He rose from his chair with a grim determination in his manner. "Do you hear what I say?" he said, as though to a vast audience. "It shall not crush me." Then his eyes lighted on a box of his wife's letters and papers which had been found in her room. He opened the box and took out some of the papers. A few of them were receipted accounts. Several of them were letters evidently written on that last night, gummed down, and stamped ready for the post. One was to her intimate friend, Julia Stanhope, with whom she had been touring in Scotland: a woman whom he had always disliked, and who, so he thought, had always encouraged poor Marianne's displays of uncontrolled anger. He put the letters into the post-box. And here apparently was her journal. He did not know that she had kept a journal. He smiled sadly as he thought of all the stormy scenes it must surely record. He did not read it. He tore it up and threw the fragments in the fire, and watched them curl up and carry their secret away with them. But one page, the last page, had escaped the destruction, and fell at his feet. He picked it up and he saw these words: "September 20th.—-Had another temper to-night. As usual, bitterly, bitterly sorry. If only I could tell him; but I can't, and I won't." Those must have been her last written words. They touched the most tender chords in the man's highly-strung[26] gentle nature. He forgot his own sufferings: his own outraged peace and harmony of spirit: his own ambitions and schemes marred by constant turmoil of mind: his own broad outlook on life stealthily fenced in, now in one direction and now another, by her compelling pettiness of temperament. All this he forgot. She had not understood him—but—had he ever understood her? Ah, that was it—that was the crux of the whole matter; and he remembered now that never once had she reproached him with that. Never once had she said to him: [26] "And do you think there has been nothing to understand in me? I may not be the marvellous person you suppose yourself to be. I may not have all the gifts you are supposed to have; but at least I am a human being, with my own necessities and crying demands, no less importunate with me than yours with you." Never had she said that to him. But he said it to himself over and over again, and almost broke his heart in the repeating of it. CHAPTER IV.
Prev.
Back
Top