He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗
- Author: Anthony Trollope
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whisked away with a pair of grey horses to the railway station, and
before the last toast of the day had been proposed by the Belgian
Councillor of Legation, they were half way up the Apennines on their
road to Bologna. Mr Spalding behaved himself like a man on the
occasion. Nothing was spared in the way of expense, and when he made
that celebrated speech, in which he declared that the republican virtue
of the New World had linked itself in a happy alliance with the
aristocratic splendour of the Old, and went on with a simile about the
lion and the lamb, everybody accepted it with good humour in spite of
its being a little too long for the occasion.
‘It has gone off very well, mamma; has it not?’ said Nora, as she
returned home with her mother to her lodgings.
‘Yes, my dear; much, I fancy, as these things generally do.’
‘I thought it was so nice. And she looked so very well. And he was so
pleasant, and so much like a gentleman—not noisy, you know, and yet not
too serious.’
‘I dare say, my love.’
‘It is easy enough, mamma, for a girl to be married, for she has
nothing to do but to wear her clothes and look as pretty as she can.
And if she cries and has a red nose it is forgiven her. But a man has
so difficult a part to play! If he tries to carry himself as though it
were not a special occasion, he looks like a fool that way; and if he
is very special, he looks like a fool the other way. I thought Mr
Glascock did it very well.’
‘To tell you the truth, my dear, I did not observe him.’
‘I did narrowly. He hadn’t tied his cravat at all nicely.’
‘How could you think of his cravat, Nora, with such memories as you
must have, and such regrets, I cannot understand.’
‘Mamma, my memories of Mr Glascock are pleasant memories, and as for
regrets, I have not one. Can I regret, mamma, that I did not marry a man
whom I did not love and that I rejected him when I knew that I loved
another? You cannot mean that, mamma.’
‘I know this, that I was thinking all the time how proud I should have
been, and how much more fortunate he would have been, had you been
standing there instead of that American young woman.’ As she said this
Lady Rowley burst into tears, and Nora could only answer her mother by
embracing her. They were alone together, their party having been too
large for one carriage, and Sir Marmaduke having taken his two younger
daughters. ‘Of course, I feel it,’ said Lady Rowley, through her tears.
‘It would have been such a position for my child! And that young man
without a shilling in the world; and writing in that way, just for bare
bread!’ Nora had nothing more to say. A feeling that in herself would
have been base, was simply affectionate and maternal in her mother. It
was impossible that she should make her mother see it as she saw it.
There was but one intervening day and then the Rowleys returned to
England. There had been, as it were, a tacit agreement among them that,
in spite of all their troubles, their holiday should be a holiday up to
the time of the Glascock marriage. Then must commence at once the stern
necessity of their return home home, not only to England, but to those
antipodean islands from which it was too probable that some of them
might never come back. And the difficulties in their way seemed to be
almost insuperable. First of all there was to be the parting from Emily
Trevelyan. She had determined to remain in Florence, and had written to
her husband saying that she would do so, and declaring her willingness
to go out to him, or to receive him in Florence at any time and in any
manner that he might appoint. She had taken this as a first step,
intending to go to Casalunga very shortly, even though she should
receive no answer from him. The parting between her and her mother and
father and sisters was very bitter. Sir Marmaduke, as he had become
estranged from Nora, had grown to be more and more gentle and loving
with his eldest daughter, and was nearly overcome at the idea of
leaving her in a strange land, with a husband near her, mad, and yet
not within her custody. But he could do nothing could hardly say a word
toward opposing her. Though her husband was mad, he supplied her with
the means of living; and when she said that it was her duty to be near
him, her father could not deny it.
The parting came. ‘I will return to you the moment you send to me,’
were Nora’s last words to her sister. ‘I don’t suppose I shall send,’
said Emily. ‘I shall try to bear it without assistance.’
Then the journey from Italy to England was made without much
gratification or excitement, and the Rowley family again found
themselves at Gregg’s Hotel.
CROPPER AND BURGESS
We must now go back to Exeter and look after Mr Brooke Burgess and Miss
Dorothy Stanbury. It is rather hard upon readers that they should be
thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence to the
preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the nature of
a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards its close.
In this little history there are, we fear, three or four more to come.
We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh Stanbury’s
treachery, or death, or the possibility that he after all may turn out
to be the real descendant of the true Lord Peterborough and the actual
inheritor of the title and estate of Monkhams, nor will we speak of
Nora’s certain fortitude under either of these emergencies. But the
instructed reader must be aware that Camilla French ought to have a
husband found for her; that Colonel Osborne should be caught in some
matrimonial trap, as how otherwise should he be fitly punished? and
that something should be at least attempted for Priscilla Stanbury, who
from the first has been intended to be the real heroine of these pages.
That Martha should marry Giles Hickbody, and Barty Burgess run away
with Mrs MacHugh, is of course evident to the meanest novel-expounding
capacity; but the fate of Brooke Burgess and of Dorothy will require to
be evolved with some delicacy and much detail.
There was considerable difficulty in fixing the day. In the first place
Miss Stanbury was not very well and then she was very fidgety. She must
see Brooke again before the day was fixed, and after seeing Brooke she
must see her lawyer. ‘To have a lot of money to look after is more
plague than profit, my dear,’ she said to Dorothy one day;
‘particularly when you don’t quite know what you ought to do with it.’
Dorothy had always avoided any conversation with her aunt about money
since the first moment in which she had thought of accepting Brooke
Burgess as her husband. She knew that her aunt had some feeling which
made her averse to the idea that any portion of the property which she
had inherited should be enjoyed by a Stanbury after her death, and
Dorothy, guided by this knowledge, had almost convinced herself that
her love for Brooke was treason either against him or against her aunt.
If, by engaging herself to him, she would rob him of his inheritance,
how bitter a burden to him would her love have been! If, on the other
hand, she should reward her aunt for all that had been done for her by
forcing herself, a Stanbury, into a position not intended for her, how
base would be her ingratitude! These thoughts had troubled her much,
and had always prevented her from answering any of her aunt’s chance
allusions to the property. For her, things had at last gone very right.
She did not quite know how it had come about, but she was engaged to
marry the man she loved. And her aunt was, at any rate, reconciled to
the marriage. But when Miss Stanbury declared that she did not know
what to do about the property, Dorothy could only hold her tongue. She
had had plenty to say when it had been suggested to her that the
marriage should be put off yet for a short while, and that, in the
meantime, Brooke should come again to Exeter. She swore that she did
not care for how long it was put off, only that she hoped it might not
be put off altogether. And as for Brooke’s coming, that, for the
present, would be very much nicer than being married out of hand at
once. Dorothy, in truth, was not at all in a hurry to be married, but
she would have liked to have had her lover always coming and going.
Since the courtship had become a thing permitted, she had had the
privilege of welcoming him twice at the house in the Close; and that
running down to meet him in the little front parlour, and the getting
up to make his breakfast for him as he started in the morning, were
among the happiest epochs of her life. And then, as soon as ever the
breakfast was eaten, and he was gone, she would sit down to write him a
letter. Oh, those letters, so beautifully crossed, more than one of
which was copied from beginning to end because some word in it was not
thought to be sweet enough—what a heaven of happiness they were to her!
The writing of the first had disturbed her greatly, and she had almost
repented of the privilege before it was ended; but with the first and
second the difficulties had disappeared; and, had she not felt somewhat
ashamed of the occupation, she could have sat at her desk and written
him letters all day. Brooke would answer them, with fair regularity,
but in a most cursory manner, sending seven or eight lines in return for
two sheets fully crossed; but this did not discompose her in the least.
He was worked hard at his office, and had hundreds of other things to
do. He, too, could say, so thought Dorothy, more in eight lines than she
could put into as many pages.
She was quite happy when she was told that the marriage could not take
place till August, but that Brooke must come again in July. Brooke did
come in the first week of July, and somewhat horrified Dorothy by
declaring to her that Miss Stanbury was unreasonable.
‘If I insist upon leaving London so often for a day or two,’ said he,
‘how am I to get anything like leave of absence when the time comes?’
In answer to this Dorothy tried to make him understand that business
should not be neglected, and that, as far as she was concerned, she
could do very well without that trip abroad which he had proposed for
her. ‘I’m not going to be done in that way,’ said Brooke. ‘And now that
I am here she has nothing to say to me. I’ve told her a dozen times
that I don’t want to know anything about her will, and that I’ll take
it all for granted. There is something to be settled on you, that she
calls her own.’
‘She is so generous, Brooke.’
‘She is generous enough, but she is very whimsical. She is going to
make
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