Can You Forgive Her? (20 page)

‘I have tried, and it will not be banished.’

‘Try again, Alice. It
is a damned spirit, and belongs neither to heaven nor to earth. Do not say to me the words that you were about to say till you have wrestled with it manfully. I think I
know what those words were to be. If you love me, those words should not be spoken. If you do not–’

‘If I do not love you, I love no one upon earth.’

‘I believe it. I believe it as I believe in my own love for you. I trust your
love implicitly, Alice. I know that you love me. I think I can read your mind. Tell me that I may return to Cambridgeshire, and again plead my cause for an early marriage from thence. I will not take such speech from you to mean more than it says!’

She sat quiet, looking at him – looking full into his face. She had in nowise changed her mind, but after such words from him, she did not know how
to declare to him her resolution. There was something in his manner that awed her, – and something also that softened her.

‘Tell me,’ said he, ‘that I may see you again tomorrow morning in our usual quiet, loving way, and that I may return home tomorrow evening. Pronounce a yea to that speech from me, and I will ask for nothing further.’

‘No; I cannot do so,’ she said. And the tone of her voice,
as she spoke, was different to any tone that he had heard before from her mouth.

‘Is that melancholy fiend too strong for you?’ He smiled as he said this, and as he smiled, he took her hand. She did not attempt to withdraw it, but sat by him in a strange calmness, looking straight before her into the middle of the room. ‘You have not struggled with it. You know, as I do, that it is a bad fiend
and a wicked one, – a fiend that is prompting you to the worst cruelty in the world. Alice! Alice! Alice! Try to think of all this as though some other person were concerned. If it were your friend, what advice would you give her?’

‘I would bid her tell the man who had loved her, – that is, if he were noble, good, and great, – that she found herself to be unfit to be his wife; and then I would
bid her ask his pardon humbly on her knees.’ As she said this, she sank before him on to the floor, and looked up into his face with an expression of sad contrition which almost drew him from his purposed firmness.

He had purposed to be firm, – to yield to her in nothing, resolving
to treat all that she might say as the hallucination of a sickened imagination, – as the effect of absolute Want
of health, for which some change in her mode of life would be the best cure. She might bid him begone in what language she would. He knew well that such was her intention. But he would not allow a word coming from her in such a way to disturb arrangements made for the happiness of their joint lives. As a loving husband would treat a wife, who, in some exceptionable moment of a melancholy malady,
should declare herself unable to remain longer in her home, so would he treat her. As for accepting what she might say as his dismissal, he would as soon think of taking the fruit-trees from the southern wall because the sun sometimes shines from the north. He could not treat either his interests or hers so lightly as that.

‘But what if he granted no such pardon, Alice? I will grant none such.
You are my wife, my own, my dearest, my chosen one. You are all that I value in the world, my treasure and my comfort, my earthly happiness and my gleam of something better that is to come hereafter. Do you think that I shall let you go from me in that way? No, love. If you are ill I will wait till your illness is gone by; and, if you will let me, I will be your nurse.’

‘I am not ill.’

‘Not
ill with any defined sickness. You do not shake with ague, nor does your head rack you with aching; but yet you may be ill. Think of what has passed between us. Must you not be ill when you seek to put an end to all that without any cause assigned.’

‘You will not hear my reasons,’ – she was still kneeling before him and looking up into his face.

‘I will hear them if you will tell me that they
refer to any supposed faults of my own.’

‘No, no, no!’

‘Then I will not hear them. It is for me to find out your faults, and when I have found out any that require complaint. I will come and make it. Dear Alice, I wish you knew how I long for you.’ Then he put his hand upon her hair, as though he would caress her.

But this she would not suffer, so she rose slowly, and stood with
her hand upon
the table in the middle of the room. ‘Mr Grey–’ she said.

‘If you will call me so, I shall think it only a part of your malady.’

‘Mr Grey,’ she continued, ‘I can only hope that you will take me at my word.’

‘Oh, but I will not; certainly I will not, if that would be adverse to my own interests.’

‘I am thinking of your interests; I am, indeed; – at any rate as much as of my own. I feel quite
sure that I should not make you happy as your wife, – quite sure; and feeling that; I think that I am right, even after all that has passed, to ask your forgiveness, and to beg that our engagement may be over.’

‘No, Alice, no; never with my consent I cannot tell you with what contentment I would marry you tomorrow, – tomorrow, or next month, or the month after. But if it cannot be so, then I
will wait. Nothing but your marriage with some one else would convince me.’

‘I cannot convince you in that way,’ she said, smiling.

‘You will convince me in no other. You have not spoken to your father of this as yet?’

‘Not as yet’

‘Do not do so, at any rate for the present. You will own that it might be possible that you would have to unsay what you had said.’

‘No; it is not possible.’

‘Give yourself and me the chance. It can do no harm. And, Alice, I ask you now for no reasons. I will not ask your reasons, or even listen to them, because I do not believe that they will long have effect even on yourself. Do you still think of going to Cheltenham?’

‘I have decided nothing as yet.’

‘If I were you, I would go. I think a change of air would be good for you.’

‘Yes; you treat me
as though I were partly silly, and partly insane; but it is not so. The change you speak of should be in my nature, and in yours.’

He shook his head and still smiled. There was something in the unperturbed security of his manner which almost made her angry with him. It seemed as though he assumed so great a superiority that he felt himself able to treat any resolve of hers as the petulance of
a child. And though he spoke in strong language of his love, and of his longing that she should come to him, yet he was so well able to command his feelings, that he showed no sign of grief at the communication she had made to him. She did not doubt his love, but she believed him to be so much the master of his love, – as he was the master of everything else, that her separation from him would cause
him no uncontrollable grief. In that she utterly failed to understand his character. Had she known him better, she might have been sure that such a separation now would with him have carried its mark to the grave. Should he submit to her decision, he would go home and settle himself to his books the next day; but on no following day would he be again capable of walking forth among his flowers
with an easy heart. He was a strong, constant man, perhaps over-conscious of his own strength; but then his strength was great. ‘He is perfect!’ Alice had said to herself often. ‘Oh that he were less perfect!’

He did not stay with her long after the last word that has been recorded. ‘Perhaps’ he said, as for a moment he held her hand at parting, ‘I had better not come tomorrow.’

‘No, no; it
is better not.’

‘I advise you not to tell your father of this, and doubtless you will think of it before you do so. But if you do tell him, let me know that you have done so.’

‘Why that?’

‘Because in such case I also must see him. God bless you, Alice! God bless you, dearest, dearest Alice!’ Then he went, and she sat there on the sofa without moving, till she heard her father’s feet as he came
up the stairs.

‘What, Alice, are you not in bed yet?’

‘Not yet, papa.’

‘And so John Grey has been here. He has left his stick in the hall. I should know it among a thousand.’

‘Yes; he has been here.’

‘Is anything the matter, Alice?’

‘No, papa, nothing is the matter.’

‘He has not made himself disagreeable, has he?’

‘Not in the least. He never does anything wrong. He may defy man or woman
to find fault with him.’

‘So that is it, is it? He is just a shade too good. Well, I have always thought that myself. But it’s a fault on the right side.’

‘It’s no fault, Papa. If there be any fault, it is not with him. But I am yawning and tired, and I will go to bed.’

‘Is he to be here tomorrow?’

‘No; he returns to Nethercoats early. Good night, papa.’

Mr Vavasor, as he went up to his bedroom,
felt sure that there had been something wrong between his daughter and her lover. ‘I don’t know how she’ll ever put up with him,’ he said to himself, ‘he is so terribly conceited. I shall never forget how he went on about Charles Kemble
⁴
, and what a fool he made of himself.’

Alice, before she went to bed, sat down and wrote a letter to her cousin Kate.

I
T
cannot perhaps fairly be said that George Vavasor was an un-hospitable man, seeing that it was his custom to entertain his friends occasionally at Greenwich, Richmond, or such places; and he would now and again have a friend to dine with him at his club. But he never gave breakfasts, dinners, or suppers under his own roof. During a short period of his wine-selling
career, at which time he had occupied handsome rooms over his place of business in New Burlington Street, he had presided at certain feasts given to customers or expectant customers by the firm; but he had not found this employment to his taste, and had soon relinquished it to one of the other partners. Since that he had lived in lodgings in Cecil Street, – down at the bottom of that retired
nook, near to the river and away from the Strand. Here he had
simply two rooms on the first floor, and hither his friends came to him very rarely. They came very rarely on any account. A stray man might now and then pass an hour with him here; but on such occasions the chances were that the visit had some reference, near or distant, to affairs of business. Eating or drinking there was never any
to be found here by the most intimate of his allies. His lodgings were his private retreat, and they were so private that but few of his friends knew where he lived.

And had it been possible he would have wished that no one should have known his whereabouts. I am not aware that he had any special reason for this peculiarity, or that there was anything about his mode of life that required hiding;
but he was a man who had always lived as though secrecy in certain matters might at any time become useful to him. He had a mode of dressing himself when he went out at night that made it almost impossible that any one should recognize him. The people at his lodgings did not even know that he had relatives, and his nearest relatives hardly knew that he had lodgings. Even Kate had never been at
the rooms in Cecil Street, and addressed all her letters to his place of business or his club. He was a man who would bear no inquiry into himself. If he had been out of view for a month, and his friends asked him where he had been, he always answered the question falsely, or left it unanswered. There are many men of whom everybody knows all about all then: belongings; – as to whom everybody knows
where they live, whither they go, what is their means, and how they spend it. But there are others of whom no man knows anything, and George Vavasor was such a one. For myself I like the open babbler the best Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice.

Vavasor also maintained another little establishment, down in Oxfordshire; but the two establishments did not even know
of each other’s existence. There was a third, too, very closely hidden from the world’s eye, which shall be nameless; but of the establishment in Oxfordshire he did sometimes speak, in very humble words, among his friends. When he found himself among hunting men, he would speak of his two nags at Roebury, saying that he had never yet been able to mount a regular hunting stable, and
that he supposed
he never would; but that there were at Roebury two indifferent beasts of his if any one chose to buy them. And men very often did buy Vavasor’s horses. When he was on them they always went well and sold themselves readily. And though he thus spoke of two, and perhaps did not keep more during the summer, he always seemed to have horses enough when he was down in the country. No one even knew
George Vavasor not to hunt because he was short of stuff. And here, at Roebury, he kept a trusty servant, an ancient groom with two little bushy grey eyes which looked as though they could see through a stable door. Many were the long whisperings which George and Bat Smithers carried on at the stable door, in the very back depth of the yard attached to the hunting inn at Roebury. Bat regarded his
master as a man wholly devoted to horses, but often wondered why he was not more regular in his sojournings in Oxfordshire. Of any other portion of his master’s life Bat knew nothing. Bat could give the address of his master’s club in London, but he could give no other address.

But though Vavasor’s private lodgings were so very private, he had, nevertheless, taken some trouble in adorning them.
The furniture in the sitting-room was very neat, and the book-shelves were filled with volumes that shone with gilding on their backs. The inkstand, the paper-weight, the envelope case on his writing-table were all handsome. He had a single good portrait of a woman’s head hanging on one of his walls. He had a special place adapted for his pistols, others for his foils, and again another for his
whips. The room was as pretty a bachelor’s room as you would wish to enter, but you might see, by the position of the single easy-chair that was brought forward, that it was seldom appropriated to the comfort of more than one person. Here he sat lounging over his breakfast, late on a Sunday morning in September, when all the world was out of town. He was reading a letter which had just been brought
down to him from his club. Though the writer of it was his sister Kate, she had not been privileged to address it to his private lodgings. He read it very quickly, running rapidly over its contents, and then threw it aside from him as though it were of no moment, keeping, however, an enclosure in his hand.