Life's Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy (best love novels of all time .txt) 📕

The report pleased Millborne; it was highly creditable, and far better than he had hoped.  He was curious to get a view of the two women who led such blameless lives.

He had not long to wait to gain a glimpse of Leonora.  It was when she was standing on her own doorstep, opening her parasol, on the morning after his arrival.  She was thin, though not gaunt; and a good, well-wearing, thoughtful face had taken the place of the one which had temporarily attracted him in the days of his nonage.  She wore black, and it became her in her character of widow.  The daughter next appeared; she was a smoothed and rounded copy of her mother, with the same decision in her mien that Leonora had, and a bounding gait in which he traced a faint resemblance to his own at her age.

For the first time he absolutely made up his mind to call on them.  But his antecedent step was to send Leonora a note the next morning, stating his proposal to visit her, and suggesting the evening as the time, because she seemed to be so greatly occupied in her professional capacity during the day.  He purposely worded his note in such a form as not to require an answer from her which would be possibly awkward to write.

No answer came.  Naturally he should not have been surprised at this; and yet he felt a little checked, even though she had only refrained from volunteering a reply that was not demanded.

At eight, the hour fixed by himself, he crossed over and was passively admitted by the servant.  Mrs. Frankland, as she called herself, received him in the large music-and-dancing room on the first-floor front, and not in any private little parlour as he had expected.  This cast a distressingly business-like colour over their first meeting after so many years of severance.  The woman he had wronged stood before him, well-dressed, even to his metropolitan eyes, and her manner as she came up to him was dignified even to hardness.  She certainly was not glad to see him.  But what could he expect after a neglect of twenty years!

‘How do you do, Mr. Millborne?’ she said cheerfully, as to any chance caller.  ‘I am obliged to receive you here because my daughter has a friend downstairs.’

‘Your daughter—and mine.’

‘Ah—yes, yes,’ she replied hastily, as if the addition had escaped her memory.  ‘But perhaps the less said about that the better, in fairness to me.  You will consider me a widow, please.’

‘Certainly, Leonora . . . ’  He could not get on, her manner was so cold and indifferent.  The expected scene of sad reproach, subdued to delicacy by the run of years, was absent altogether.  He was obliged to come to the point without preamble.

‘You are quite free, Leonora—I mean as to marriage?  There is nobody who has your promise, or—’

‘O yes; quite free, Mr. Millborne,’ she said, somewhat surprised.

‘Then I will tell you why I have come.  Twenty years ago I promised to make you my wife; and I am here to fulfil that promise.  Heaven forgive my tardiness!’

Her surprise was increased, but she was not agitated.  She seemed to become gloomy, disapproving.  ‘I could not entertain such an idea at this time of life,’ she said after a moment or two.  ‘It would complicate matters too greatly.  I have a very fair income, and require no help of any sort.  I have no wish to marry . . . What could have induced you to come on such an errand now?  It seems quite extraordinary, if I may say so!’

‘It must—I daresay it does,’ Millborne replied vaguely; ‘and I must tell you that impulse—I mean in the sense of passion—has little to do with it.  I wish to marry you, Leonora; I much desire to marry you.  But it is an affair of conscience, a case of fulfilment.  I promised you, and it was dishonourable of me to go away.  I want to remove that sense of dishonour before I die.  No doubt we might get to love each other as warmly as we did in old times?’

She dubiously shook her head.  ‘I appreciate your motives, Mr. Millborne; but you must consider my position; and you will see that, short of the personal wish to marry, which I don’t feel, there is no reason why I should change my state, even though by so doing I should ease your conscience.  My position in this town is a respected one; I have built it up by my own hard labours, and, in short, I don’t wish to alter it.  My daughter, too, is just on the verge of an engagement to be married, to a young man who will make her an excellent husband.  It will be in every way a desirable match for her.  He is downstairs now.’

‘Does she know—anything about me?’

‘O no, no; God forbid!  Her father is dead and buried to her.  So that, you see, things are going on smoothly, and I don’t want to disturb their progress.’

He nodded.  ‘Very well,’ he said, and rose to go.  At the door, however, he came back again.

‘Still, Leonora,’ he urged, ‘I have come on purpose; and I don’t see what disturbance would be caused.  You would simply marry an old friend.  Won’t you reconsider?  It is no more than right that we should be united, remembering the girl.’

She shook her head, and patted with her foot nervously.

‘Well, I won’t detain you,’ he added.  ‘I shall not be leaving Exonbury yet.  You will allow me to see you again?’

‘Yes; I don’t mind,’ she said reluctantly.

The obstacles he had encountered, though they did not reanimate his dead passion for Leonora, did certainly make it appear indispensable to his peace of mind to overcome her coldness.  He called frequently.  The first meeting with the daughter was a trying ordeal, though he did not feel drawn towards her as he had expected to be; she did not excite his sympathies.  Her mother confided to Frances the errand of ‘her old friend,’ which was viewed by the daughter with strong disfavour.  His desire being thus uncongenial to both, for a long time Millborne made not the least impression upon Mrs. Frankland.  His attentions pestered her rather than pleased her.  He was surprised at her firmness, and it was only when he hinted at moral reasons for their union that she was ever shaken.  ‘Strictly speaking,’ he would say, ‘we ought, as honest persons, to marry; and that’s the truth of it, Leonora.’

‘I have looked at it in that light,’ she said quickly.  ‘It struck me at the very first.  But I don’t see the force of the argument.  I totally deny that after this interval of time I am bound to marry you for honour’s sake.  I would have married you, as you know well enough, at the proper time.  But what is the use of remedies now?’

They were standing at the window.  A scantly-whiskered young man, in clerical attire, called at the door below.  Leonora flushed with interest.

‘Who is he?’ said Mr. Millborne.

‘My Frances’s lover.  I am so sorry—she is not at home!  Ah! they have told him where she is, and he has gone to find her . . . I hope that suit will prosper, at any rate!’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Well, he cannot marry yet; and Frances sees but little of him now he has left Exonbury.  He was formerly doing duty here, but now he is curate of St. John’s, Ivell, fifty miles up the line.  There is a tacit agreement between them, but—there have been friends of his who object, because of our vocation.  However, he sees the absurdity of such an objection as that, and is not influenced by it.’

‘Your marriage with me would help the match, instead of hindering it, as you have said.’

‘Do you think it would?’

‘It certainly would, by taking you out of this business altogether.’

By chance he had found the way to move her somewhat, and he followed it up.  This view was imparted to Mrs. Frankland’s daughter, and it led her to soften her opposition.  Millborne, who had given up his lodging in Exonbury, journeyed to and fro regularly, till at last he overcame her negations, and she expressed a reluctant assent.

They were married at the nearest church; and the goodwill—whatever that was—of the music-and-dancing connection was sold to a successor only too ready to jump into the place, the Millbornes having decided to live in London.

Millborne was a householder in his old district, though not in his old street, and Mrs. Millborne and their daughter had turned themselves into Londoners.  Frances was well reconciled to the removal by her lover’s satisfaction at the change.  It suited him better to travel from Ivell a hundred miles to see her in London, where he frequently had other engagements, than fifty in the opposite direction where nothing but herself required his presence.  So here they were, furnished up to the attics, in one of the small but popular streets of the West district, in a house whose front, till lately of the complexion of a chimney-sweep, had been scraped to show to the surprised wayfarer the bright yellow and red brick that had lain lurking beneath the soot of fifty years.

The social lift that the two women had derived from the alliance was considerable; but when the exhilaration which accompanies a first residence in London, the sensation of standing on a pivot of the world, had passed, their lives promised to be somewhat duller than when, at despised Exonbury, they had enjoyed a nodding acquaintance with three-fourths of the town.  Mr. Millborne did not criticise his wife; he could not.  Whatever defects of hardness and acidity his original treatment and the lapse of years might have developed in her, his sense of a realized idea, of a re-established self-satisfaction, was always thrown into the scale on her side, and out-weighed all objections.

It was about a month after their settlement in town that the household decided to spend a week at a watering-place in the Isle of Wight, and while there the Reverend Percival Cope (the young curate aforesaid) came to see them, Frances in particular.  No formal engagement of the young pair had been announced as yet, but it was clear that their mutual understanding could not end in anything but marriage without grievous disappointment to one of the parties at least.  Not that Frances was sentimental.  She was rather of the imperious sort, indeed; and, to say all, the young girl had not fulfilled her father’s expectations of her.  But he hoped and worked for her welfare as sincerely as any father could do.

Mr. Cope was introduced to the new head of the family, and stayed with them in the Island two or three days.  On the last day of his visit they decided to venture on a two hours’ sail in one of the small yachts which lay there for hire.  The trip had not progressed far before all, except the curate, found that sailing in a breeze did not quite agree with them; but as he seemed to enjoy the experience, the other three bore their condition as well as they could without grimace or complaint, till the young man, observing their discomfort, gave immediate directions to tack about.  On the way back to port they sat silent, facing each other.

Nausea in such circumstances, like midnight watching, fatigue, trouble, fright, has this marked effect upon the countenance, that it often brings out strongly