Oh, those hysterical women, with their love of keeping letters!
All this took place some years before Brand's marriage. He went abroad again until the storm blew over. This rumour, at least, had never reached Evelyn. Had others, he wondered? In all such matters she was so strictly rigid; he often wondered if her uncompromising views of sin were the result of temperament or convent education. Uncompromising to sin, that is to say--not to the sinner. His wife seemed to separate action from actor. The sin itself was loathsome, repulsive--it made her shrink. The sinner was wounded, and for him she had healing balms and ointments. But where another woman would have slurred over the cause of the hurt, she spoke of it confidently by name, confronting adultery or theft as she would any other mortal combat.
"We talk of Magersfontein and Colenso," she said once. "If we'd met sin on another kind of battle-field and been defeated, why should we be ashamed to call the battle-field by its own name?"
That Evelyn was original her husband conceded--at times he even took a certain pride in her looks and ways. They were useful. But her attitude to him personally was unendurable. She had never loved him, of course--such a man does not ask for love; he would not have recognized it had he found it. On the other hand, he had never claimed anything from her to which she had not made instant response so far as she was able. She had swept his floors and cooked for him, in their poorer days, like the docile wife of any village labourer; she had mended his reputation as well as his clothes, Hare once said, chuckling. When he was ill she nursed him; when he was well she stayed with him or left him as he wished. But day by day the wall that separated them grew higher; he had married a pliable child, who had become a woman in an hour.
If he spoke of it at all--which was seldom, for, try as he would, he could find no tangible ground for complaint--it was only to rail at her religion.
"Those damned priests and directors are behind this pose of yours. I'll break it down, as well as you, before I've done with you."
In an access of fury one day he dragged from her bedroom wall a Delia Robbia plaque of the Madonna and Child, before which a lamp was burning, and flung it to the ground.