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

“Nor did I go to her, sir,” I said, turning red, no doubt; for though this was truth, I own it was untrue.

“You mean she was brought to you?” says Theo's father, in great agitation. “Is it behind Hester's petticoat that you will shelter yourself? What a fine defence for a gentleman!”

“Well, I won't screen myself behind the poor child,” I replied. “To speak as I did was to make an attempt at evasion, and I am ill-accustomed to dissemble. I did not infringe the letter of my agreement, but I acted against the spirit of it. From this moment I annul it altogether.”

“You break your word given to me!” cries Mr. Lambert.

“I recall a hasty promise made on a sudden at a moment of extreme excitement and perturbation. No man can be for ever bound by words uttered at such a time; and, what is more, no man of honour or humanity, Mr. Lambert, would try to bind him.”

“Dishonour to me! sir,” exclaims the General.

“Yes, if the phrase is to be shuttlecocked between us!” I answered, hotly. “There can be no question about love, or mutual regard, or difference of age, when that word is used: and were you my own father—and I love you better than a father, Uncle Lambert,—I would not bear it! What have I done? I have seen the woman whom I consider my wife before God and man, and if she calls me I will see her again. If she comes to me, here is my home for her, and the half of the little I have. 'Tis you, who have no right, having made me the gift, to resume it. Because my mother taunts you unjustly, are you to visit Mrs. Esmond's wrong upon this tender, innocent creature? You profess to love your daughter, and you can't bear a little wounded pride for her sake. Better she should perish away in misery, than an old woman in Virginia should say that Mr. Lambert had schemed to marry one of his daughters. Say that to satisfy what you call honour and I call selfishness, we part, we break our hearts well nigh, we rally, we try to forget each other, we marry elsewhere? Can any man be to my dear as I have been? God forbid! Can any woman be to me what she is? You shall marry her to the Prince of Wales to-morrow, and it is a cowardice and treason. How can we, how can you, undo the promises we have made to each other before Heaven? You may part us: and she will die as surely as if she were Jephthah's daughter. Have you made any vow to Heaven to compass her murder? Kill her if you conceive your promise so binds you: but this I swear, that I am glad you have come, so that I may here formally recall a hasty pledge which I gave, and that, call me when she will, I will come to her!”

No doubt this speech was made with the flurry and agitation belonging to Mr. Warrington's youth, and with the firm conviction that death would infallibly carry off one or both of the parties, in case their worldly separation was inevitably decreed. Who does not believe his first passion eternal? Having watched the world since, and seen the rise, progress, and—alas, that I must say it!—decay of other amours, I may smile now as I think of my own youthful errors and ardours; but, if it be a superstition, I had rather hold it; I had rather think that neither of us could have lived with any other mate, and that, of all its innumerable creatures, Heaven decreed these special two should be joined together.

“We must come, then, to what I had fain have spared myself,” says the General, in reply to my outbreak; “to an unfriendly separation. When I meet you, Mr. Warrington, I must know you no more. I must order—and they will not do other than obey me—my family and children not to recognise you when they see you, since you will not recognise in your intercourse with me the respect due to my age, the courtesy of gentlemen. I had hoped so far from your sense of honour, and the idea I had formed of you, that, in my present great grief and perplexity, I should have found you willing to soothe and help me as far as you might—for, God knows, I have need of everybody's sympathy. But, instead of help, you fling obstacles in my way. Instead of a friend—a gracious Heaven pardon me!—I find in you an enemy! An enemy to the peace of my home and the honour of my children, sir! And as such I shall treat you, and know how to deal with you, when you molest me!”

And, waving his hand to me, and putting on his hat, Mr. Lambert hastily quitted my apartment.

I was confounded, and believed, indeed, there was war between us. The brief happiness of yesterday was clouded over and gone, and I thought that never since the day of the first separation had I felt so exquisitely unhappy as now, when the bitterness of quarrel was added to the pangs of parting, and I stood not only alone but friendless. In the course of one year's constant intimacy I had come to regard Lambert with a reverence and affection which I had never before felt for any mortal man except my dearest Harry. That his face should be turned from me in anger was as if the sun had gone out of my sphere, and all was dark around me. And yet I felt sure that in withdrawing the hasty promise I had made not to see Theo, I was acting rightly—that my fidelity to her, as hers now to me, was paramount to all other ties of duty or obedience, and that, ceremony or none, I was hers, first and before all. Promises were passed between us, from which no parent could absolve either; and all the priests in Christendom could no more than attest and confirm the sacred contract which had tacitly been ratified between us.

I saw Jack Lambert by chance that day, as I went mechanically to my not unusual haunt, the library of the new Museum; and with the impetuousness of youth, and eager to impart my sorrow to some one, I took him out of the room and led him about the gardens, and poured out my grief to him. I did not much care for Jack (who in truth was somewhat of a prig, and not a little pompous and wearisome with his Latin quotations) except in the time of my own sorrow, when I would fasten upon him or any one; and having suffered himself in his affair with the little American, being haud ignarus mali (as I knew he would say), I found the college gentleman ready to compassionate another's misery. I told him, what has here been represented at greater length, of my yesterday's meeting with his sister; of my interview with his father in the morning; of my determination at all hazards never to part with Theo. When I found from the various quotations from the Greek and Latin authors which he uttered that he leaned to my side in the dispute, I thought him a man of great sense, clung eagerly to his elbow, and bestowed upon him much more affection than he was accustomed at other times to have from me. I walked with him up to his father's lodgings in Dean Street; saw him enter at the dear door; surveyed the house from without with a sickening desire to know from its exterior appearance how my beloved fared within; and called for a bottle at the coffee-house where I waited Jack's return. I called him Brother when I sent him away. I fondled him as the condemned wretch at Newgate hangs about the jailor or the parson, or any one who is kind to him in his