PAUL ANSTRUTHER’S WIFE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VI, Issue 38, 20 September 1890, Page 6

PAUL ANSTRUTHER’S WIFE.

77f»V HEN Janet Fraser told her ' uncle, who had eeased to be her guardian and trustee ’Mr I | three years before, that she J h a< l ful, y made up her mind e W T«l to marry Paul Anstruther, ijjMnJjJfK; J LagStijfltte® tire old gentleman shrugged I I h* B shoulders cynically. L J ‘'hi the principle, I supT ''’j pose, that reformed rakes make the best husbands. I t ' b trust you are quite sure, Janet, that the adjective is as applicable to him as the substantive.’ Most people said much the same thing, not, however, within Miss Fraser’s hearing. She was a woman whose conduct it was not easy to criticise before her face, and her clear blue eyes had a cold look in them if any one ventured to hint at young Anstruther’s misdeeds. These had been flagrant enough to provoke a good deal of sympathy for his father —that other Paul Anstruther, the eminent qjgfc? * philanthropist, who had certainly deserved a son of different character. It was just possible, however, ill-natured folk whispered, that if his ow Anstruther had devoted a little more to his el n ’ h* s whole family might have been less unruly and ilevot ' es *' 8011 ’ e,s unsteady. The very decorum and selfover on father’s life, with its over-preciseness and , righteousness, was perhaps partly responsible for the bear Blns > ’ ,u *' *^ le consequences were none the less hard to The elder Anstruther had quite resigned himself to his n ’s evil doings and evil reputation, when he was startled ‘•y the news of his son’s engagement to Janet Fraser, the Scotch heiress, whom many men had tried to win, and who had been cold to all previous wooers. Mr Anstruther did not shrug his shoulders (that was too worldly a gesture for him), but he shook his head sadly. ‘ Poor woman 1 Poor woman ! caught by a handsome face 1 Well, well 1 I hope she may not repent it.’ These were the comments made by their two nearest relatives on the marriage of Janet Fraser and Paul Anstruther. No one knew except the two concerned how, two years earlier, when Paul had taken Janet’s hand in his and stumbled like the veriest schoolboy over the words, ‘ I love you,’ she had looked at him with those clear blue eyes, cold no longer, and answered : ‘ If I could only trust you, Paul.’ That was all that had passed between them, but the little scene had remained with the woman as a sacred memory. It was not till two years of absence and silence were passed that he came to her again. Then, standing erect before her, he said : • You can trust me now, Janet.’ She placed her hand in his with a proud confidence and smiled up into his eyes. Neither then nor later did any words about his past rise to the lips of either, and Janet’s perfect happiness was untouched by a doubt or fear. The opinion of the world, which smiled at her folly, and reprobated him as mercenary, mattered nothing. She was radiant in the thought of his love for her, and, true woman as she was, his salvation through her ; and, in her turn, she loved him with all the force and devotion of a nature cold to the world at large, and trusted him with the entire confidence of one slow to change. They were married amid the conventional rejoicings and secret misgivings of their friends, and left them to discuss leisurely the future of the pair who roamed about the Continent in an easy unconventional fashion. ‘ Be sure and come back to-morrow, Paul,’ his wife said three months later as they stood side by side watching the butterflies flitting to and fro in their riverside garden ; ‘ I bad rather have no horses at all than lose your company.’ For answer he put his arm round her and tenderly kissed her fair hair. • It is rather absurd,’ she said, with a laugh which did not sound quite genuine, ‘ that I should dislike losing you for a couple of days when I did without you for so many years. However,’ she went on brightly, ‘ I shall not waste iny time ; I have no end of letters to write. By the way, what shall I do about any that come for you ?’ • 0, just open them ; there may be one about the London house. ’ In five minutes more he was gone and Janet was alone, as she had not been for three months ; but she was not idle, and found plenty of correspondence to occupy her even before the noonday post brought in the London letters.

‘Two for me and three for Paul.’ Then, she opened one of the last, ‘ What a vulgar handwriting !’ She glanced at the contents and then laid it down. The sun was still shining on the river ; a thrush, which was practising on the branch of a lime-tree, had never paused in his song ; but dining those two minutes her whole life, her whole being had changed. Such a letter as it was I An appeal for money. ‘ You promassed last December to send it, but you never did. I suppose you thought I did not know where you lived, but I saw your wedding in the paper. Some one says that your wife is no end rich.’ ‘No end rich !’ Was there ever so poor a woman as this one, who sat there staring at the bail spelling, the loathsome familiarity of the signature, ‘ Your very loveing Nellie.’ By a sort of double consciousness she knew that some day she would feel the madness of despair, the certainty of irretrievable anguish, whilst at the time she felt nothing of all this, only an unutterable loathing of herself ami her tolly. Why di<l that woman speak of December’ It was a December evening that she had met Paul Anstruther after his two years’ probation ; December when she had placed her hand in his with the glad confident smile of a woman loving and beloved. ‘ Fool ! —fool !—fool!’ cried her heart passionately. But she never moved or touched the cruel letter lying upon her lap. A shadow fell across the window, and she started ; but she need not have feared. It was not her husband, but his father, stately and courteous as usual, who began in measured tones :

* I want to see Paul, my dear, but I hear—Janet, what is it ?’ He stood still in the French window facing her, reading in her face the unutterable and unendurable suffering of the past hour. ‘ Your son is out,’ she began in a monotonous tone, without rising to meet him, without lifting the hands which hung listlessly at her side. ‘ What is wrong ? In Heaven’s name, tell me, Janet !’ Thus adjured, she stood up and tried to speak in her usual tone, but the effort was too great. A darkness came upon her sight, a great surging of sound in her ears, and she fell as one dead at her father-in-law’s feet. When she opened her eyes, after what seemed a few blissful moments of unconsciousness, Mr Anstruther was bending over her. Something of the white ashen horror of her face was reflected in his, ami the two looked at one another in silence. She spoke first, with a piteous attempt at explanation : ‘I am not very well. I feel the heat.’ She pushed back her hair from her forehead as she spoke, and tried to rise. There was a deep tenderness in his voice as he stopped her. ‘ Don’t get up, Janet. You have been unconscious along time, and must rest ; besides’—with an obvious effort—‘l must speak to you. Tell me if you can understand me.’ She waited a little, her eyes fixed upon the swaying branch of a lime-tree. What was there to understand ? Then there was a wild rush of consciousness, and the aching throbbing heart realised its own bitterness. ‘ I understand you ; go on.’ ‘ I hope,’ he began in an embarrassed way, ‘ that yon will forgive me ; but when you fainted this letter fell to the giound. I caught sight of some of its contents; I—l guessed the rest. Janet, Janet,’ with an appealing cry, ‘ you knew v hen you married him that—’ She rose to her feet, strong in her indignation, but she did not speak. Yes; the world would say that she had deserved this ; but he would not dare to say so, to think so when he remembered his words to her. ‘ You must not think I mean to excuse him ; but after all ’ —well might the father’s eyes shrink, the father’s lips falter, before the anguish of that still face —‘ but, after all, you are married, and—’ He broke down here altogether : it was Janet who finished his words. ‘ And must keep up appearances, you mean. O, you need not be afraid. I shall not make a scandal about all this. As you say ’ —the words were spoken with slow bitterness—- ‘ I knew what he was when I married him.’ She walked to the window and closed it with a steady hand. Now that the white face was turned from him any man might have misjudged—as Mr Anstruther did—her calmness. ' You will like some luncheon,’ she went on, her hand still busy with the catch. ‘ They' shall put some in the diningroom ; but 1 think—l think you must excuse me. I am a little—tired.’ ‘ My poor Janet,’ he began ; but she did not look at him or heed him as she moved across the room to the door, and he was silent. She paused, her fingers closing round the handle, and looked at him with eyes he found it hard to meet, so full were they of an appealing anguish. 1 You are his father. Do you think this can be true ?’ He turned away in silence and shook his head. She felt she had asked him too much in asking him to pronounce upon his son’s undoubted guilt. With a movement of sympathy in the midst of her own suffering, she laid her hand tenderly upon his arm. He placed his own upon it and spoke impressively. ‘ Janet, take my advice ; don’t speak of this to Paul. He is a man to resent fiercely anything like interference. Best let the whole affair drop and forget it.’ She did not answer him, and he spoke even more urgently : ‘ Promise me to be silent.’

She looked him full and fiercely in the face, her own wrongs and her own sufferings engrossing her once more. ‘ Do you think I should stoop to discuss this?’ she asked, in a voice shaken by passion. ‘ You need not be afraid : your son is safe from my reproaches. ’ So she left him and locked herself into her room to walk to and fro with no knowledge of hours or seasons, till the late June sun set, and the midsummer twilight fell over the silent garden. ‘ Fool !’ she muttered to herself once or twice, but otherwise her suffering did not find expression, for no words were strong enough for the shrinking and loathing with which she looked back upon her three months of happiness. That letter had not only ruined her future, it had robbed her of her past. What had her gladness, her trust, her love been but the delusion of a weak woman blinded by the most ordinary and commonplace of methods? He had never loved her ! How often must he have laughed to himself at her words of love, at her tenderness, at her caresses. She started as if stung by a lash, and in torture went over every scene of the past, clear in its smallest detail to a memory quickened by anguish. It was evening before her husband returned. Through the hours of the sleepless night, of the silent day, she had schooled herself to meet him, but she had not known how hard it would be to look again upon those false eyes, that treacherous face. She had gone through so much that she thought to find him changed, but he stood there as bright and smiling as ever. ‘ Why, Nettie, what is the matter?’ he asked as he put his arms round her and kissed her forehead.

All she had planned to do and say in this first interview vanished from her mind. She only felt the hideous hypocrisy of his caress, and shook herself free from it with a gesture of disgust. ‘ Don’t touch me !’ she said fiercely. ‘ What on earth do you mean ?’ he asked with a puzzled laugh. * What is wrong ?’ * I have found you out,’ she made answer, her hands closing over one another and driving the rings into her flesh : ‘ you did not expect that, did you ?’ * Found me out ?’ his voice trembling a little, as his past came crowding back into his mind. * I—l don’t understand you.’ She did not think that she had nourished any hope in her heart, but she knew that some faint lingering remnant must have survived by its sudden death now, as she read her husband’s guilt in his embarrassed tone and anxious face.

‘ I know why you married me,’ she said, in a voice he had never heard from her. ‘ I know that you wanted my miserable money. Well,’ with a laugh which held all the unspoken hysterical pain of her long vigil, ‘you shall have it if you do not come near me. ’ An awful whiteness spread over her husband’s face. ‘ But if you do I will never give you a penny.’ ‘ That will do,’he said roughly, almost brutally. ‘You have said too much alreadj'.’ He turned upon hi« heel and left her ; but he paused at the door, perhaps in the hope that she would relent and call him back.

Even at that moment, if he had gone to her, taken her in his arms, and poured out a passion of protestations, she felt she could not have forgiven him, but when the door closed between then; she knew that she was alone for ever. Very few words had passed during the interview, buttheir separation was as surely decreed by those few words as their union had been by those other words which two clergymen had solemnly pronounced over them in church. Nothing remained for them both but to accommodate themselves to the new lives which opened before them.

Once or twice the man made faint efforts at reconciliation and explanation—very faint ones, for the words of his wife rankled in his heart—but they met with no response. Had they been much stronger and warmer they would have fallen back dead and cold from the icy barrier she had built up round herself. Life was to be endured with what patience they could command, and in unbroken silence; and it was so endured for a time. Then, as was to be expected, the man’s strength gave way under the burden which strained the woman’s endurance to the uttermost; and one November day Janet Anstruther was free to weep out her agony of disappointed love and trust beside ears silent for ever. ‘ From an accident in the hunting field, Paul Anstruther, aged thirty-two.’ So ran the announcement in the Times, but when the world is told any fact, it must be contented with half the truth concerning it. To make matters even it generally invents at least three-quarters more. Our wrongs seem to grow small when those who wronged us are incapable of the explanation we never asked when they could give it. Still, Janet’s injuries were not ones to be forgotten, nor was she the woman to let the great wave of death pass over her and blot out all previous impressions. Only she was haunted by the question. Might she not by more tenderness, more softness, have won the dead man to a life which should have been an expiation ? Whilst now no effort of pardon or agony of prayer could change the terrible • past. Such thoughts filled her mind night and day. Yet she never seemed to fail in any of the duties required of her by business or convention, and her father-in-law, who alone was admitted to see her, was earnest in his praises of her self-control. One morning as she came downstairs she saw a young woman in black standing at the hall-door speaking eagerly to the servant. ‘ What is it, Parkins?’ she stopped to ask. ‘ This young person, ma’am,’ the butler began discreetly, ‘is making some inquiries about —my master.’ ‘ Come in here,’ said Janet, with a gesture of command, and the two women were left alone. ‘ What did you want ?’ asked the widow harshly, her eyes coldly surveying the figure before her. The other woman seemed almost to tremble as she looked at the tall, calm, stately figure in black. ‘ What do you want ?’ repeated Janet. ‘ I saw Mr Anstruther’s death in the paper, and I—l wanted to know,’ stammered the new-comer. ‘ I did not mean to intrude —but I thought there was some mistake. ’ ‘ Some mistake?’ repeated Janet mechanically. ‘ The-paper said thirty-two. That was so much younger. The door opened, but Janet did not move or stir. The first rush of a hope which was more of an agony than a joy overwhelmed her. ‘Go on. You thought—’ she said hoarsely. But the other was staring past her in blank amazement. ‘ Janet,’ said her father-in-law’s voice, ‘ Parkins tells me—’ Then he paused, and his face in its sudden whiteness stabbed Janet by its likeness to that other face hidden away for ever. It was the girl who broke silence. ‘ Paul I Paul !’ she cried with a burst of natural emotion, ‘ I thought you were dead.' Janet looked from one to the other ; there was no need for words ; the whole hideous story was clear before her. ‘ Go,’ she said, pointing to the door, and in a moment she was alone with her unavailing remorse. Mr Anstruther and his daughter-in-law never meet, and the world pities him very much for all that he has suffered from his son and his son’s wife.