The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope [good story books to read .txt] 📗

You have told me that Mr. Carbury was your beau ideal of an English gentleman.”

“So he is.”

“Then why didn’t he behave as such?” and Mrs. Hurtle again smiled. “Did not you yourself feel that you were rebuked for coming here with me, when he expressed surprise at your journey? Has he authority over you?”

“Of course he has not. What authority could he have?”

“Nay, I do not know. He may be your guardian. In this safe-going country young men perhaps are not their own masters till they are past thirty. I should have said that he was your guardian, and that he intended to rebuke you for being in bad company. I dare say he did after I had gone.”

This was so true that Montague did not know how to deny it. Nor was he sure that it would be well that he should deny it. The time must come, and why not now as well as at any future moment? He had to make her understand that he could not join his lot with her⁠—chiefly indeed because his heart was elsewhere, a reason on which he could hardly insist because she could allege that she had a prior right to his heart;⁠—but also because her antecedents had been such as to cause all his friends to warn him against such a marriage. So he plucked up courage for the battle. “It was nearly that,” he said.

There are many⁠—and probably the greater portion of my readers will be among the number⁠—who will declare to themselves that Paul Montague was a poor creature, in that he felt so great a repugnance to face this woman with the truth. His folly in falling at first under the battery of her charms will be forgiven him. His engagement, unwise as it was, and his subsequent determination to break his engagement, will be pardoned. Women, and perhaps some men also, will feel that it was natural that he should have been charmed, natural that he should have expressed his admiration in the form which unmarried ladies expect from unmarried men when any such expression is to be made at all;⁠—natural also that he should endeavour to escape from the dilemma when he found the manifold dangers of the step which he had proposed to take. No woman, I think, will be hard upon him because of his breach of faith to Mrs. Hurtle. But they will be very hard on him on the score of his cowardice⁠—as, I think, unjustly. In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself⁠—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind’s skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself. With this man it was not really that. He feared the woman;⁠—or at least such fears did not prevail upon him to be silent; but he shrank from subjecting her to the blank misery of utter desertion. After what had passed between them he could hardly bring himself to tell her that he wanted her no further and to bid her go. But that was what he had to do. And for that his answer to her last question prepared the way. “It was nearly that,” he said.

“Mr. Carbury did take it upon himself to rebuke you for showing yourself on the sands at Lowestoft with such a one as I am?”

“He knew of the letter which I wrote to you.”

“You have canvassed me between you?”

“Of course we have. Is that unnatural? Would you have had me be silent about you to the oldest and the best friend I have in the world?”

“No, I would not have had you be silent to your oldest and best friend. I presume you would declare your purpose. But I should not have supposed you would have asked his leave. When I was travelling with you, I thought you were a man capable of managing your own actions. I had heard that in your country girls sometimes hold themselves at the disposal of their friends⁠—but I did not dream that such could be the case with a man who had gone out into the world to make his fortune.”

Paul Montague did not like it. The punishment to be endured was being commenced. “Of course you can say bitter things,” he replied.

“Is it my nature to say bitter things? Have I usually said bitter things to you? When I have hung round your neck and have sworn that you should be my God upon earth, was that bitter? I am alone and I have to fight my own battles. A woman’s weapon is her tongue. Say but one word to me, Paul, as you know how to say it, and there will be soon an end to that bitterness. What shall I care for Mr. Carbury, except to make him the cause of some innocent joke, if you will speak but that one word? And think what it is I am asking. Do you remember how urgent were once your own prayers to me;⁠—how you swore that your happiness could only be secured by one word of mine? Though I loved you, I doubted. There were considerations of money, which have now vanished. But I spoke it⁠—because I loved you, and because I believed you. Give me that which you swore you