He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗
- Author: Anthony Trollope
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hour he called again, and was about to give it up, when he met the
man whom he was seeking on the steps.
‘I was looking for you,’ he said.
‘Well, here I am.’
It was impossible not to see in the look of Trevelyan’s face, and
not to hear in the tone of his voice, that he was, at the moment,
in an angry and unhappy frame of mind. He did not move as though
he were willing to accompany his friend, and seemed almost to know
beforehand that the approaching interview was to be an unpleasant
one.
‘I want to speak to you, and perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a
turn with me,’ said Stanbury.
But Trevelyan objected to this, and led the way into the club
waiting-room. A club waiting-room is always a gloomy, unpromising
place for a confidential conversation, and so Stanbury felt it to
be on the present occasion. But he had no alternative. There they
were together, and he must do as he had promised. Trevelyan kept
on his hat and did not sit down, and looked very gloomy. Stanbury
having to commence without any assistance from outward auxiliaries,
almost forgot what it was that he had promised to do.
‘I have just come from Curzon Street,’ he said.
‘Well!’
‘At least I was there about two hours ago.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose, whether it was two hours or two
minutes,’ said Trevelyan.
‘Not in the least. The fact is this; I happened to come upon the
two girls there, when they were very unhappy, and your wife asked
me to come and say a word or two to you.’
‘Was Colonel Osborne there?’
‘No; I had met him in the street a minute or two before.’
‘Well, now; look here, Stanbury. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll
keep your hands out of this. It is not but that I regard you
as being as good a friend as I have in the world; but, to own the
truth, I cannot put up with interference between myself and my
wife.’
‘Of course you understand that I only come as a messenger.’
‘You had better not be a messenger in such a cause. If she has
anything to say she can say it to myself.’
‘Am I to understand that you will not listen to me?’
‘I had rather not.’
‘I think you are wrong,’ said Stanbury.
‘In that matter you must allow me to judge for myself. I can easily
understand that a young woman like her, especially with her sister
to back her, should induce such a one as you to take her part.’
‘I am taking nobody’s part. You wrong your wife, and you especially
wrong Miss Rowley.’
‘If you please, Stanbury, we will say nothing more about it.’ This
Trevelyan said holding the door of the room half open in his hand,
so that the other was obliged to pass out through it.
‘Good evening,’ said Stanbury, with much anger.
‘Good evening,’ said Trevelyan, with an assumption of indifference.
Stanbury went away in absolute wrath, though the trouble which he
had had in the interview was much less than he had anticipated, and
the result quite as favourable. He had known that no good would come
of his visit. And yet he was now full of anger against Trevelyan,
and had become a partisan in the matter which was exactly that which
he had resolutely determined that he would not become. ‘I believe
that no woman on earth could live with him,’ he said to himself
as he walked away. ‘It was always the same with him—a desire for
mastery, which he did not know how to use when he had obtained it.
If it were Nora, instead of the other sister, he would break her
sweet heart within a month.’
Trevelyan dined at his club, and hardly spoke a word to any one
during the evening. At about eleven he started to walk home, but
went by no means straight thither, taking a long turn through St.
James’s Park, and by Pimlico. It was necessary that he should make
up his mind as to what he would do. He had sternly refused the
interference of a friend, and he must be prepared to act on his
own responsibility. He knew well that he could not begin again with
his wife on the next day as though nothing had happened. Stanbury’s
visit to him, if it had done nothing else, had made this impossible.
He determined that he would not go to her room tonight, but would
see her as early as possible in the morning and would then talk to
her with all the wisdom of which he was master.
How many husbands have come to the same resolution; and how
few of them have found the words of wisdom to be efficacious!
HARD WORDS
It is to be feared that men in general do not regret as they should do
any temporary ill-feeling, or irritating jealousy between husbands and
wives, of which they themselves have been the cause. The author is not
speaking now of actual lovemakings, of intrigues and devilish villany,
either perpetrated or imagined; but rather of those passing gusts of
short-lived and unfounded suspicion to which, as to other accidents,
very well-regulated families may occasionally be liable. When such
suspicion rises in the bosom of a wife, some woman intervening or being
believed to intervene between her and the man who is her own, that
woman who has intervened or been supposed to intervene, will either
glory in her position or bewail it bitterly, according to the
circumstances of the case. We will charitably suppose that, in a great
majority of such instances, she will bewail it. But when such painful
jealous doubts annoy the husband, the man who is in the way will almost
always feel himself justified in extracting a slightly pleasurable
sensation from the transaction. He will say to himself probably,
unconsciously indeed, and with no formed words, that the husband is an
ass, an ass if he be in a twitter either for that which he has kept or
for that which he has been unable to keep, that the lady has shewn a
good deal of appreciation, and that he himself is is is quite a Captain
Bold of Halifax! All the while he will not have the slightest intention
of wronging the husband’s honour, and will have received no greater
favour from the intimacy accorded to him than the privilege of running
on one day to Marshall and Snellgrove’s, the haberdashers, and on
another to Handcocks’, the jewellers. If he be allowed to buy a present
or two, or to pay a few shillings here or there, he has achieved much.
Terrible things now and again do occur, even here in England; but
women, with us, are slow to burn their household gods. It happens,
however, occasionally, as we are all aware, that the outward garments
of a domestic deity will be a little scorched; and when this occurs,
the man who is the interloper will generally find a gentle consolation
in his position, let its interest be ever so flaccid and unreal, and
its troubles in running about, and the like, ever so considerable and
time-destructive.
It was so certainly with Colonel Osborne when he became aware that his
intimacy with Mrs Trevelyan had caused her husband uneasiness. He was
not especially a vicious man, and had now, as we know, reached a time
of life when such vice as that in question might be supposed to have
lost its charm for him. A gentleman over fifty, popular in London, with
a seat in Parliament, fond of good dinners, and possessed of everything
which the world has to give, could hardly have wished to run away with
his neighbour’s wife, or to have destroyed the happiness of his old
friend’s daughter. Such wickedness had never come into his head; but he
had a certain pleasure in being the confidential friend of a very
pretty woman; and when he heard that that pretty woman’s husband was
jealous, the pleasure was enhanced rather than otherwise. On that
Sunday, as he had left the house in Curzon Street, he had told Stanbury
that Trevelyan had just gone off in a huff, which was true enough, and
he had walked from thence down Clarges Street, and across Piccadilly to
St. James’s Street, with a jauntier step than usual, because he was
aware that he himself had been the occasion of that trouble. This was
very wrong; but there is reason to believe that many such men as
Colonel Osborne, who are bachelors at fifty, are equally malicious.
He thought a good deal about it on that evening, and was still thinking
about it on the following morning. He had promised to go up to Curzon
Street on the Monday really on some most trivial mission, on a matter
of business which no man could have taken in hand whose time was of the
slightest value to himself or any one else. But now that mission
assumed an importance in his eyes, and seemed to require either a
special observance or a special excuse. There was no real reason why he
should not have stayed away from Curzon Street for the next fortnight;
and had he done so he need have made no excuse to Mrs Trevelyan when he
met her. But the opportunity for a little excitement was not to be
missed, and instead of going he wrote to her the following note:
‘Albany, Monday.
Dear Emily,
What was it all about yesterday? I was to have come up with the words
of that opera, but perhaps it will be better to send it. If it be not
wicked, do tell me whether I am to consider myself as a banished man. I
thought that our little meetings were so innocent and so pleasant! The
green-eyed monster is of all monsters the most monstrous and the most
unreasonable. Pray let me have a line, if it be not forbidden.
Yours always heartily,
F. O.
‘Putting aside all joking, I beg you to remember that I consider myself
always entitled to be regarded by you as your most sincere friend.’
When this was brought to Mrs Trevelyan, about twelve o’clock in the
day, she had already undergone the infliction of those words of wisdom
which her husband had prepared for her, and which were threatened at
the close of the last chapter. Her husband had come up to her while she
was yet in her bedroom, and had striven hard to prevail against her.
But his success had been very doubtful. In regard to the number of
words, Mrs Trevelyan certainly had had the best of it. As far as any
understanding one of another was concerned, the conversation had been
useless. She believed herself to be injured and aggrieved, and would
continue so to assert, let him implore her to listen to him as loudly
as he might. ‘Yes I will listen, and I will obey you,’ she had said,
‘but I will not endure such insults without telling you that I feel
them.’ Then he had left her fully conscious that he had failed, and
went forth out of his house into the City, to his club, to wander about
the streets, not knowing what he had best do to bring back that state
of tranquillity at home which he felt to be so desirable.
Mrs Trevelyan was alone when Colonel Osborne’s note was brought to her,
and was at that moment struggling with herself in anger against her
husband.
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