CHAPTER XXIX.

A DREARY LIFE.

In the light of the late but genial autumn sunshine lay Court Netherleigh. September was quickly passing. It was summer weather when we last met the reader; it is getting on for winter now.

In that favourite room of Miss Upton's where we first saw her--Miss Margery's room, as it is called in the household--she sits today, shivering near a blazing fire, a bright cashmere shawl worn over her purple silk gown, a simple cap of rich white lace shading her shrunken features. Her malady is making steady progress, and she always feels cold.

The small, pretty room has been renewed, but its old colours are retained. The glass-doors, that used to stand open when the sun shone or the air was balmy, are closed today, for the faintest breath of wind chills the invalid. On the table at her elbow lies a book of devotion half closed, her spectacles resting between the leaves; one of those books that the gay and busy world turn from as being so gloomy, and that bring comfort so great to those who are leaving it. Miss Upton sits back in her chair, looking up at the blue heavens, where she is so soon to be.

"I cannot help wishing sometimes," she began in low dreamy tones, "that more decided revelation of what heaven will be had been vouchsafed to us. I mean as to our own state there, our work, and occupations. Though I suppose that all work--work, as we call it here--will be as rest there. We know that we shall be in a state of happiness beyond conception; but we know not precisely of what it will consist."

"I suppose we were not meant to know," replied the young lady to whom she spoke, who sat apart on the green satin sofa, her elbow resting on one arm of it, her delicate hand shading her face. The tone of her voice was weary and depressed, the other hand lay listless on her muslin dress. "Time enough for that, perhaps, when we get there--those who _do_ get there."

"Don't be irreverent," came the quick reproof.

"Irreverent! I did not mean to be so, Aunt Margery."

"You used to be irreverent enough, Lady Adela. As the world knows."

"Ay. Things have changed for me."

It was indeed the Lady Adela sitting there. But she was altered in looks almost as much as Miss Margery. The once careless, saucy, haughty girl had grown sad, her manner utterly spiritless, the once blooming face was pale and thin. Only yesterday had she come to Court Netherleigh, following on a communication from Lady Acorn.

"I can do nothing with her; she is utterly self-willed and obstinate; I shall send her to you for a little while, Margery," wrote Lady Acorn to Miss Upton: and Margery Upton had replied that she might come.

That a wave of trouble had swept over Lady Adela, leaving desolation and despair behind it, was all too visible. To be put away by her husband in the face and eyes of her own family and of the world, was to her proud spirit the very bitterest blow possible to be inflicted on it; a cruel mortification, that she would never quite lose the sting of as long as life lasted.

On the very day the separation was decided upon, not an hour after Mr. Grubb left her in her chamber after apprising her of it, Lord Acorn, as you have read, came to the house, and took her from it without ceremony. His usual débonnaire indifference had given place to a sternness, against which there could be no thought of rebellion.

She took up her abode at Chenevix House that day, and Darvy followed with the possessions that belonged to her. She was not kindly received, or warmly treated. No, she had given too serious offence for that. Her mother did not spare her in the matter of reproach; her father was calmly bitter; Grace was cold. Lady Sarah Hope ran away to the country to avoid her, taking her sister Frances and Alice Dalrymple; and Lady Sarah made no scruple of letting it be known at her father's why she had gone.

Lord and Lady Acorn might have their personal failings, the one be too lavish of money, the other of temper, but they had at least brought up their daughters to be good and honourable women, instilling into them strict principles; and the blow was a sharp one. They deemed it right and just not to spare her who had inflicted it--inflicted it in wanton wilfulness--and they let her pain come home to her. It all told upon Adela.

The world turned upon her a cold shoulder. Rumours of the separation between Mr. and Lady Adela Grubb soon grew into certainty; and the world wanted to know the cause of it. For, after all, the true and immediate cause, that terrible crime she had allowed herself to commit, never transpired. The very few cognizant of it buried the secret within their own bosoms for her good name's sake. No clue transpiring as to this, people fell back upon the other and only cause known, more or less, to them--her long-maintained cavalier treatment of her husband. Mr. Grubb must have come to his senses at last, reasoned society, and sent her home to her mother to be taught better manners. And society considered that he had done righteously.

So the world, taking up other people's business according to custom, turned its back upon her. Which was, to say the least of it, inconsistent. For now, had the Lady Adela been suspected of any grave social crime; one, let us say, involving fears of having to appear before the Judge of the Divorce Court, society would have shaken hands with her as usual, so long as public proceedings remained in abeyance: what every one may privately see or suspect goes for nothing. This other offence was lighter, it did not involve those fatal extremes; this was more as though she were being punished as a naughty child; consequently the world thought fit to let its opinion be known, and to deal out a meed of censure on its own immaculate score.

But it told, I say, on Lady Adela. Told cruelly. Cast off by her husband for good and aye; tacitly reproached daily and hourly by her parents; rejected by her sisters, as though she might tarnish them if brought into too close contact, and looked askance at by society; Lady Adela drank the cup of repentance to the dregs.

If she could, if she could only undo her work--if that one fatal morning, when she found the cheque-book lying on the floor of her husband's dressing-room, had never been numbered in the calendar of the past! She was for ever wishing this fruitless wish. For ever wishing that her treatment of her husband had been different in the time before that one temptation set in.

No more invitations came for her from the gay world. Not that she would have accepted them. For the short time the Chenevix family remained in town after the outbreak, cards would come in, bidding Lord and Lady Acorn and their daughter Grace to this entertainment or to that; but never a one came for Lady Adela Grubb. She might have passed out of existence for all the notice taken of her. Mr. Grubb had suggested to her father that she should have her own carriage. She did not set one up; she would have had no use for it, had it been set up for her.

They went to their seat in Oxfordshire, carrying her with them. Lord Acorn returned to town in a day or two: Grace went on to Colonel Hope's place near Cheltenham, to stay with her sisters, Sarah and Frances. This left Adela and Lady Acorn alone; and her ladyship very nearly drove the girl wild with her tartness. She would have driven her quite wild had Adela's spirit been what it once was; but it was altogether subdued.

"Mamma," said Adela to her one day, after some mutual bickering, "do you want me to die?"

"Don't talk like a simpleton," retorted Lady Acorn.

"I think I shall die--if I have to lead this life much longer."

"You are as much likely to die as I am. What do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. I think I must--must kill myself, or something. Take a dose of opium, perhaps."

"You wicked girl! Running on in that false manner! Whatever your life may be, you have brought it upon yourself."

"Yes," thought Adela, "there lies the sting."

"What's the matter with the life?" tartly resumed her mother.

"It is so weary. And there's no hope left in it."

"It would not be weary if you chose to exert yourself. Get music--books--work. Look at Grace, how busy she is when we are staying here, with her sick-clubs, and her poor cottagers, and her schools."

Lady Adela turned up her pretty nose. "Sick-clubs and schools! Yes, that suits Grace."

"At all events, it keeps her from being dull. What do you do all day long! Just sit with your head bent on your hand, or mope about the rooms like one demented! It gives me the fidgets to look at you! You should rouse yourself, Adela."

"Rouse myself to what?" she faintly asked. "There's nothing to rouse myself to."

"_Make_ something: some interest for yourself. No life is open to you now except a quiet one. Even were it possible that you could wish for any other, I and your father would take care you did not enter on it. But quiet lives may be made full of interest, if we will; a great deal more so than noisy ones."

Good advice, no doubt: perhaps the only advice now open to Lady Adela. She did not profit by it. The weary time went on, and she grew more weary day by day. Lady Acorn called her obstinate; sometimes Adela retaliated. At last, the countess, losing all patience, wrote to Miss Upton to say she should send her for a little change to Court Netherleigh; for she was quite unaware of the critical state of Miss Upton's health.

And this was the first time, this morning when we see Miss Upton and Adela sitting together, that any special conversation had been held between them. The previous day had been one of Miss Margery's "bad days," when she was confined to the sofa in her chamber, and she had only been able to see Adela for a minute or two, to bid her welcome. Miss Upton criticizing Adela's appearance by the morning light, found her looking ill, but she quite believed her to be just as graceless as ever.

"Things change for all of us, Adela," observed she, continuing the conversation. "They have changed most especially for you."

Lady Adela raised her face, something like defiance on it. Was the miserable past to be recalled to her _here_, as well as at home?--was she going to be for ever lectured upon its fruits, as her mother lectured her? She was wretched enough herself about it, Heaven knew, and would undo it if she could; but that was no reason why all the world should be incessantly casting it in her teeth. She answered sharply.

"The past is over, Aunt Margery, and the less said about it the better. To be told of it will do me no good."

Aunt Margery did not like the tone. Could this mistaken girl--she really looked but as a girl--be _extenuating_ the past, and her own conduct in it?

"Do you know what I said, Adela, when the news reached me of all you had done, and I thought of the consequences it might involve? I said--and I spoke truly--that I would rather have seen you in your grave."

"Said it to mamma, I suppose?"

"No. I tried to excuse you to her. I said it to your husband."

"Oh--to him," said Adela, assuming an indifference she did not feel.

"And I am not sure but death might have been a happier fate for you than this that you have brought upon yourself--disgrace, the neglect of the world, and a dreary, purposeless life."

It might have been. Adela felt it so to her heart's core. She bit her lips to conceal their trembling.

"All the same, Aunt Margery, he was harsher than he need have been."

"Who was?"

"Mr. Grubb."

"Do you think so, Adela--remembering your long course of scorn and cruelty? My only wonder was that he had not emancipated himself from it long before."

Adela flushed, and began to tap her foot on the carpet in incipient rebellion. Of all things, she hated to be reminded of that mistake of the long-continued years. Miss Margery noted the signs.

"Child, I do not wish to pain you unnecessarily: but, as the topic has come up, I cannot allow you to mistake my opinion. You had a prince of a husband; a man of rare merit: he has, I truly believe, scarcely his equal in the world----"

"I know you always thought him perfection," interrupted Adela.

"I _found_ him so. As near perfection as mortal man may be here."

"Including his name," she put in, with a touch of her old sauciness.

Miss Upton replied not in words: she simply looked at her. It was a long, steady, and very peculiar look, one that Adela did not understand, and it passed away with a half-smile.

"For true nobility of mind," resumed Miss Margery, "for uprightness of life, for goodness of heart, who is like him? Look at his generosity to all and every one. Recall one slight recent act of his--what he did for that fantastically foolish lad, Charles Cleveland. Most men, provoked as Mr. Grubb had been by you, and in a degree also by Charles, would have abandoned him to his fate. Not he. That is not his way. When the poor Rector was fretting himself to discover what was next to be done with Charles, and the young fellow was mooning about Netherleigh, his hands in his pockets, trying to make up his mind to go and enlist, for he saw no other opening for him, there came a letter to the Rector from Mr. Grubb. He had interested himself with his correspondents in Calcutta--I'm not sure but it is a branch of his own house--and had obtained Charles a place, out there, at just double the salary he enjoyed here."

"And Charley is half-way over the seas on his voyage to it," lightly remarked Adela. "Charley was only a goose, Aunt Margery."

"You cannot say that of your husband," sharply returned Miss Margery, not approving the tone. "Unless it was in his love for you. Your husband was fond of you to folly; he indulged your every whim; he would have made your life happy as a dream of Paradise. And how did you requite him?"

No answer. The rebellious tapping of the foot had ceased.

"It has been a sad, cruel business altogether," sighed Miss Upton: "both for him and for you. It has blighted his life; taken all the sunshine out of it. And what has it done for yours?"

What indeed? Adela pushed back her pretty brown hair with both hands from her feverish forehead.

"Any way, the blight does not seem to have sensibly affected him, Aunt Margery. One hears of him here, there, and everywhere. You can't take up a newspaper but you see his name reiterated in it--Grubb, Grubb, Grubb!"

She put a great amount of scorn into the name. Miss Upton sighed.

"I am grieved to see you in this frame of mind, Adela."

"I am only saying what's true, Aunt Margery. I'm sure one would think he had taken the whole business of the world upon his shoulders. He is being asked to stand for some county or other now."

"Yes; he is playing an active part in the world," assented Miss Margery. "All honour to him that it is so! Do you suppose that one, wise and conscientious as he is, would put aside his duties to God and man because his heart has been well-nigh broken by a heartless wife? Rather would he be the more earnest in fulfilling them. Occupation will enable him to forget the past sooner and more effectually than anything else would."

"To forget me, I suppose you mean, Aunt Margery."

"Would you wish him to remember you, Adela--and what you have been to him? I tell you, child, that my whole heart aches for your husband: it ached long before you left him; while--I must say it--it was full of resentment against you. I am very sorry for you, Adela; you are my god-daughter, and I will try my best, whilst you stay with me, to soothe your wounds and reconcile you to this inevitable change. It has tried you: I see that, in spite of your pretended carelessness; you appear to me to be anything but strong."

"I am not strong, Aunt Margery. And if I fade away into the grave, I don't suppose any one will miss me or regret me."

"The best thing for her, perhaps, poor child--to be removed from this blighted life to the bright and beautiful life above! And her husband, released from his trammels, would then probably find that comfort in a second wife which he missed in her. Who knows but this may be God's purpose? He is over all."

Was Margery Upton aware that these words were spoken in a murmur--not merely thought? Probably not. They reached Adela: and a curious pang shot through her heart.

The butler came into the room at the moment, bringing a message to his mistress. One of her tenants had called, and wished very much to be allowed a short interview with her. And Miss Upton, who was still able to attend at times to worldly matters, quitted the room at once.

A faint cry escaped Lady Adela as the door closed. She turned her face upon the sofa-cushion, and burst into a flood of distressing tears.