The Small House at Allington, Anthony Trollope [best ebook reader for chromebook .txt] 📗

said the countess; “and then you can see him tomorrow morning. I don’t suppose he will say very much, you know; and perhaps he may think⁠—you won’t mind my saying it, I’m sure⁠—that Alexandrina might have done better. But I don’t believe that he’ll raise any strong objection. There will be something about settlements, and that sort of thing, of course.” Then the countess went away, and Alexandrina was left with her lover for half an hour. When the half-hour was over, he felt that he would have given all that he had in the world to have back the last four-and-twenty hours of his existence. But he had no hope. To jilt Lily Dale would, no doubt, be within his power, but he knew that he could not jilt Lady Alexandrina De Courcy.

On the next morning at twelve o’clock he had his interview with the father, and a very unpleasant interview it was. He was ushered into the earl’s room, and found the great peer standing on the rug, with his back to the fire, and his hands in his breeches pockets.

“So you mean to marry my daughter?” said he. “I’m not very well, as you see; I seldom am.”

These last words were spoken in answer to Crosbie’s greeting. Crosbie had held out his hand to the earl, and had carried his point so far that the earl had been forced to take one of his own out of his pocket, and give it to his proposed son-in-law.

“If your lordship has no objection. I have, at any rate, her permission to ask for yours.”

“I believe you have not any fortune, have you? She’s got none; of course you know that?”

“I have a few thousand pounds, and I believe she has as much.”

“About as much as will buy bread to keep the two of you from starving. It’s nothing to me. You can marry her if you like; only, look here, I’ll have no nonsense. I’ve had an old woman in with me this morning⁠—one of those that are here in the house⁠—telling me some story about some other girl that you have made a fool of. It’s nothing to me how much of that sort of thing you may have done, so that you do none of it here. But⁠—if you play any prank of that kind with me, you’ll find that you’ve made a mistake.”

Crosbie hardly made any answer to this, but got himself out of the room as quickly as he could.

“You’d better talk to Gazebee about the trifle of money you’ve got,” said the earl. Then he dismissed the subject from his mind, and no doubt imagined that he had fully done his duty by his daughter.

On the day after this, Crosbie was to go. On the last afternoon, shortly before dinner, he was waylaid by Lady Julia, who had passed the day in preparing traps to catch him.

“Mr. Crosbie,” she said, “let me have one word with you. Is this true?”

“Lady Julia,” he said, “I really do not know why you should inquire into my private affairs.”

“Yes, sir, you do know; you know very well. That poor young lady who has no father and no brother, is my neighbour, and her friends are my friends. She is a friend of my own, and being an old woman, I have a right to speak for her. If this is true, Mr. Crosbie, you are treating her like a villain.”

“Lady Julia, I really must decline to discuss the matter with you.”

“I’ll tell everybody what a villain you are; I will, indeed;⁠—a villain and a poor weak silly fool. She was too good for you; that’s what she was.” Crosbie, as Lady Julia was addressing to him the last words, hurried upstairs away from her, but her ladyship, standing on a landing-place, spoke up loudly, so that no word should be lost on her retreating enemy.

“We positively must get rid of that woman,” the countess, who heard it all, said to Margaretta. “She is disturbing the house and disgracing herself every day.”

“She went to papa this morning, mamma.”

“She did not get much by that move,” said the countess.

On the following morning Crosbie returned to town, but just before he left the castle he received a third letter from Lily Dale. “I have been rather disappointed at not hearing this morning,” said Lily, “for I thought the postman would have brought me a letter. But I know you’ll be a better boy when you get back to London, and I won’t scold you. Scold you, indeed! No; I’ll never scold you, not though I shouldn’t hear for a month.”

He would have given all that he had in the world, three times told, if he could have blotted out that visit to Courcy Castle from the past facts of his existence.

XXV Adolphus Crosbie Spends an Evening at His Club

Crosbie, as he was being driven from the castle to the nearest station, in a dogcart hired from the hotel, could not keep himself from thinking of that other morning, not yet a fortnight past, on which he had left Allington; and as he thought of it he knew that he was a villain. On this morning Alexandrina had not come out from the house to watch his departure, and catch the last glance of his receding figure. As he had not started very early she had sat with him at the breakfast-table; but others also had sat there, and when he got up to go, she did no more than smile softly and give him her hand. It had been already settled that he was to spend his Christmas at Courcy; as it had been also settled that he was to spend it at Allington.

Lady Amelia was, of all the family, the most affectionate to him, and perhaps of them all she was the one whose affection was worth the most. She was not a woman endowed with a very high mind or with very noble feelings.