Sons of Fire, Volume I by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Allan recalled the story which Mrs. Mornington had told him of Mr. Wornock's marriage, and the mysterious birth of his son and heir -- mysterious in that it was a strange thing for an English gentleman with a fine estate to carry off his wife to a foreign country before the birth of her first child, and to remain an exile from home and property until his son was three years old. Mystery of some kind -- a secret sorrow or a secret shame -- must have been at the root of conduct so unusual; and might not that secret include the story of the young wife's sin?

Allan Carew had heard of husbands so beneficent as to forgive that sin which to the mind of the average man lies beyond reach of pardon; husbands who have taken back runaway wives, and set the fallen idol once again in the temple of home-life; husbands who, knowing themselves old, ugly, and unlovable, have palliated and pardoned the passionate impulses of undisciplined girlhood, the sin in which there has been more of romantic folly than of profligate inclination; husbands who have asked themselves whether _they_ were not the darker sinners in having possessed themselves of creatures so lovely and so frail, so unadapted for a passionless, workaday union with grey hairs and old age. It might be, Allan thought, that Mr. Wornock was one of these, and that he had conveyed his young wife away from the scene of her sin and the influence of her betrayer, and had hidden her shame and his dishonour in that quiet valley among the snow-peaks and the glaciers. But if Mrs. Wornock had so sinned in the early days of her married life there must be people at Matcham who would remember the lover's presence at Discombe, even although his real character had been undiscovered by the searching eyes of village censors.