"So am I, but it can't be helped. It is to be hoped it will be the
greater treat when he does get it. I've a far greater weight on my
heart, because your father seems so displeased with me. I was fond
of him, and now he is making me quite a coward. You see, Molly,"
continued she, a little piteously, "I've never lived with people with
such a high standard of conduct before; and I don't quite know how to
behave."
"You must learn," said Molly tenderly. "You'll find Roger quite as
strict in his notions of right and wrong."
"Ah, but he's in love with me!" said Cynthia, with a pretty
consciousness of her power. Molly turned away her head, and was
silent; it was of no use combating the truth, and she tried rather
not to feel it--not to feel, poor girl, that she too had a great
weight on her heart, into the cause of which she shrank from
examining. That whole winter long she had felt as if her sun was all
shrouded over with grey mist, and could no longer shine brightly for
her. She wakened up in the morning with a dull sense of something
being wrong; the world was out of joint, and, if she were born to set
it right, she did not know how to do it. Blind herself as she would,
she could not help perceiving that her father was not satisfied with
the wife he had chosen. For a long time Molly had been surprised at
his apparent contentment; sometimes she had been unselfish enough to
be glad that he was satisfied; but still more frequently nature would
have its way, and she was almost irritated at what she considered
his blindness. Something, however, had changed him now: something
that had arisen at the time of Cynthia's engagement. He had become
nervously sensitive to his wife's failings, and his whole manner
had grown dry and sarcastic, not merely to her, but sometimes to
Cynthia,--and even--but this very rarely, to Molly herself. He was
not a man to go into passions, or ebullitions of feeling: they would
have relieved him, even while degrading him in his own eyes; but
he became hard, and occasionally bitter in his speeches and ways.
Molly now learnt to long after the vanished blindness in which her
father had passed the first year of his marriage; yet there were no
outrageous infractions of domestic peace. Some people might say that
Mr. Gibson "accepted the inevitable;" he told himself in more homely
phrase "that it was no use crying over spilt milk:" and he, from
principle, avoided all actual dissensions with his wife, preferring
to cut short a discussion by a sarcasm, or by leaving the room.
Moreover, Mrs. Gibson had a very tolerable temper of her own, and her
cat-like nature purred and delighted in smooth ways, and pleasant
quietness. She had no great facility for understanding sarcasm; it
is true it disturbed her, but as she was not quick at deciphering
any depth of meaning, and felt it unpleasant to think about it, she
forgot it as soon as possible. Yet she saw she was often in some kind
of disfavour with her husband, and it made her uneasy. She resembled
Cynthia in this: she liked to be liked; and she wanted to regain
the esteem which she did not perceive she had lost for ever. Molly
sometimes took her stepmother's part in secret; she felt as if
she herself could never have borne her father's hard speeches so
patiently; they would have cut her to the heart, and she must either
have demanded an explanation, and probed the sore to the bottom, or
sat down despairing and miserable. Instead of which Mrs. Gibson,
after her husband had left the room, on these occasions would say in
a manner more bewildered than hurt--