Can You Forgive Her? (100 page)

‘Sir,’ said Alice, ‘you have heard from
her all that you can care to hear. If you have any feeling of honour in you, you will leave her.’

‘I will never leave her, while she tells me that she loves me!’

‘Yes, Burgo, you will; – you must! I shall never tell you that again, never. Do as she bids you. Go, and leave us; – but I could not bear that you should tell me that I was hard.’

‘You are hard; – hard and cruel, as you said, yourself.’

‘Am I? May God forgive you for saying that of me!’

‘Then why do you send me away?’

‘Because I am a man’s wife, and because I care for his honour, if not for my own. Alice, let us go.’

He still held her, but she would have been gone from him had he not stooped over her, and put his arm round her waist. In doing this, I doubt whether he was quicker than she would have been had she chosen to resist
him. As it was, he pressed her to his bosom, and, stooping over her, kissed her lips. Then he left her, and making his way out of the room, and down the stairs, got himself out into the street.

‘Thank God, that he is gone!’ said Alice.

‘You may say so,’ said Lady Glencora, ‘for you have lost nothing!’

‘And you have gained everything!’

‘Have I? I did not know that I had ever gained anything,
as yet. The only human being to whom I have ever yet given my whole heart, – the only thing that I have ever really loved, has just gone from me for ever, and you bid me thank God that I have lost him. There is no room for thankfulness in any of it; – either in
the love or in the loss. It is all wretchedness from first to last!’

‘At any rate, he understands now that you meant it when you told
him to leave you.’

‘Of course I meant it. I am beginning to know myself by degrees. As for running away with him, I have not the courage to do it. I can think of it, scheme for it, wish for it; – but as for doing it, that is beyond me. Mr Palliser is quite safe. He need not try to coax me to remain.’

Alice knew that it was useless to argue with her, so she came and sat over her, – for Lady Glencora
had again placed herself on the stool by the window, – and tried to sooth her by smoothing her hair, and nursing her like a child.

‘Of course I know that I ought to stay where I am,’ she said, breaking out, almost with rage, and speaking with quick, eager voice. ‘I am not such a fool as to mistake what I should be if I left my husband, and went to live with that man as his mistress. You don’t
suppose that I should think that sort of life very blessed. But why have I been brought to such a pass as this? And, as for female purity! Ah! What was their idea of purity when they forced me, like ogres, to marry a man for whom they knew I never cared? Had I gone with him, – had I now eloped with that man who ought to have been my husband, – whom would a just God have punished worst, – me, or those
two old women and my uncle, who tortured me into this marriage?’

‘Come, Cora, – be silent.’

‘I won’t be silent! You have had the making of your own lot. You have done what you liked, and no one has interfered with you. You have suffered, too; but you, at any rate, can respect yourself.’

‘And so can you, Cora, – thoroughly, now.’

‘How; – when he kissed me, and I could hardly restrain myself
from giving him back his kiss tenfold, could I respect myself? But it is all sin. I sin towards my husband, feigning that I love him; and I sin in loving that other man, who should have been my husband. There; – I hear Mr Palliser at the door. Come away with me; or rather, stay, for he will come up here, and you can keep him in talk while I try to recover myself.’

Mr Palliser did at once as his
wife had said, and came upstairs to
the little front room, as soon as he had deposited his hat in the hall. Alice was, in fact, in doubt, what she should do, as to mentioning, or omitting to mention, Mr Fitzgerald’s name. In an ordinary way, it would be natural that she should name any visitor who had called, and she specially disliked the idea of remaining silent because that visitor had come
as the lover of her host’s wife. But, on the other hand, she owed much to Lady Glencora; and there was no imperative reason, as things had gone, why she should make mischief. There was no further danger to be apprehended. But Mr Palliser at once put an end to her doubts. ‘You have had a visitor here?’ said he.

‘Yes,’ said Alice.

‘I saw him as I went out,’ said Mr Palliser. ‘Indeed, I met him
at the hall door. He, of course, was wrong to come here; – so wrong, that he deserves punishment, if there were any punishment for such offences.’

‘He has been punished, I think,’ said Alice.

‘But as for Glencora,’ continued Mr Palliser, without any apparent notice of what Alice had said, ‘I thought it better that she should see him or not, as she should herself decide.’

‘She had no choice
in the matter. As it turned out, he was shown up here at once. She sent for me, and I think she was right to do that.’

‘Glencora was alone when he came in?’

‘For a minute or two, – till I could get to her.’

‘I have no questions to ask about it,’ said Mr Palliser, after waiting for a few moments. He had probably thought that Alice would say something further. ‘I am very glad that you were within
reach of her, as otherwise her position might have been painful. For her, and for me perhaps, it may be as well that he has been here. As for him, I can only say, that I am forced to suppose him to be a villain. What a man does when driven by passion, I can forgive; but that he should deliberately plan schemes to ruin both her and me, is what I can hardly understand.’ As he made this little speech
I wonder whether his conscience said anything to him about Lady Dumbello, and a certain evening in his own life, on which he had ventured to call that lady, Griselda.

The little party of three dined together very quietly, and after dinner they all went to work with their novels. Before long Alice saw that Mr Palliser was yawning, and she began to understand how much he had given up in order that
his wife might be secure. It was then, when he had left the room for a few minutes, in order that he might wake himself by walking about the house, that Glencora told Alice of his yawning down at Matching. ‘I used to think that he would fall in pieces. What are we to do about it?’

‘Don’t seem to notice it,’ said Alice.

‘That’s all very well,’ said the other; ‘but he’ll set us off yawning as
bad as himself, and then he’ll notice it. He has given himself up to politics, till nothing else has any salt in it left for him. I cannot think why such a man as that wanted a wife at all.’

‘You are very hard upon him, Cora.’

‘I wish you were his wife, with all my heart. But, of course, I know why he got married. And I ought to feel for him as he has been so grievously disappointed.’ Then Mr
Palliser having walked off his sleep, returned to the room, and the remainder of the evening was passed in absolute tranquillity.

Burgo Fitzgerald, when he left the house, turned back into Grosvenor Square, not knowing, at first, whither he was going. He took himself as far as his uncle’s door, and then, having paused there for a moment, hurried on. For half an hour, or thereabouts, something
like true feeling was at work within his heart. He had once more pressed to his bosom the woman he had, at any rate, thought that he had loved. He had had his arm round her, and had kissed her, and the tone with which she had called him by his name was still ringing in his ears, ‘Burgo!’ He repeated his own name audibly to himself, as though in this way he could recall her voice. He comforted himself
for a minute with the conviction that she loved him. He felt, – for a moment, – that he could live on such consolation as that! But among mortals there could, in truth, hardly be one with whom such consolation would go a shorter way. He was a man who required to have such comfort backed by patés and curaçoa to a very large extent, and now it might be doubted whether the amount of patés and curaçoa
at his command would last him much longer.

He would not go in and tell his aunt at once of his failure, as he could gain nothing by doing so. Indeed, he thought that he would not tell his aunt at all. So he turned back from Grosvenor Square, and went down to his club in St James’s Street, feeling that billiards and brandy-and-water might, for the present, be the best restorative. But, as he went
back, he blamed himself very greatly in the matter of those bank-notes which he had allowed Lady Monk to take from him. How had it come to pass that he had been such a dupe in her hands? When he entered his club in St James’s Street his mind had left Lady Glencora, and was hard at work considering how he might best contrive to get that spoil out of his aunt’s possession.

O
N
the following morning everybody was stirring by times at Mr Palliser’s house in Park lane, and the master of that house yawned no more. There is some life in starting for a long journey, and the life is the stronger and the fuller if the things and people to be carried are numerous and troublesome. Lady Glencora was a little troublesome, and would not come down
to breakfast in time. When rebuked on account of this manifest breach of engagement, she asserted that the next train would do just as well; and when Mr Palliser proved to her, with much trouble, that the next train could not enable them to reach Paris on that day, she declared that it would be much more comfortable to take a week in going than to hurry over the ground in one day. There was nothing
she wanted so much as to see Folkestone.

‘If that is the case, why did not you tell me so before?’ said Mr Palliser, in his gravest voice. ‘Richard and the carriage went down yesterday, and are already on board the packet.’

‘If Richard and the carriage are already on board the packet,’ said Lady Glencora, ‘of course we must follow them, and we must put off the glories of Folkestone till we come
back. Alice, haven’t
you observed that, in travelling, you are always driven on by some Richard or some carriage, till you feel that you are a slave?’

All this was trying to Mr Palliser; but I think that he enjoyed it, nevertheless, and that he was happy when he found that he did get his freight off from the Pimlico Station in the proper train.

Of course Lady Glencora and Alice were very ill
crossing the Channel; of course the two maids were worse than their mistresses; of course the men kept out of their master’s way when they were wanted, and drank brandy-and-water with the steward downstairs; and of course Lady Glencora declared that she would not allow herself to be carried beyond Boulogne that day; – but, nevertheless, they did get on to Paris. Had Mr Palliser become Chancellor
of the Exchequer, as he had once hoped, he could hardly have worked harder than he did work. It was he who found out which carriage had been taken for them, and who put with his own hands, the ladies’ dressing-cases and cloaks on to the seats, – who laid out the novels, which, of course, were not read by the road, – and made preparations as though this stage of their journey was to take them a week,
instead of five hours and a half.

‘Oh, dear! how I have slept!’ said Lady Glencora, as they came near to Paris.

‘I think you’ve been tolerably comfortable,’ said Mr Palliser, joyfully.

‘Since we got out of that horrid boat I have done pretty well. Why do they make the boats so nasty? I’m sure they do it on purpose.’

‘It would be difficult to make them nice, I suppose?’ said Alice.

‘It is
the sea that makes them uncomfortable,’ said Mr Palliser.

‘Never mind; we shan’t have any more of it for twelve months, at any rate. We can get to the Kurds, Alice, without getting into a packet again. That, to my way of thinking, is the great comfort of the Continent. One can go everywhere without being seasick.’

Mr Palliser said nothing, but he sighed as he thought of being absent for a whole
year. He had said that such was his intention,
and would not at once go back from what he himself had said. But how was he to live for twelve months out of the House of Commons? What was he to do with himself, with his intellect and his energy, during all these coming dreary days? And then, – he might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer! He might even now, at this very moment, have been upon
his legs, making a financial statement of six hours’ duration, to the delight of one-half of the House, and bewilderment of the other, instead of dragging cloaks across that dingy, dull, dirty waiting-room at the Paris Station, in which British subjects are kept in prison while their boxes are being tumbled out of the carriages.

‘But we are not to stop here; – are we?’ said Lady Glencora, mournfully.

‘No, dear; – I have given the keys to Richard. We will go on at once.’

‘But can’t we have our things?’

‘In about half an hour,’ pleaded Mr Palliser.

‘I suppose we must bear it, Alice?’ said Lady Glencora as she got into the carriage that was waiting for her.

Alice thought of the last time in which she had been in that room, – when George and Kate had been with her, – and the two girls had
been quite content to wait patiently while their trunks were being examined. But Alice was now travelling with great people, – with people who never spoke of their wealth, or seemed ever to think of it, but who showed their consciousness of it at every turn of their lives. ‘After all,’ Alice had said to herself more than once, ‘I doubt whether the burden is not greater than the pleasure.’

They
stayed in Paris for a week, and during that time Alice found that she became very intimate with Mr Palliser. At Matching she had, in truth, seen but little of him, and had known nothing. Now she began to understand his character, and learned how to talk to him. She allowed him to tell her of things in which Lady Glencora resolutely persisted in taking no interest. She delighted him by writing down
in a little pocket-book the number of eggs that were consumed in Paris every day, whereas Glencora protested that the information was worth nothing unless her husband
could tell her how many of the eggs were good, and how many bad. And Alice was glad to find that a hundred and fifty thousand female operatives were employed in Paris, while Lady Glencora said it was a great shame, and that they
ought all to have husbands. When Mr Palliser explained that that was impossible, because of the redundancy of the female population, she angered him very much by asserting that she saw a great many men walking about who, she was quite sure, had not wives of their own.