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

that it might be well to write a short line to Lily, telling her nothing of the truth⁠—a note written as though his engagement with her was still unbroken, but yet written with care, saying nothing about that engagement, so as to give him a little time. Then he thought that he would telegraph to Bernard and tell everything to him. Bernard would, of course, be prepared to avenge his cousin in some way, but for such vengeance Crosbie felt that he should care little. Lady Julia had told him that Lily was without father or brother, thereby accusing him of the basest cowardice. “I wish she had a dozen brothers,” he said to himself. But he hardly knew why he expressed such a wish.

He returned to London on the last day of October, and he found the streets at the West End nearly deserted. He thought, therefore, that he should be quite alone at his club, but as he entered the dinner room he saw one of his oldest and most intimate friends standing before the fire. Fowler Pratt was the man who had first brought him into Sebright’s, and had given him almost his earliest start on his successful career in life. Since that time he and his friend Fowler Pratt had lived in close communion, though Pratt had always held a certain ascendancy in their friendship. He was in age a few years senior to Crosbie, and was in truth a man of better parts. But he was less ambitious, less desirous of shining in the world, and much less popular with men in general. He was possessed of a moderate private fortune on which he lived in a quiet, modest manner, and was unmarried, not likely to marry, inoffensive, useless, and prudent. For the first few years of Crosbie’s life in London he had lived very much with his friend Pratt, and had been accustomed to depend much on his friend’s counsel; but latterly, since he had himself become somewhat noticeable, he had found more pleasure in the society of such men as Dale, who were not his superiors either in age or wisdom. But there had been no coolness between him and Pratt, and now they met with perfect cordiality.

“I thought you were down in Barsetshire,” said Pratt.

“And I thought you were in Switzerland.”

“I have been in Switzerland,” said Pratt.

“And I have been in Barsetshire,” said Crosbie. Then they ordered their dinner together.

“And so you’re going to be married?” said Pratt, when the waiter had carried away the cheese.

“Who told you that?”

“Well, but you are? Never mind who told me, if I was told the truth.”

“But if it be not true?”

“I have heard it for the last month,” said Pratt, “and it has been spoken of as a thing certain; and it is true; is it not?”

“I believe it is,” said Crosbie, slowly.

“Why, what on earth is the matter with you, that you speak of it in that way? Am I to congratulate you, or am I not? The lady, I’m told, is a cousin of Dale’s.”

Crosbie had turned his chair from the table round to the fire, and said nothing in answer to this. He sat with his glass of sherry in his hand, looking at the coals, and thinking whether it would not be well that he should tell the whole story to Pratt. No one could give him better advice; and no one, as far as he knew his friend, would be less shocked at the telling of such a story. Pratt had no romance about women, and had never pretended to very high sentiments.

“Come up into the smoking-room and I’ll tell you all about it,” said Crosbie. So they went off together, and, as the smoking-room was untenanted, Crosbie was able to tell his story.

He found it very hard to tell;⁠—much harder than he had beforehand fancied. “I have got into terrible trouble,” he began by saying. Then he told how he had fallen suddenly in love with Lily, how he had been rash and imprudent, how nice she was⁠—“infinitely too good for such a man as I am,” he said;⁠—how she had accepted him, and then how he had repented. “I should have told you beforehand,” he then said, “that I was already half engaged to Lady Alexandrina De Courcy.” The reader, however, will understand that this half-engagement was a fiction.

“And now you mean that you are altogether engaged to her?”

“Exactly so.”

“And that Miss Dale must be told that, on second thoughts, you have changed your mind?”

“I know that I have behaved very badly,” said Crosbie.

“Indeed you have,” said his friend.

“It is one of those troubles in which a man finds himself involved almost before he knows where he is.”

“Well; I can’t look at it exactly in that light. A man may amuse himself with a girl, and I can understand his disappointing her and not offering to marry her⁠—though even that sort of thing isn’t much to my taste. But, by George, to make an offer of marriage to such a girl as that in September, to live for a month in her family as her affianced husband, and then coolly go away to another house in October, and make an offer to another girl of higher rank⁠—”

“You know very well that that has had nothing to do with it.”

“It looks very like it. And how are you going to communicate these tidings to Miss Dale?”

“I don’t know,” said Crosbie, who was beginning to be very sore.

“And you have quite made up your mind that you’ll stick to the earl’s daughter?”

The idea of jilting Alexandrina instead of Lily had never as yet presented itself to Crosbie, and now, as he thought of it, he could not perceive that it was feasible.

“Yes,” he said, “I shall marry Lady Alexandrina;⁠—that is, if I do not cut the whole concern, and my own throat into the bargain.”

“If I were in your shoes I think I should cut the whole concern. I could