What is Ralph Truitt's secret?

As Catherine nurses Ralph Truitt back to life and health, warming his body with hers, stripping him, bathing him, we learn in alternate chapters more about the strange background of the two lead characters, the true antagonists, in "A Reliable Wife." We're certainly heading into Gothic territory here, though American style - the remote farmhouse, the lonely and bitter curator of family wealth, the silent and perversely devoted household servants, the mysterious death of the first wife, the hints about a house that nobody visits anymore, the ferocious weather, and, most of all, the arrival in town, in the story, of the mysterious stranger. Strong echos here of the Brontes, and of a whole genre that today mainly lives in romance paperbacks. But it does have a life here, mainly because the writing is pretty strong and original. I do have a problem accepting the history of the Ralph and Catherine - Ralph's horribly tormented life with a religious fanatic mother and a sensualist father, his lifelong self-loathing because of his sexual drive (there's something slightly Proustian here, and I wonder if the whole thing would make more sense if Ralph were a self-loathing homosexual?), he riotous youth, his fervid courtship, his long and agonized celibacy after his wife's death - but does he have no friends, no ideas, no human relationships at all? He is a man entirely driven by hatred, including self-hatred, and it's unclear why this would be so - and why he would break out now and seek a wife. And what an unfortunate choice he's made! Wouldn't a smart and studious man, who's waited so long, made a better decision about a "mail order" bride? I guess anything can happen, certainly in fiction, but I do have a sense that I'm being set up, or asked to suspend a whole lot of disbelief.