He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗
- Author: Anthony Trollope
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in the cottage at Twickenham. Her life was dreary enough, and there was
but very little of hope in it to make its dreariness supportable. As
often happens in periods of sickness, the single friend who could now
be of service to the one or to the other was the doctor. He came daily
to them, and with that quick growth of confidence which medical
kindness always inspires, Trevelyan told to this gentleman all the
history of his married life and all that Trevelyan told to him he
repeated to Trevelyan’s wife. It may therefore be understood that
Trevelyan, between them, was treated like a child.
Dr. Nevill had soon been able to tell Mrs Trevelyan that her husband’s
health had been so shattered as to make it improbable that he should
ever again be strong, either in body or in mind. He would not admit,
even when treating his patient like a child, that he had ever been mad,
and spoke of Sir Marmaduke’s threat as unfortunate. ‘But what could
papa have done?’ asked the wife.
‘It is often, no doubt, difficult to know what to do: but threats are
seldom of avail to bring a man back to reason. Your father was angry
with him, and yet declared that he was mad. That in itself was hardly
rational. One does not become angry with a madman.’
One does not become angry with a madman; but while a man has power in
his hands over others, and when he misuses that power grossly and
cruelly, who is there that will not be angry? The misery of the insane
more thoroughly excites our pity than any other suffering to which
humanity is subject; but it is necessary that the madness should be
acknowledged to be madness before the pity can be felt. One can
forgive, or, at any rate, make excuses for any injury when it is done;
but it is almost beyond human nature to forgive an injury when it is
a-doing, let the condition of the doer be what it may. Emily Trevelyan
at this time suffered infinitely. She was still willing to yield in all
things possible, because her husband was ill, because perhaps he was
dying; but she could no longer satisfy herself with thinking that all
that she had admitted, all that she was still ready to admit, had been
conceded in order that her concessions might tend to soften the
afflictions of one whose reason was gone. Dr. Nevill said that her
husband was not mad, and indeed Trevelyan seemed now to be so clear in
his mind that she could not doubt what the doctor said to her. She
could not think that he was mad, and yet he spoke of the last two years
as though he had suffered from her almost all that a husband could
suffer from a wife’s misconduct. She was in doubt about his health. ‘He
may recover,’ the doctor said; ‘but he is so weak that the slightest
additional ailment would take him off.’ At this time Trevelyan could
not raise himself from his bed, and was carried, like a child, from one
room to another. He could eat nothing solid, and believed himself to be
dying. In spite of his weakness, and of his savage memories in regard
to the past he treated his wife on all ordinary subjects with
consideration. He spoke much of his money, telling her that he had not
altered, and would not alter, the will that he had made immediately on
his marriage. Under that will all his property would be hers for her
life, and would go to their child when she was dead. To her this will
was more than just, it was generous in the confidence which it placed in
her; and he told his lawyer, in her presence, that, to the best of his
judgment, he need not change it. But still there passed hardly a day in
which he did not make some allusion to the great wrong which he had
endured, throwing in her teeth the confessions which she had made and
almost accusing her of that which she certainly never had confessed,
even when, in the extremity of her misery at Casalunga, she had thought
that it little mattered what she said, so that for the moment he might
be appeased. If he died, was he to die in this belief? If he lived, was
he to live in this belief? And if he did so believe, was it possible
that he should still trust her with his money and with his child?
‘Emily,’ he said one day, ‘it has been a terrible tragedy, has it not?’
She did not answer his question, sitting silent as it was her custom to
do when he addressed her after such fashion as this. At such times she
would not answer him; but she knew that he would press her for an
answer. ‘I blame him more than I do you,’ continued Trevelyan,
‘infinitely more. He was a serpent intending to sting me from the first,
not knowing perhaps how deep the sting would go.’ There was no question
in this, and the assertion was one which had been made so often that
she could let it pass. ‘You are young, Emily, and it may be that you
will marry again.
‘Never,’ she said, with a shudder. It seemed to her then that marriage
was so fearful a thing that certainly she could never venture upon it
again.
‘All I ask of you is, that should you do so, you will be more careful
of your husband’s honour.’
‘Louis,’ she said, getting up and standing close to him, ‘tell me what
it is that you mean.’ It was now his turn to remain silent, and hers to
demand an answer. ‘I have borne much,’ she continued, ‘because I would
not vex you in your illness.’
‘You have borne much?’
‘Indeed and indeed, yes. What woman has ever borne more!’
‘And I?’ said he.
‘Dear Louis, let us understand each other at last. Of what do you
accuse me? Let us, at any rate, know each other’s thoughts on this
matter, of which each of us is ever thinking.’
‘I make no new accusation.’
‘I must protest then against your using words which seem to convey
accusation. Since marriages were first known upon earth, no woman has
ever been truer to her husband than I have been to you.’
‘Were you lying to me then at Casalunga when you acknowledged that you
had been false to your duties?’
‘If I acknowledged that, I did lie. I never said that; but yet I did
lie, believing it to be best for you that I should do so. For your
honour’s sake, for the child’s sake, weak as you are, Louis, I must
protest that it was so. I have never injured you by deed or thought.’
‘And yet you have lied to me! Is a lie no injury—and such a lie! Emily,
why did you lie to me! You will tell me tomorrow that you never lied,
and never owned that you had lied.’
Though it should kill him, she must tell him the truth now. ‘You were
very ill at Casalunga,’ she said, after a pause.
‘But not so ill as I am now. I could breathe that air. I could live
there. Had I remained I should have been well now; but what of that?’
‘Louis, you were dying there. Pray, pray listen to me. We thought that
you were dying; and we knew also that you would be taken from that
house.’
‘That was my affair. Do you mean that I could not keep a house over my
head?’ At this moment he was half lying, half sitting, in a large easy
chair in the little drawing-room of their cottage, to which he had been
carried from the adjoining bedroom. When not excited, he would sit for
hours without moving, gazing through the open window, sometimes with
some pretext of a book lying within the reach of his hand; but almost
without strength to lift it, and certainly without power to read it.
But now he had worked himself up to so much energy that he almost
raised himself up in his chair, as he turned towards his wife. ‘Had I
not the world before me, to choose a house in?’
‘They would have put you somewhere, and I could not have reached you.’
‘In a madhouse, you mean. Yes if you had told them.’
‘Will you listen, dear Louis? We knew that it was our duty to bring you
home; and as you would not let me come to you, and serve you, and
assist you to come here where you are safe unless I owned that you had
been right, I said that you had been right.’
‘And it was a lie you say now?’
‘All that is nothing. I can not go through it; nor should you. There is
the only question. You do not think that I have been? I need not say
the thing. You do not think that?’ As she asked the question, she knelt
beside him, and took his hand in hers, and kissed it.‘say that you do
not think that, and I will never trouble you further about the past.’
‘Yes, that is it. You will never trouble me!’ She glanced up into his
face and saw there the old look which he used to wear when he was at
Willesden and at Casalunga; and there had come again the old tone in
which he had spoken to her in the bitterness of his wrath, the look and
the tone, which had made her sure that he was a madman. ‘The craft and
subtlety of women passes everything!’ he said. ‘And so at last I am to
tell you that from the beginning it has been my doing. I will never say
so, though I should die in refusing to do it.’
After that there was no possibility of further conversation, for there
came upon him a fit of coughing, and then he swooned; and in
half-an-hour he was in bed, and Dr. Nevill was by his side. ‘You must
not speak to him at all on this matter,’ said the doctor. ‘But if he
speaks to me?’ she asked. ‘Let it pass,’ said the doctor. ‘Let the
subject be got rid of with as much ease as you can. He is very ill now,
and even this might have killed him.’ Nevertheless, though this seemed
to be stern, Dr. Nevill was very kind to her, declaring that the
hallucination in her husband’s mind did not really consist of a belief
in her infidelity, but arose from an obstinate determination to yield
nothing. ‘He does not believe it; but he feels that were he to say as
much, his hands would be weakened and yours strengthened.’
‘Can he then be in his sane mind?’
‘In one sense all misconduct is proof of insanity,’ said the doctor.
‘In his case the weakness of the mind has been consequent upon the
weakness of the body.’
Three days after that Nora visited Twickenham from Monkhams in
obedience to a telegram from her sister. ‘Louis,’ she said, ‘had become
so much weaker, that she hardly dared to be alone with him. Would Nora
come to her?’ Nora came of course, and Hugh met her at the station, and
brought her with him to the cottage. He asked whether he might see
Trevelyan, but was told that it would be better that he should not. He
had been almost continually silent since the last dispute which he had
with his wife; but he had given little signs that he was
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