with folded arms, his hands were working. He could not keep them still but by clasping them to his side. "I was just, Marianne!" he said. "Just, and not severe to judge. I judged but as I knew the facts. If I was told nothing, I knew nothing to extenuate your fault. You were young and beautiful, and I thought that perhaps you had not strong principles to guide you. Now that you have told me all, I allow that you were more sinned against than sinning; but I cannot acquit you of not entrusting me before this with the whole truth."
"You never asked me for it."
"No," he answered sternly. "I could not do that. It was for you to have spoken."
Then, all at once, Saltren began to tremble; he took hold of the window-jamb, and he shook so that the diamond panes in the casement rattled. He stood there quivering in all his limbs. Great drops formed and rolled off his tall forehead, hung a moment suspended on his shaggy brow and then fell to the ground. They were not tears, they were the anguish drops expressed from his brain.
Mrs. Saltren looked at him with astonishment and some trepidation. She never had comprehended him. She could not understand what was going on in him now.
"What is it, Stephen?"
He waved his hand. He could not speak.
"But, Stephen, what is it? Are you ill?"
Then he threw himself before her, and clasped her to him furiously, with a cry and a sob, and broke into a convulsion of loud weeping. He kissed her forehead, hair, and lips. He seized her hands, and covered them at once with tears and kisses.
"Marianne!" he said at last, with a voice interrupted and choked. "For all these years we have been divided, you and I, I and you, under one roof, and yet with the whole world between us. I never loved any but you—never, never any; and all these long years there has been my old love deep in my heart, not dead, but sleeping; and now and then putting up its hands and uttering a cry, and I have bid it go to sleep again and lie still, and never hoped that the trumpet would sound, and it would spring up to life once more. But why did you not tell me this before? Why did you hide from me that you were the sufferer, you the wronged? If you would have told me this, I would have forgiven you long ago. My heart has been hungering and crying out for love. I have seen you every day, and felt that I have loved you, felt it in every vein. To me you have not grown old, but have remained the same, only there was this shadow of a great darkness between us. I constrained myself, because I considered you had sinned against God and me, and were unworthy of being loved!"
Again he drew her head to his shoulder, laid it there, and kissed her, and sobbed, and clasped her passionately.
"Marianne! Let him that is without guilt cast the first stone. I forgive you. Tell me that you loved me when I came to you asking you to be mine."
"I did love you, Stephen—you and you only."
"And that other; he who—" he did not finish the sentence—a fresh fit of trembling came on him.
"I never did love him, Stephen. Only his title and his position impressed me. I was young, and he was so much my superior in age, in rank, in strength; and the prospect opened before me was so splendid, that a poor, young, trustful, foolish thing like me—"
"You did not love him?" Stephen spoke with eagerness.
"I have assured you that I never did."
"Oh the age that we have spent together under one roof, united yet separated; one in name, apart in soul; years of sorrow to both of us; years of estrangement; years of disappointed love, and broken trust, and embittered home—all this we owe to him!"
Marianne felt his heart beating furiously, and his muscles contracting spasmodically in his face, that was against hers, in his breast, in his arms.
Has it ever chanced to the reader to encounter a married couple blind to each other's faults, and these faults glaring? One might suppose that daily intercourse would have sharpened the perception of each other's weaknesses, but instead of that it blunts it. They cannot detect in each other the grotesque, the ugly, the false, that are conspicuous and offensive to everyone else. Love, it is, which has softly dropped the veil over their eyes, or withdrawn from them the faculty of perceiving in each other these blemishes which, if perceived, would make common life unendurable. Love is well painted as blind, but the blindest of all loves is the love of the married. In the case of the Saltrens the blindness was on one side only, because on his side only was there true love. This had dulled his perception, so that he saw not the shallowness, untruthfulness, vanity, and heartlessness of Marianne, qualities which her brother saw clearly enough.
"You have borne your wrong all these years unavenged," he said. "My God! how I have misjudged you! One word more, Marianne." He disengaged himself from her. He had been kneeling with his arms enfolding her; now he released his hold, and knelt, bolt-upright, with his hands depending to the floor, gaunt, ungainly, motionless. "Marianne," he said, slowly, "I know so much that I must be told all. I must know the rest." He paused for full a minute, looking her steadily in the face, still kneeling upright, stiffly, uncouthly. "Who was he?"
Marianne did not speak. Now in turn agitation overcame her. Had she gone too far with this story, true or false?
She raised her hands deprecatingly. What would the consequences be?
Then, all at once, with a shriek rather than a cry, Saltren leaped to his feet.
"You need not say a word. I know all now, all—without your telling me. You were in the Park at the time with the old Lady Lamerton, and—and you had the boy named after him."
Had there been light in the room, it would have been seen how pale was the face of Mrs. Saltren, but that of her husband, the captain, had turned a deadlier white still.
"It all unfolds before me, all becomes plain!" he cried. "I wondered whose was the head I saw on the book."
"On what book, Stephen?"
"I feared, I doubted, but now I doubt no more. It was his likeness!"
"What book do you mean?"
"The book of the Everlasting Gospel which I saw an angel carry in his right hand, flying in the midst of heaven; and he cast the book down, and the book was dipped in blood; and when it fell into the water, the water was turned to blood, as the river of Egypt when Israel was about to escape."
The door flew open, and Giles Inglett Saltren entered, wearing a light coat thrown over his evening dress. As he came in he removed his hat.
Captain Saltren turned on him with flashing eyes, and in his most sonorous tones said, as he waved him away: "Go back, go back whence you came. You have no part in me. You are not my son. Return to him who has cared for you: to him who is your father—Lord Lamerton."