Anthony Trollope - The Palliser Novels - Complete Series - All 6 Books in One Edition

“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 banknotes 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.

Table of Contents Table of Contents Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn The Eustace Diamonds Phineas Redux The Prime Minister The Duke’s Children

On 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.