But they could not. _They_ were enjoying Trevlyn Hold and its advantages, and Rupert was little better than an outcast on the face of the earth. Every dinner put upon their table, every article of attire bought for their children, every honour or comfort their position brought them, seemed to rise up reproachfully before the face of Mrs. Chattaway, and say, "The money to procure all this is not yours and your husband's; it is stolen from Rupert." And she could do nothing to remedy it; could only wage ever-constant battle with the knowledge, and the sting it brought. No remedy existed. They had not come into the inheritance by legal fraud; had succeeded to it fairly and openly, according to the will of Squire Trevlyn. If the whole world ranged itself on Rupert's side, pressing that the property should be resigned to him, Mr. Chattaway had only to point to the will, and say, "You cannot act against that."
It may be that this very fact brought remorse home with greater force to Mrs. Chattaway. It may be that incessantly dwelling upon it caused a morbid state of feeling, which increased the malady. Certain it is, that night and day the wrongs of Rupert pressed on her mind. She loved him with that strange intensity which brings an aching to the heart. When the baby orphan was brought home to her from its foreign birthplace, with its rosy cheeks and its golden curls--when it put out its little arms to her, and gazed at her with its large blue eyes, her heart went out to it there and then, and she caught it to her with a love more passionate than any ever given to her own children. The irredeemable wrong inflicted on the unconscious child, fixed itself on her conscience in that hour, never to be lifted from it.
If ever a woman lived a dual life, that woman was Mrs. Chattaway. Her true aspect--that in which she saw herself as she really was--was as different from the one presented to the world as light from darkness. Do not blame her. It was difficult to help it. The world and her own family saw in Mrs. Chattaway a weak, gentle, apathetic woman, who did not take upon herself even the ordinary authority of the head of a household. They little imagined that that weak woman, remarkable for nothing but indifference, passed her days in sadness, in care, in thought. The hopeless timidity (inherited from her mother) which had been her bane in former days, was her bane still. She had not dared to rise up against her husband when the wrong was inflicted upon Rupert Trevlyn; she did not dare openly rise up now against the petty tyrannies daily dealt out to him. There may have been a latent consciousness in her mind that if she did interfere it would not change things for the better, and might make them worse for Rupert. Probably it would have done so.