The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray (top books to read txt) 📕

Lambert had inveigled me into the marriage; that they knew such an union was unworthy of me; that (as Madam E. understood) they had desired a similar union for her younger son, which project, not unluckily for him, perhaps, was given up when it was found that Mr. Henry Warrington was not the inheritor of the Virginian property. If Mr. Lambert was a man of spirit and honour, as he was represented to be, Madam Esmond scarcely supposed that, after her representations, he would persist in desiring this match. She would not lay commands upon her son, whose temper she knew; but for the sake of Miss Lambert's own reputation and comfort, she urged that the dissolution of the engagement should come from her family, and not from the just unwillingness of Rachel Esmond Warrington of Virginia.

“God help us, George!” the General said, “and give us all strength to bear this grief, and these charges which it has pleased your mother to bring! They are hard, but they don't matter now. What is of most importance, is to spare as much sorrow as we can to my poor girl. I know you love her so well, that you will help me and her mother to make the blow as tolerable as we may to that poor gentle heart. Since she was born she has never given pain to a soul alive, and 'tis cruel that she should be made to suffer.” And as he spoke he passed his hand across his dry eyes.

“It was my fault, Martin! It was my fault!” weeps the poor mother.

“Your mother spoke us fair, and gave her promise,” said the father.

“And do you think I will withdraw mine?” cried I; and protested, with a thousand frantic vows, what they knew full well, that I was bound to Theo before Heaven, and that nothing should part me from her.

“She herself will demand the parting. She is a good girl, God help me! and a dutiful. She will not have her father and mother called schemers, and treated with scorn. Your mother knew not, very likely, what she was doing, but 'tis done. You may see the child, and she will tell you as much. Is Theo dressed, Molly? I brought the letter home from my office last evening after you were gone. The women have had a bad night. She knew at once by my face that there was bad news from America. She read the letter quite firmly. She said she would like to see you and say good-bye. Of course, George, you will give me your word of honour not to try and see her afterwards. As soon as my business will let me we will get away from this, but mother and I think we are best all together. 'Tis you, perhaps, had best go. But give me your word, at any rate, that you will not try and see her. We must spare her pain, sir! We must spare her pain!” And the good man sate down in such deep anguish himself that I, who was not yet under the full pressure of my own grief, actually felt his, and pitied it. It could not be that the dear lips I had kissed yesterday were to speak to me only once more. We were all here together; loving each other, sitting in the room where we met every day; my drawing on the table by her little workbox; she was in the chamber upstairs; she must come down presently.

Who is this opens the door? I see her sweet face. It was like our little Mary's when we thought she would die of the fever. There was even a smile upon her lips. She comes up and kisses me. “Good-bye, dear George!” she says. Great Heaven! An old man sitting in this room,—with my wife's workbox opposite, and she but five minutes away, my eyes grow so dim and full that I can't see the book before me. I am three-and-twenty years old again. I go through every stage of that agony. I once had it sitting in my own postchaise, with my wife actually by my side. Who dared to sully her sweet love with suspicion? Who had a right to stab such a soft bosom? Don't you see my ladies getting their knives ready, and the poor child baring it? My wife comes in. She has been serving out tea or tobacco to some of her pensioners. “What is it makes you look so angry, papa?” she says. “My love!” I say, “it is the thirteenth of April.” A pang of pain shoots across her face, followed by a tender smile. She has undergone the martyrdom, and in the midst of the pang comes a halo of forgiveness. I can't forgive; not until my days of dotage come, and I cease remembering anything. “Hal will be home for Easter; he will bring two or three of his friends with him from Cambridge,” she says. And straightway she falls to devising schemes for amusing the boys. When is she ever occupied, but with plans for making others happy?

A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object. My corns hurt me, I know, but I suspect my neighbour's shoes pinch him too. I am not going to howl much over my own grief, or enlarge at any great length on this one. Many another man, I dare say, has had the light of his day suddenly put out, the joy of his life extinguished, and has been left to darkness and vague torture. I have a book I tried to read at this time of grief—Howel's Letters—and when I come to the part about Prince Charles in Spain, up starts the whole tragedy alive again. I went to Brighthelmstone, and there, at the inn, had a room facing the east, and saw the sun get up ever so many mornings, after blank nights of wakefulness, and smoked my pipe of Virginia in his face. When I am in that place by chance, and see the sun rising now, I shake my fist at him, thinking, O orient Phoebus, what horrible grief and savage wrath have you not seen me suffer! Though my wife is mine ever so long, I say I am angry just the same. Who dared, I want to know, to make us suffer so? I was forbidden to see her. I kept my promise, and remained away from the house: that is, after that horrible meeting and parting. But at night I would go and look at her window, and watch the lamp burning there; I would go to the Chartreux (where I knew another boy), and call for her brother, and gorge him with cakes and half-crowns. I would meanly have her elder brother to dine, and almost kiss him when he went away. I used to breakfast at a coffee-house in Whitehall, in order to see Lambert go to his office; and we would salute each other sadly, and pass on without speaking. Why did not the women come out? They never did. They were practising on her, and persuading her to try and forget me. Oh, the weary, weary days! Oh, the maddening time! At last a doctor's chariot used to draw up before the General's house every day. Was she ill? I fear I was rather glad she was ill. My own suffering was so infernal, that I greedily wanted her to share my pain. And would she not? What grief of mine has it not felt, that gentlest and most compassionate of hearts? What pain would it not suffer to spare mine a pang?

I sought that doctor out. I had an interview with him. I told my story, and laid bare my heart to him, with an outburst of passionate sincerity, which won his sympathy. My confession enabled him to understand his young patient's malady; for which his drugs had no remedy or anodyne. I had promised not to see her, or to go to her: I had kept my promise. I had promised to leave London: I had gone away. Twice, thrice I went back and told my sufferings to him. He would take my fee now and again, and always receive me kindly, and let me speak. Ah, how I clung to him! I suspect he