Mary Cholmondeley

“ Does any woman ever really remain in ignorance if she is not loved, or if she has been married for other reasons than love? What constant props and supports she had given to Mr. Loftus's love for her! It had never been allowed to stand alone. Why had she from the first always bolstered it up by continually saying to herself and others, until she almost believed it: 'My husband is so devoted to me. My love is such a little thing beside his. What have I done to deserve such a great devotion?' How often she had said all these things that tepidly-loved women say! ”

“ And I know the primroses are first love. I have felt sure of that always. I wonder, my Sibyl, when there is so much in your heart for me, that there are any left to come out in the woods; but there are a few, you see, among the brown leaves.'
'They will soon be over,' said Sibyl, turning her head away.
'Yes,' said Mr. Loftus, with a gentleness which was new to Sibyl, and he was always gentle. 'They will die presently, as first love dies. But nevertheless it is a beautiful gift while it lasts, and we must not grieve because, like the primroses, it cannot last in flower for ever. ”

“ Loftus and Sibyl set out together.
They were in the park in a few minutes, and were walking down towards Wilderleigh, on the opposite side of the river, an old house of weather-beaten gray stone, of twisted chimneys and uneven roofs and pointed gables, with quaint carved finials, standing above its terraces and its long stone balustrade. The sun was setting in a sky of daffodil behind the tall top-heavy elms of the rookery and the tower of the village church. Little fleets of clouds lay motionless in high heaven, looking towards the west. The land in its long shadows dreamed of peace. ”

“ He could do no more, and a sense of exhaustion and distress was upon him. He had been clumsy. He had hurt the poor butterfly, after all.
He sat a long time on the tree-trunk, the low sunshine on his worn, patient face, on which the refinement of suffering and of thought had set their indelible stamp. And now the thin high features wore a new look of present distress over the old outlived troubles, a new look which anyone who really loved him would have been heart-stricken to have called into it. But when love ceases to wound its object, and bears its own cross, it has ceased to be young. ”

“ Can any man whose wife has forsaken him ever quite forget that he has once been deserted, that the road which leads away from him has known a woman's footsteps, and another may walk in it? He stood still and listened. The spirit had over-mastered the flesh. All suffering had vanished.
From the next room, Sibyl's sitting-room, which opened out of her bedroom, a faint sound came. He noiselessly crossed, and looked through the half-open door, and thanked God.
Sibyl was lying on her face on the polished floor in her night-gown, moaning and sobbing, a white blot upon the dark boards. ”

“ It was like awakening from a nightmare to realize that Wilderleigh would not be sold, after all. He almost wished that he might live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.
The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress, and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth unfavourable comments. ”

“ It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl, consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispassionate gaze foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life. ”

“ On natures like these the only influence which can make any impression is a personal one. It is overwhelming while it lasts; but it is the teacher who is everything—the teaching is nothing. And when he is removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under another wave, and the work of the first, the foundation patiently and lovingly built in its pretty yellow sand, is swept away, or remains in futile fragments, as a mark of the folly of one who built on sand.
Certain strong, abiding principles Mr. Loftus had sought to instil into Sibyl's mind. ”

“ The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.
'And so my second wife is also to be an esprit faible,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. 'But in the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with.'
And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the ardent sunshine. ”

“ She picked her way down the steep hillside, through the wakened broom and sleeping heather, and along the edge of the little oasis of oatfield, where so many thousands of round, river-worn stones had been gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure which that little field meant, reclaimed from the heather, but not wholly reclaimed from the stones, had often touched Lady Pierpoint, who knew what labour was; but it did not appeal to Sibyl. ”

“ Those who sleep at night, for whom each day is not divided by a gulf of pain, who look upon the darkness as a time of rest, and the morning as a time of waking, know one side of life, perhaps, as the passers-by in the street know one side of the hospital as they skirt it—the outside wall.
Mr. Loftus slept ill, and the night after Sibyl's return he woke early. The gray light was just showing above the white blinds as he had seen it so many, many times. ”

“ If one loves anybody, does one forget the others?'
'Some women do,' said Lady Pierpoint, taking Peggy's red, tear-stained face in her hands and kissing it. She could not bear to own, even to Peggy, how wounded her warm maternal heart had been because Sibyl, whose delicacy had given her so many anxious hours, had shown no feeling at parting with her. Mr. Loftus had shown much more, when he had come to speak to her alone for a few minutes in her sitting-room, when the carriage was at the door. ”

“ For youth perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork. But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For 'Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères.' That is a hard saying, but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not true. ”

“ Loftus talking to Lady Pierpoint, and saw as in some new and arid light his thin stooping figure in the carved high-backed chair, the refined profile with the high thin nose and scant brushed-back gray hair, and the bloodless Vandyke hand holding his wine-glass. Mr. Loftus had a very beautiful hand. Doll had not seen Mr. Loftus and Sibyl together except at the altar-rails. And as he looked rage took him. It was a monstrous marriage. The blood rushed to his face, and beat in his temples. And a sudden bitter hatred surged up within him against Mr. Loftus as man against man. ”

“ For those who do not sleep, life has two sides—the side of night as well as day—and the heaviest hour of the day or night is the hour before the dawn, when the night-lamp totters and dies, and the ashen light of another day falls like despair on the familiar articles of furniture, the chairs, the table, the wardrobe, which have been up all night like ourselves, taking the imprint of our exhaustion through the interminable hours, and which look older and more haggard than ever in the changed light which brings nor change nor rest. ”

“ There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. ”

“ I thank and bless you for all you have given me, your whole spring of primroses; and now that spring is passing, as it must, Sibyl, as it must, not by your fault, take comfort, and when other feelings come into your heart, as they have come in, do not reproach yourself, do not cut me to the heart by grieving, but remember that I understand, and that my love and honour and gratitude can never change towards you, and that I too was young once: as young as—Doll, and there is no need for you and him to be so miserable. ”

“ They wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the different speculators, who of course named their own price.
Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent. To know him at all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this marriage had the appearance of being ignoble—not, perhaps, for another man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an explanation. He gave none. ”

“ Would the morning ever come, he wondered, when he should no longer open his eyes upon the dawn, when 'these last steps' should be climbed, and effort would cease, and weariness might lie down and cease also?
The premonitory tremor, the shudder of coming illness, laid its hand upon him, and with it came that physical recoil of the flesh from solitude before which the strongest will goes down.
Involuntarily he got up and went to Sibyl's room. He opened the door noiselessly and looked in.
The room felt deserted. He went up to the bed; it was empty. A great fear fell upon him. Had she left him? ”

“ That passion of tears could flow from one source only. He knew Sibyl well enough to know that she had no tears, no strong emotion, for anything except that which affected her own personal happiness. Her slight nature could not reach to impersonal love, any more than it could reach to righteous anger. All this apparent failure of health and listlessness had a mental cause, as he had always feared, as he now knew for certain. She was unhappy.
'She has ceased to love me,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'and she is in despair. Doll loves her, and she has found it out. ”

“ Only a Frenchwoman could have dared to translate a child's posy of pale blue and white violets, tied with a silver string, into a gown; but Sibyl Carruthers' dressmaker was an artist in her way, and took an artist's license, and the half-mourning which she had designed for the great heiress was in colouring what a bereaved butterfly might have worn. ”

“ Presently it was all over, and they were going out.
'We were to wait for the others here,' said Peggy, the girl who had been sitting with Sibyl, as they emerged into the sunshine with the crowd. 'Mother and Mr. Doll were just behind us.'
Lady Pierpoint, Sibyl's aunt, presently joined them with Mr. Doll Loftus, an irreproachable-looking, unapproachable-looking fair young man, who, it was whispered, was almost too smart to live, but who nevertheless bore himself with severe simplicity. ”

“ The night of the masked ball had arrived. A large party had assembled at Wilderleigh, including Lady Pierpoint and her daughters, and Doll. It was Doll's first visit to Wilderleigh since Mr. Loftus's marriage, and as he looked down the dinner-table at Sibyl he wondered at his own folly in coming. He thought he had 'got over it,' but to-night he found that he had made a sufficiently grave mistake in supposing so. Unimaginative persons never know when they have got over anything, because they have no fore-knowledge in absence of the stab which a certain presence can inflict. ”

“ Sibyl received the suggestion of this visit in silence. She did not oppose herself to it, but left the room to shed a torrent of angry tears in private. The truth, which seldom visited her feeble judgment, did not tell her that Mr. Loftus was anxious about her health. Hysteria took up the tale instead, and officiously informed her that he was tired of her. He wanted to get rid of her. Men were always like that after they had been married a little time. What was a woman's love and devotion to them when the first novelty had worn off? ”

“ After the first novelty of convalescence was past, and she had been installed in her sitting-room in a cascade of lace and ribbons, which her dressmaker called a saut du lit, and after Mr. Loftus had gravitated back towards the library on the ground-floor and his article for the Millennium, Sibyl began to experience that vague weariness and distaste of life which all know who know ill health. ”

“ So absorbed was she in her devotion to her husband, and in the interchange of beautiful sentiments, that her other duties, increased by her position at Wilderleigh, were not even perceived. Unobservant persons are sometimes surprised at the real devotion—and Sibyl's was real—of which a shallow and cold-hearted nature shows itself capable. But those who look closer perceive at what heavy expense to others that one link is held, which is in reality only a new and more subtle form of selfishness. ”