The Palliser Novels (94 page)

“I had a plan all ready; — only he came back.”

“Of course he came back. Of course he came back, when they sent him word how you and she were going on. And now he will have forgiven her, and after that, of course, the thing will be all over.”

“I tell you what, aunt; she would go if she knew how. When I was forced to leave her last night, she promised to see me again. And as for being idle, and not doing anything; — why, I was out in Park Lane last night, after you were in bed.”

“What good did that do?”

“It didn’t do any good, as it happened. But a fellow can only try. I believe, after all, it would be easier down in the country, — especially now that he has taken it into his head to look after her.”

Lady Monk sat silent for a few moments, and then she said in a low voice, “What did she say to you when you were parting? What were her exact words?” She, at any rate, was not deficient in energy. She was anxious enough to see her purpose accomplished. She would have conducted the matter with discretion, if the running away with Mr Palliser’s wife could, in very fact, have been done by herself.

“She said she would see me again. She promised it twice.”

“And was that all?”

“What could she say more, when she was forced to go away?”

“Had she said that she would go with you?”

“I had asked her, — half a dozen times, and she did not once refuse. I know she means it, if she knew how to get away. She hates him; — I’m sure of it. A woman, you know, wouldn’t absolutely say that she would go, till she was gone.”

“If she really meant it, she would tell you.”

“I don’t think she could have told me plainer. She said she would see me again. She said that twice over.”

Again Lady Monk sat silent. She had a plan in her head, — a plan that might, as she thought, give to her nephew one more chance. But she hesitated before she could bring herself to explain it in detail. At first she had lent a little aid to this desired abduction of Mr Palliser’s wife, but in lending it had said no word upon the subject. During the last season she had succeeded in getting Lady Glencora to her house in London, and had taken care that Burgo should meet her there. Then a hint or two had been spoken, and Lady Glencora had been asked to Monkshade. Lady Glencora, as we know, did not go to Monkshade, and Lady Monk had then been baffled. But she did not therefore give up the game. Having now thought of it so much, she began to speak of it more boldly, and had procured money for her nephew that he might thereby be enabled to carry off the woman. But though this had been well understood between them, though words had been spoken which were sufficiently explicit, the plan had not been openly discussed. Lady Monk had known nothing of the mode in which Lady Glencora was to have been carried off after her party, nor whither she was to have been taken. But now, — now she must arrange it herself, and have a scheme of her own, or else the thing must fail absolutely. Even she was almost reluctant to speak out plainly to her nephew on such a subject. What if he should be false to her, and tell of her? But when a woman has made such schemes, nothing distresses her so sadly as their failure. She would risk all rather than that Mr Palliser should keep his wife.

“I will try and help you,” she said at last, speaking hoarsely, almost in a whisper, “if you have courage to make an attempt yourself.”

“Courage!” said he “What is it you think I am afraid of? Mr Palliser? I’d fight him, — or all the Pallisers, one after another, if it would do any good.”

“Fighting! There’s no fighting wanted, as you know well enough. Men don’t fight nowadays. Look here! If you can get her to call here some day, — say on Thursday, at three o’clock, — I will be here to receive her; and instead of going back into her carriage, you can have a cab for her somewhere near. She can come, as it were, to make a morning call.”

“A cab!”

“Yes; a cab won’t kill her, and it is less easily followed than a carriage.”

“And where shall we go?”

“There is a train to Southampton at four, and the boat sails for Jersey at half-past six; you will be in Jersey the next morning, and there is a boat goes on to St Malo, almost at once. You can go direct from one boat to the other, — that is, if she has strength and courage.” After that, who will say that Lady Monk was not a devoted aunt?

“That would do excellently well,” said the enraptured Burgo.

“She will have difficulty in getting away from me, out of the house. Of course I shall say nothing about it, and shall know nothing about it. She had better tell her coachman to drive somewhere to pick some one up, and to return; — out somewhere to Tyburnia, or down to Pimlico. Then she can leave me, and go out on foot, to where you have the cab. She can tell the hall-porter that she will walk to her carriage. Do you understand?” Burgo declared that he did understand.

“You must call on her, and make your way in, and see her, and arrange all this. It must be a Thursday, because of the boats.” Then she made inquiry about his money, and took from him the notes which he had, promising to return them, with something added, on the Thursday morning; but he asked, with a little whine, for a five-pound note, and got it. Burgo then told her about the travelling-bags and the stockings, and they were quite pleasant and confidential. “Bid her come in a stout travelling-dress,” said Lady Monk. “She can wear some lace or something over it, so that the servants won’t observe it. I will take no notice of it.” Was there ever such an aunt?

After this, Burgo left his aunt, and went away to his club, in a state of most happy excitement.

Alice, on her return from Westmoreland, went direct to Park Lane, whither Lady Glencora and Mr Palliser had also returned before her. She was to remain with them in London one entire day, and on the morning after that they were to start for Paris. She found Mr Palliser in close attendance upon his wife. Not that there was anything in his manner which at all implied that he was keeping watch over her, or that he was more with her, or closer to her than a loving husband might wish to be with a young wife; but the mode of life was very different from that which Alice had seen at Matching Priory!

On her arrival Mr Palliser himself received her in the hall, and took her up to his wife before she had taken off her travelling hat. “We are so much obliged to you, Miss Vavasor,” he said. “I feel it quite as deeply as Glencora.”

“Oh, no,” she said; “it is I that am under obligation to you for taking me.”

He merely smiled, and shook his head, and then took her up-stairs. On the stairs he said one other word to her: “You must forgive me if I was cross to you that night she went out among the ruins.” Alice muttered something, — some little fib of courtesy as to the matter having been forgotten, or never borne in mind; and then they went on to Lady Glencora’s room. It seemed to Alice that he was not so big or so much to be dreaded as when she had seen him at Matching. His descent from an expectant, or more than an expectant, Chancellor of the Exchequer, down to a simple, attentive husband, seemed to affect his gait, his voice, and all his demeanour. When he received Alice at the Priory he certainly loomed before her as something great, whereas now his greatness seemed to have fallen from him. We must own that this was hard upon him, seeing that the deed by which he had divested himself of his greatness had been so pure and good!

“Dear Alice, this is so good of you! I am all in the midst of packing, and Plantagenet is helping me.” Plantagenet winced a little under this, as the hero of old must have winced when he was found with the distaff. Mr Palliser had relinquished his sword of state for the distaff which he had assumed, and could take no glory in the change. There was, too, in his wife’s voice the slightest hint of mockery, which, slight as it was, he perhaps thought she might have spared. “You have nothing left to pack,” continued Glencora, “and I don’t know what you can do to amuse yourself.”

“I will help you,” said Alice.

“But we have so very nearly done. I think we shall have to pull all the things out, and put them up again, or we shall never get through to-morrow. We couldn’t start to-morrow; — could we, Plantagenet?”

“Not very well, as your rooms are ordered in Paris for the next day.”

“As if we couldn’t find rooms at every inn on the road. Men are so particular. Now in travelling I should like never to order rooms, — never to know where I was going or when I was going, and to carry everything I wanted in a market-basket.” Alice, who by this time had followed her friend along the passage to her bedroom, and had seen how widely the packages were spread about, bethought herself that the market-basket should be a large one. “And I would never travel among Christians. Christians are so slow, and they wear chimney-pot hats everywhere. The further one goes from London among Christians, the more they wear chimney-pot hats. I want Plantagenet to take us to see the Kurds, but he won’t.”

“I don’t think that would be fair to Miss Vavasor,” said Mr Palliser, who had followed them.

“Don’t put the blame on her head,” said Lady Glencora. “Women have always pluck for anything. Wouldn’t you like to see a live Kurd, Alice?”

“I don’t exactly know where they live,” said Alice.

“Nor I. I have not the remotest idea of the way to the Kurds. You see my joke, don’t you, though Plantagenet doesn’t? But one knows that they are Eastern, and the East is such a grand idea!”

“I think we’ll content ourselves with Rome, or perhaps Naples, on this occasion,” said Mr Palliser.

The notion of Lady Glencora packing anything for herself was as good a joke as that other one of the Kurds and whey. But she went flitting about from room to room, declaring that this thing must be taken, and that other, till the market-basket would have become very large indeed. Alice was astonished at the extent of the preparations, and the sort of equipage with which they were about to travel. Lady Glencora was taking her own carriage. “Not that I shall ever use it,” she said to Alice, “but he insists upon it, to show that I am not supposed to be taken away in disgrace. He is so good; — isn’t he?”

“Very good,” said Alice. “I know no one better.”

“And so dull!” said Lady Glencora. “But I fancy that all husbands are dull from the nature of their position. If I were a young woman’s husband, I shouldn’t know what to say to her that wasn’t dull.”

Two women and two men servants were to be taken. Alice had received permission to bring her own maid — “or a dozen, if you want them,” Lady Glencora had said. “Mr Palliser in his present mood would think nothing too much to do for you. If you were to ask him to go among the Kurds, he’d go at once; — or on to Crim Tartary, if you made a point of it.” But as both Lady Glencora’s servants spoke French, and as her own did not, Alice trusted herself in that respect to her cousin. “You shall have one all to yourself,” said Lady Glencora. “I only take two for the same reason that I take the carriage, — just as you let a child go out in her best frock, for a treat, after you’ve scolded her.”

When Alice asked why it was supposed that Mr Palliser was so specially devoted to her, the thing was explained to her. “You see, my dear, I have told him everything. I always do tell everything. Nobody can say I am not candid. He knows about your not letting me come to your house in the old days. Oh, Alice! — you were wrong then; I shall always say that. But it’s done and gone; and things that are done and gone shall be done and gone for me. And I told him all that you said, — about you know what. I have had nothing else to do but make confessions for the last ten days, and when a woman once begins, the more she confesses the better. And I told him that you refused Jeffrey.”

“You didn’t?”

“I did indeed, and he likes you the better for that. I think he’d let Jeffrey marry you now if you both wished it; — and then, oh dear! — supposing that you had a son and that we adopted it?”

“Cora, if you go on in that way I will not remain with you.”

“But you must, my dear. You can’t escape now. At any rate, you can’t when we once get to Paris. Oh dear! you shouldn’t grudge me my little naughtinesses. I have been so proper for the last ten days. Do you know I got into a way of driving Dandy and Flirt at the rate of six miles an hour, till I’m sure the poor beasts thought they were always going to a funeral. Poor Dandy and poor Flirt! I shan’t see them now for another year.”

On the following morning they breakfasted early, because Mr Palliser had got into an early habit. He had said that early hours would be good for them. “But he never tells me why,” said Lady Glencora. “I think it is pleasant when people are travelling,” said Alice. “It isn’t that,” her cousin answered; “but we are all to be such particularly good children. It’s hardly fair, because he went to sleep last night after dinner while you and I kept ourselves awake: but we needn’t do that another night, to be sure.” After breakfast they all three went to work to do nothing. It was ludicrous and almost painful to see Mr Palliser wandering about and counting the boxes, as though he could do any good by that. At this special crisis of his life he hated his papers and figures and statistics, and could not apply himself to them. He, whose application had been so unremitting, could apply himself now to nothing. His world had been brought to an abrupt end, and he was awkward at making a new beginning. I believe that they all three were reading novels before one o’clock. Lady Glencora and Alice had determined that they would not leave the house throughout the day. “Nothing has been said about it, but I regard it as part of the bond that I’m not to go out anywhere. Who knows but what I might be found in Gloucester Square?” There was, however, no absolute necessity that Mr Palliser should remain with them; and, at about three, he prepared himself for a solitary walk. He would not go down to the House. All interest in the House was over with him for the present. He had the Speaker’s leave to absent himself for the season. Nor would he call on anyone. All his friends knew, or believed they knew, that he had left town. His death and burial had been already chronicled, and were he now to reappear, he could reappear only as a ghost. He was being talked of as the departed one; — or rather, such talk on all sides had now come nearly to an end. The poor Duke of St Bungay still thought of him with regret when more than ordinarily annoyed by some special grievance coming to him from Mr Finespun; but even the Duke had become almost reconciled to the present order of things. Mr Palliser knew better than to disturb all this by showing himself again in public; and prepared himself, therefore, to take another walk under the elms in Kensington Gardens.