Free The King's General by Daphne du Maurier Page B

about his own children and his life at Stowe, and then I asked him, not without some tremulation, for all my calm assurance, how Richard did.
    For a moment he did not answer, and, glancing at him, I saw his brow was troubled.
    "I had not wished to speak of it," he said at length, "but since you ask me--all has gone very ill with him, Honor, ever since his marriage."
    Some devil of satisfaction rose in my breast, which I could not crush, and: "How so?" I asked. "Has he not a son?"
    For I had heard that a boy was born to them a year or so before, on May I6 to be I exact, which date, ironically enough, was the same as that on which I had been crippled.
    A new life for the one that is wasted, I had thought at the time, when I was told of it, and like a spoilt child that has learnt no wisdom after all, I remember crying all night upon my pillow, thinking of the boy who, but for mischance and the workings of destiny, might have been mine. That was a day, if I recollect aright, when Matty kept guard at my door, and I made picture after picture in my mind of Richard's wife propped upon pillows with a baby in her arms, and Richard smiling beside her. The fantasy was one which, for all my disciplined indifference, I found most damnable.
    But to return to Bevil.
    "Yes," he answered, "it is true he has a son, and a daughter, too, but whether Richard sees them or not I cannot say. The truth is he has quarrelled with his wife, treated her in a barbarous fashion, even laid violent hands upon her, so she says, and she is now petitioning for a divorce against him. Furthermore, he slandered the Earl of Suffolk, his wife's kinsman, who brought an action against him in the Star Chamber and won the case, and Richard, refusing to pay the fine--and in truth he could not, possessing not a penny--is likely to be cast into the Fleet Prison for debt at any moment."
    Oh God, I thought, what a contrast to the life we would have made together. Or was I wrong, and was this symbolic of what might have been?
    "He was always violent-natured, even as a lad," continued Bevil. "You knew so little of him, Honor; alas, three months of happy wooing is no time in which to judge a man."
    I could not answer this, for reason was on his side. But I thought of the spring days, lost to me forever, and the apple blossoms in the orchard. No maid could have had more tender or more intuitive a lover.
    "How was Richard violent?" I asked. "Irresponsible and wild, perhaps, but nothing worse. His wife must have provoked him."
    "As to that, I know nothing," answered Bevil. "But I can well believe it. She is a woman of some malice and of doubtful morals. She was a close friend to Gartred-- perhaps you did not know--and it was when she was visiting at Orley Court that the match was made between them. Richard--as no one knows better than yourself-- could not have been his best self at that time."
    I said nothing, feeling behind Bevil's gentle manner some faint reproach, unconscious though it was.
    "The truth is," said Bevil, "that Richard married Mary Howard for her money, but, once wed, found he had no control over her purse or her property, the whole being in the power of trustees who act solely in her interest."
    "Then he is no whit better off than he was before?" I asked.
    "Rather worse, if anything," replied Bevil. "For the Star Chamber will not release him from his debt for slander, and I have too many claims upon me at this time to help him either."
    It was a sorry picture that he painted, and though to my jealous fancy more preferable than the idyllic scene of family bliss that I had in imagination conjured, it was no consolation to learn of his distress. That Richard should ill-use his wife because he could not trifle with her property was an ugly fact to face, but, having some inkling of his worser self, I guessed this to be true. He had married her without love and in much bitterness of heart, and she, suspecting his motive, had taken care to disappoint him. What a rock of