‘Nothing whatever, my dear,’ assented Mrs. Pryor eagerly, ‘nor of marriage; and the false pictures they give of those subjects cannot be too strongly condemned. They are not like reality; they show you only the green tempting surface of the marsh, and give not one faithful or truthful hint of the slough underneath.’
‘But it is not always slough,’ objected Caroline; ‘there are happy marriages. Where affection is reciprocal and sincere, and minds are harmonious, marriage must be happy.’
‘It is never wholly happy. Two people can never literally be as one; there is, perhaps, a possibility of content under peculiar circumstances, such as are seldom combined, but it is as well not to run the risk; you may make fatal mistakes. Be satisfied, my dear; let all the single be satisfied with their freedom.’
‘You echo my uncle’s words,’ exclaimed Caroline, in a tone of dismay; ‘you speak like Mrs. Yorke in her most gloomy moments—like Miss Mann when she is most sourly and hypochondriacally disposed. This is terrible!’
‘No: it is only true. Oh, child! you have only lived the pleasant morning time of life; the hot, weary noon, the sad evening, the sunless night, are yet to come for you. Mr. Helstone, you say, talks as I talk; and I wonder how Mrs. Matthewson Helstone would have talked had she been living? She died! She died!’
‘And, alas! my own mother and father …’ exclaimed Caroline, struck by a sombre recollection.
‘What of them?’
‘Did I never tell you that they were separated?’
‘I have heard it.’
‘They must, then, have been very miserable.’
‘You see, all facts go to prove what I say.’
‘In this case there ought to be no such thing as marriage.’
‘There ought, my dear, were it only to prove that this life is a mere state of probation, wherein neither rest nor recompense is to be vouchsafed.’
‘But your own marriage, Mrs. Pryor?’
Mrs. Pryor shrunk and shuddered as if a rude finger had pressed a naked nerve. Caroline felt she had touched what would not bear the slightest contact.
‘My marriage was unhappy,’ said the lady, summoning courage at last; ‘but yet—’
She hesitated.
‘But yet,’ suggested Caroline, ‘not immitigably wretched?’
‘Not in its results, at least. No,’ she added in a softer tone; ‘God mingles something of the balm of mercy even in vials of the most corrosive woe. He can so turn events that from the very same blind, rash act whence sprang the curse of half our life, may flow the blessing of the remainder. Then, I am of a peculiar disposition—I own that—far from facile, without address, in some points eccentric. I ought never to have married. Mine is not the nature easily to find a duplicate, or likely to assimilate with a contrast. I was quite aware of my own ineligibility; and, if I had not been so miserable as a governess, I never should have married. And then—’