It was the knowledge that Lanty, her Lanty, who was her guide, her everything, was ashamed. It was the harm he was doing himself that she deplored, not the reflection of his behaviour upon herself.
How many the women who proclaim their own patience and their husbands’ shortcomings upon the housetops think of this? Not long since a certain woman, bediamonded and prosperous, was demanding sympathy from her dear half-dozen friends, recounting to them the derelictions of her husband. “There’s only one comfort,” she said; “after every break he makes, he always gives me a handsome present. That’s always something.” Yet we wonder that there are cynics!
There was no word spoken between Lanty and Mabella in reference to the afternoon. But that night in the darkness Lanty suddenly drew her into his arms.
She laid her cheek against his; both faces were wet with tears.
There was poignant apology made and free, full loving pardon given all in that instant.
And Mabella wept out her pain on his breast.
But the shame and bitterness and self-contempt ate into Lanty’s heart like a venomous canker....
All this had been in the late autumn, just after the death of old Mr. Didymus, and now it was spring, and all through the winter Mabella had suffered, and hoped, and prayed, and despaired, and now it had come to this that Nathan had seen Lanty intoxicated in Brixton!
Sidney went back to the parsonage sorely troubled at heart. Vashti stood in the doorway.
Her beauty struck him freshly and vividly. It was his whim that she should dress in rich and beautiful stuffs, and Vashti was quite willing to subscribe to it. Dole groaned in spirit at the spectacle of its minister’s wife in such worldly garb as she wore, but Dole would have borne much at Sidney’s hands.
To-day she was clothed in a softly draped house-gown of Persian colouring, bound by a great cord girdle about her waist; it fell in long classic lines to her feet. Vashti’s face had gained in majesty and strength since her marriage. She was thinner, but that, instead of making against her beauty, raised it to a higher plane. There was a certain luxuriousness in her temperament which made her rejoice in the beautiful things with which Sidney surrounded her. She felt instinctively that she gained in forcefulness and in individuality from her setting. And, indeed, she fitted in well amid the beautiful pictures and hangings with which Sidney had adorned the enlarged parsonage. She had always seemed too stately, too queenly, for her commonplace calicoes and cashmeres. Her mien and stature had made her surroundings seem poor and inadequate. But in this gem of a house she shone like a jewel fitly set. Sidney had had his own way about the primary arrangements, and had installed a strong working woman in the kitchen with Sally, the ex-native of Blueberry Alley, as her under-study.