The Last Chronicle of Barset (38 page)

‘Partly so, Lily.'

‘Now you must talk of him, and you must not abuse him. We must talk of him, because something must be done about his letter. Even if it be left unanswered, it cannot be so left without discussion. And yet you must say no evil of him.'

‘Am I to think that he behaved well?'

‘No, mamma; you are not to think that; but you are to look upon his fault as a fault that has been forgiven.'

‘It cannot be forgiven, dear.'

‘But, mamma, when you go to heaven –'

‘My dear!'

‘But you will go to heaven, mamma, and why should I not speak of it? You will go to heaven, and yet I suppose you have been very wicked, because we are all very wicked. But you won't be told of your wickedness there. You won't be hated there, because you were this or that when you were here.'

‘I hope not, Lily; but isn't your argument almost profane?'

‘No; I don't think so. We ask to be forgiven just as we forgive.
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That is the way in which we hope to be forgiven, and therefore it is the way in which we ought to forgive. When you say that prayer at night, mamma, do you ever ask yourself whether you have forgiven him?'

‘I forgive him as far as humanity can forgive. I would do him no injury.'

‘But if you and I are forgiven only after that fashion we shall never get to heaven.' Lily paused for some further answer from her mother, but as Mrs Dale was silent she allowed that portion of the subject to pass as completed. ‘And now, mamma, what answer do you think we ought to send to his letter?'

‘My dear, how am I to say? You know I have said already that if I could act on my own judgment, I would send none.'

‘But that was said in the bitterness of gall.'

‘Come, Lily, say what you think yourself. We shall get on better when you have brought yourself to speak. Do you think that you wish to see him again?'

‘I don't know, mamma. Upon the whole, I think not.'

‘Then in heaven's name let me write and tell him so.'

‘Stop a moment, mamma. There are two persons here to be considered – or rather, three.'

‘I would not have you think of me in such a question.'

‘I know you would not; but never mind, and let me go on. The three of us are concerned, at any rate; you, and he, and I. I am thinking of him now. We have all suffered, but I do believe that hitherto he has had the worst of it.'

‘And who has deserved the worst?'

‘Mamma, how can you go back in that way? We have agreed that that should be regarded as done and gone. He has been very unhappy, and now we see what remedy he proposes to himself for his misery. Do I flatter myself if I allow myself to look at it in that way?'

‘Perhaps he thinks he is offering a remedy for your misery.'

As this was said Lily turned round slowly and looked up into her mother's face. ‘Mamma,' she said, ‘that is very cruel. I did not think you could be so cruel. How can you, who believe him to be so selfish, think that?'

‘It is very hard to judge of men's motives. I have never supposed him to be so black that he would not wish to make atonement for the evil he has done.'

‘If I thought that there certainly could be but one answer.'

‘Who can look into a man's heart and judge all the sources of his actions? There are mixed feelings there, no doubt. Remorse for what he has done; regret for what he has lost – something, perhaps, of the purity of love.'

‘Yes, something – I hope something – for his sake.'

‘But when a horse kicks and bites, you know his nature and do not go near him. When a man has cheated you once, you think he will cheat you again, and you do not deal with him. You do not look to gather grapes from thistles,
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after you have found that they are thistles.'

‘I still go for the roses though I have often torn my hand with thorns in looking for them.'

‘But you do not pluck those that have become cankered in the blowing.'

‘Because he was once at fault, will he be cankered always?'

‘I would not trust him.'

‘Now, mamma, see how different we are; or, rather, how different it is when one judges for oneself or for another. If it were simply myself, and my own future fate in life, I would trust him with it all tomorrow, without a word. I should go to him as a gambler goes to the gambling-table, knowing that if I lost everything I could hardly be poorer than I was before. But I should have a better hope than the gambler is justified in having. That, however, is not my difficulty. And when I think of him I can see a prospect of success for the gambler. I think so well of myself that, loving him, as I do – yes, mamma, do not be uneasy – loving him, as I do, I believe I could be a comfort to him. I think that he might be better with me than without me. That is, he would be so, if he could teach himself to look back upon the past as I can do, and to judge of me as I can judge of him.'

‘He has nothing, at least, for which to condemn you.'

‘But he would have, were I to marry him now. He would condemn me because I had forgiven him. He would condemn me because I had borne what he had done to me, and had still loved him – loved him all through it all. He would feel and know the weakness – and there is weakness. I have been weak in not being able to rid myself of him altogether. He would recognise this after a while, and would despise me for it. But he would not see what there is of devotion to him in my being able to bear the taunts of the world in going back to him, and your taunts, and my own taunts. I should have to bear his also – not spoken aloud, but to be seen in his face and heard in his voice – and that I could not endure. If he despised me, and he would, that would make us both unhappy. Therefore, mamma, tell him not to come; tell him that he can never come; but, if it be possible, tell him this tenderly.' Then she got up and walked away, as though she were going out of the room; but her mother had caught her before the door was opened.

‘Lily,' she said, ‘if you think you can be happy with him, he shall come.'

‘No, mamma, no. I have been looking for the light ever since I read his letter, and I think I see it. And now, mamma, I will make a clean breast of it. From the moment in which I heard that that poor woman was dead, I have been in a state of flutter. It has been weak of me, and silly, and contemptible. But I could not help it. I kept on asking myself whether he would ever think of me now. Well; he has answered the question; and has so done it that he has forced upon me the necessity of a resolution. I have resolved, and I believe that I shall be the better for it.'

The letter which Mrs Dale wrote to Mr Crosbie was as follows:—

‘Mrs Dale presents her compliments to Mr Crosbie, and begs to assure him that it will not now be possible that he should renew the relations which were broken off three years ago, between him and Mrs Dale's family.' It was very short, certainly, and it did not by any means satisfy Mrs Dale. But she did not know how to say more without saying too much. The object of her letter was to save him the trouble of a futile perseverance, and them from the annoyance of persecution; and this she wished to do without mentioning her daughter's name. And she was determined that no word should escape her in which there was any touch of severity, any hint of an accusation. So much she owed to Lily in return for all that Lily was prepared to abandon. ‘There is my note,' she said at last, offering it to her daughter. ‘I did not mean to see it,' said Lily, ‘and, mamma, I will not read it now. Let it go. I know you have been good and have not scolded him.' ‘I have not scolded him, certainly,' said Mrs Dale. And then the letter was sent.

Mr John Eames, of the Income-tax Office, had in these days risen so high in the world that people in the west-end of town, and very respectable people too – people living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater – were glad to ask him out to dinner. Money had been left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified that money. He was a private secretary, which is in itself a great advance on being a mere clerk. And he had become the particularly intimate friend of an artist who had pushed himself into high fashion during the last year or two – one Conway Dalrymple, whom the rich English world was beginning to pet and pelt with gilt sugar-plums, and who seemed to take very kindly to petting and gilt sugar-plums. I don't know whether the friendship of Conway Dalrymple had not done as much to secure John Eames his position at the Bayswater dinner-tables, as had either the private secretaryship, or the earl's money; and yet, when they had first known each other, now only two or three years ago, Conway Dalrymple had been the poorer man of the two. Some chance had brought them together, and they had lived in the same rooms for nearly two years. This arrangement had been broken up, and the Conway Dalrymple of these days had a studio of his own, somewhere near Kensington Palace, where he painted portraits of young countesses, and in which he had even painted a young duchess. It was the peculiar merit of his pictures – so at least said the art-loving world – that though the likeness was always good, the stiffness of the modern portrait was never there. There was also ever some story told in Dalrymple's pictures over and above the story of the portraiture. This countess was drawn as a fairy with wings, that countess as a goddess with a helmet. The thing took for a time, and Conway Dalrymple was picking up his gilt sugar-plums with considerable rapidity.

On a certain day he and John Eames were to dine out together at
a certain house in that Bayswater district. It was a large mansion, if not made of stone yet looking very stony, with thirty windows at least, all of them with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at least four thousand a year for its maintenance. And its owner, Dobbs Broughton, a man very well known both in the City and over the grass in Northamptonshire, was supposed to have a good deal more than four thousand a year. Mrs Dobbs Broughton, a very beautiful woman, who certainly was not yet thirty-five, let her worst enemies say what they might, had been painted by Conway Dalrymple as a Grace. There were, of course, three Graces in the picture, but each Grace was Mrs Dobbs Broughton repeated. We all know how Graces stand sometimes; two Graces looking one way, and one the other. In this picture, Mrs Dobbs Broughton as centre Grace looked you full in the face. The same lady looked away from you, displaying her left shoulder as one side Grace, and displaying her right shoulder as the other Grace. For this pretty toy Mr Conway Dalrymple had picked up a gilt sugar-plum to the tune of six hundred pounds, and had, moreover, won the heart both of Mr and Mrs Dobbs Broughton. ‘Upon my word, Johnny,' Dalrymple had said to his friend, ‘he's a deuced good fellow, has really a good glass of claret – which is getting rarer and rarer every day – and will mount you for a day, whenever you please, down at Market Harboro'. Come and dine with them.' Johnny Eames condescended, and did go and dine with Mr Dobbs Broughton. I wonder whether he remembered, when Conway Dalrymple was talking of the rarity of good claret, how much beer the young painter used to drink when they were out together in the country, as they used to be occasionally, three years ago; and how the painter had then been used to complain that bitter cost threepence a glass, instead of twopence, which had hitherto been the recognised price of the article. In those days the sugar-plums had not been gilt, and had been much rarer.

Johnny Eames and his friend went together to the house of Mr Dobbs Broughton. As Dalrymple lived close to the Broughtons, Eames picked him up in a cab. ‘Filthy things, these cabs are,' said Dalrymple, as he got into the hansom.

‘I don't know about that,' said Johnny. ‘They're pretty good, I think.'

‘Foul things,' said Conway. ‘Don't you feel what a draught comes in here because the glass is cracked. I'd have one of my own, only I should never know what to do with it.'

‘The greatest nuisance on earth, I should think,' said Johnny.

‘If you could always have it standing ready round the corner,' said the artist, ‘it would be delightful. But one would want half a dozen horses, and two or three men for that.'

‘I think the stands are the best,' said Johnny.

They were a little late – a little later than they should have been had they considered that Eames was to be introduced to his new acquaintances. But he had already lived long enough before the world to be quite at his ease in such circumstances, and he entered Mrs Broughton's drawing-room with his pleasantest smile upon his face. But as he entered he saw a sight which made him look serious in spite of his efforts to the contrary. Mr Adolphus Crosbie, secretary to the Board at the General Committee Office, was standing on the rug before the fire.

‘Who will be there?' Eames had asked of his friend, when the suggestion to go and dine with Dobbs Broughton had been made to him.

‘Impossible to say,' Conway had replied. ‘A certain horrible fellow of the name of Musselboro, will almost certainly be there. He always is when they have anything of a swell dinner-party. He is a sort of partner of Broughton's in the City. He wears a lot of chains, and has elaborate whiskers, and an elaborate waistcoat, which is worse; and he doesn't wash his hands as often as he ought to do.'

‘An objectionable party, rather, I should say,' said Eames.

‘Well yes; Musselboro is objectionable. He's very good-humoured you know, and good-looking in a sort of way, and goes everywhere; that is among people of this sort. Of course he's not hand-and-glove with Lord Derby; and I wish he could be made to wash his hands. They haven't any other standing dish, and you may meet anybody. They always have a Member of Parliament; they generally manage to catch a Baronet; and I have met a Peer there. On that august occasion Musselboro was absent.'