FOR the first few days Richard Bassett expected some annoyance from Mary Wells; but none came, and he began to flatter himself she was too fond of him to give him pain.
This impression was shaken about ten days after the little scene I have described. He received a short note from her, as follows:
“SIR—You must meet me to-night, at the same place, eight o'clock. If you do not come it will be the worse for you.
“M. W.”
Richard Bassett's inclination was to treat this summons with contempt; but he thought it would be wiser to go and see whether the girl had any hostile intentions. Accordingly he went to the tryst. He waited for some time, and at last he heard a quick, firm foot, and Mary Wells appeared. She was hooded with her scarlet shawl, that contrasted admirably with her coal-black hair; and out of this scarlet frame her dark eyes glittered. She stood before him in silence.
He said nothing.
She was silent too for some time. But she spoke first.
“Well, sir, you promised one, and you have married another. Now what are you going to do for me?”
“What can I do, Mary? I'm not the first that wanted to marry for love, but money came in his way and tempted him.”
“No, you are not the first. But that's neither here nor there, sir. That chalk-faced girl has bought you away from me with her money, and now I mean to have my share on't.”
“Oh, if that is all,” said Richard, “we can soon settle it. I was afraid you were going to talk about a broken heart, and all that stuff. You are a good, sensible girl; and too beautiful to want a husband long. I'll give you fifty pounds to forgive me.”
“Fifty pounds!” said Mary Wells, contemptuously. “What! when you promised me I should be your wife to-day, and lady of Huntercombe Hall by-and-by? Fifty pounds! No; not five fifties.”
“Well, I'll give you seventy-five; and if that won't do, you must go to law, and see what you can get.”
“What, han't you had your bellyful of law? Mind, it is an unked thing to forswear yourself, and that is what you done at the 'sizes. I have seen what you did swear about your letter to my sister; Sir Charles have got it all wrote down in his study: and you swore a lie to the judge, as you swore a lie to me here under heaven, you villain!” She raised her voice very loud. “Don't you gainsay me, or I'll soon have you by the heels in jail for your lies. You'll do as I bid you, and very lucky to be let off so cheap. You was to be my master, but you chose her instead: well, then, you shall be my servant. You shall come here every Saturday at eight o'clock, and bring me a sovereign, which I never could keep a lump o' money, and I have had one or two from Rhoda; so I'll take it a sovereign a week till I get a husband of my own sort, and then you'll have to come down handsome once for all.”
Bassett knitted his brows and thought hard. His natural impulse was to defy her; but it struck him that a great many things might happen in a few months; so at last he said, humbly, “I consent. I have been to blame. Only I'd rather pay you this money in some other way.”
“My way, or none.”
“Very well, then, I will bring it you as you say.”
“Mind you do, then,” said Mary Wells, and turned haughtily on her heel.
Bassett never ventured to absent himself at the hour, and, at first, the blackmail was delivered and received with scarcely a word; but by-and-by old habits so far revived that some little conversation took place.
Then, after a while, Bassett used to tell her he was unhappy, and she used to reply she was glad of it.
Then he began to speak slightingly of his wife, and say what a fool he had been to marry a poor, silly nonentity, when he might have wedded a beauty.
Mary Wells, being intensely vain, listened with complacency to this, although she replied coldly and harshly.
By-and-by her natural volubility overpowered her, and she talked to Bassett about herself and Huntercombe House, but always with a secret reserve.
Later—such is the force of habit—each used to look forward with satisfaction to the Saturday meeting, although each distrusted and feared the other at bottom.
Later still that came to pass which Mary Wells had planned from the first with deep malice, and that shrewd insight into human nature which many a low woman has—the cooler she was the warmer did Richard Bassett grow, till at last, contrasting his pale, meek little wife with this glowing Hebe, he conceived an unholy liking for the latter. She met it sometimes with coldness and reproaches, sometimes with affected alarm, sometimes with a half-yielding manner, and so tormented him to her heart's content, and undermined his affection for his wife. Thus she revenged herself on them both to her heart's content.
But malice so perverse is apt to recoil on itself; and women, in particular, should not undertake a long and subtle revenge of this sort; since the strongest have their hours of weakness, and are surprised into things they never intended. The subsequent history of Mary Wells will exemplify this. Meantime, however, meek little Mrs. Bassett was no match for the beauty and low cunning of her rival.
Yet a time came when she defended herself unconsciously. She did something that made her husband most solicitous for her welfare and happiness. He began to watch her health with maternal care, to shield her from draughts, to take care of her diet, to indulge her in all her whims instead of snubbing her, and to pet her, till she was the happiest wife in England for a time. She deserved this at his hands, for she assisted him there where his heart was fixed; she aided his hobby; did more for it than any other creature in England could.
To return to Huntercombe Hall: the loving couple that owned it were no longer happy. The hope of offspring was now deserting them, and the disappointment was cruel. They suffered deeply, with this difference—that Lady Bassett pined and Sir Charles Bassett fretted.
The woman's grief was more pure and profound than the man's. If there had been no Richard Bassett in the world, still her bosom would have yearned and pined, and the great cry of Nature, “Give me children or I die,” would have been in her heart, though it would never have risen to her lips.
Sir Charles had, of course, less of this profound instinct than his wife, but he had it too; only in him the feeling was adulterated and at the same time imbittered by one less simple and noble. An enemy sat at his gate. That enemy, whose enduring malice had at last begotten equal hostility in the childless baronet, was now married, and would probably have heirs; and, if so, that hateful brood—the spawn of an anonymous letter-writer—would surely inherit Bassett and Huntercombe, succeeding to Sir Charles Bassett, deceased without issue. This chafed the childless man, and gradually undermined a temper habitually sweet, though subject, as we have seen, to violent ebullitions where the provocation was intolerable. Sir Charles, then, smarting under his wound, spoke now and then rather unkindly to the wife he loved so devotedly; that is to say, his manner sometimes implied that he blamed her for their joint calamity.
Lady Bassett submitted to these stings in silence. They were rare, and speedily followed by touching regrets; and even had it not been so she would have borne them with resignation; for this motherless wife loved her husband with all a wife's devotion and a mother's unselfish patience. Let this be remembered to her credit. It is the truth, and she may need it.
Her own yearning was too deep and sad for fretfulness; yet though, unlike her husband's, it never broke out in anger, the day was gone by when she could keep it always silent. It welled out of her at times in ways that were truly womanly and touching.
When she called on a wife the lady was sure to parade her children. The boasted tact of women—a quality the narrow compass of which has escaped their undiscriminating eulogists—was sure to be swept away by maternal egotism; and then poor Lady Bassett would admire the children loudly, and kiss them, to please the cruel egotist, and hide the tears that rose to her own eyes; but she would shorten her visit.
When a child died in the village Mary Wells was sure to be sent with words of comfort and substantial marks of sympathy.
Scarcely a day passed that something or other did not happen to make the wound bleed; but I will confine myself to two occasions, on each of which her heart's agony spoke out, and so revealed how much it must have endured in silence.
Since the day when Sir Charles allowed her to sit in a little room close to his study while he received Mr. Wheeler's visit she had fitted up that room, and often sat there to be near Sir Charles; and he would sometimes call her in and tell her his justice cases. One day she was there when the constable brought in a prisoner and several witnesses. The accused was a stout, florid girl, with plump cheeks and pale gray eyes. She seemed all health, stupidity, and simplicity. She carried a child on her left arm. No dweller in cities could suspect this face of crime. As well indict a calf.
Yet the witnesses proved beyond a doubt that she had been seen with her baby in the neighborhood of a certain old well on a certain day at noon; that soon after noon she had been seen on the road without her baby, and being asked what had become of it, had said she had left it with her aunt, ten miles off; and that about an hour after that a faint cry had been heard at the bottom of the old well—it was ninety feet deep; people had assembled, and a brave farmer's boy had been lowered in the bight of a cart-rope, and had brought up a dead hen, and a live child, bleeding at the cheek, having fallen on a heap of fagots at the bottom of the well; which child was the prisoner's.
Sir Charles had the evidence written down, and then told the accused she might make a counter-statement if she chose, but it would be wiser to say nothing at all.
Thereupon the accused dropped him a little short courtesy, looked him steadily in the face with her pale gray eyes, and delivered herself as follows:
“If you please, sir, I was a-sitting by th' old well, with baby in my arms; and I was mortal tired, I was, wi' carring of him; he be uncommon heavy for his age; and, if you please, sir, he is uncommon resolute; and while I was so he give a leap right out of my arms and fell down th' old well. I screams, and runs away to tell my brother's wife, as lives at top of the hill; but she was gone into North Wood for dry sticks to light her oven; and when I comes back they had got him out of the well, and I claims him directly; and the constable said we must come before you, sir; so here we be.”
This she delivered very glibly, without tremulousness, hesitation, or the shadow of a blush, and dropped another little courtesy at the end to Sir Charles.
Thereupon he said not one word to her, but committed her for trial, and gave the farmer's boy a sovereign.
The people were no sooner gone than Lady Bassett came in, with the tears streaming, and threw herself at her husband's knees. “Oh, Charles! can such things be? Does God give a child to a woman that has the heart to kill it, and refuse one to me, who would give my heart's blood to save a hair of its little head? Oh, what have we done that he singles us out to be so cruel to us?”
Then Sir Charles tried to comfort her, but could not, and the childless ones wept together.
It began to be whispered that Mrs. Bassett was in the family way. Neither Sir Charles nor Lady Bassett mentioned this rumor. It would have been like rubbing vitriol into their own wounds. But this reserve was broken through one day. It was a sunny afternoon in June, just thirteen months after Mr. Bassett's wedding—Lady Bassett was with her husband in his study, settling invitations for a ball, and writing them—when the church-bells struck up a merry peal. They both left off, and looked at each other eloquently. Lady Bassett went out, but soon returned, looking pale and wild.
“Yes!” said she, with forced calmness. Then, suddenly losing her self-command, she broke out, pointing through the window at Highmore, “He has got a fine boy—to take our place here. Kill me, Charles! Send me to heaven to pray for you, and take another wife that will love you less but be like other wives. That villain has married a fruitful vine, and” (lifting both arms to heaven, with a gesture unspeakably piteous, poetic, and touching) “I am a barren stock.”
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