The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (best fiction novels of all time .TXT) 📕

“I suppose you mean something.”

“I mean a great deal, dear. I mean all that a man can mean. That is it. You hardly understand that I am serious to the extent of ecstatic joy on the one side, and utter indifference to the world on the other. I shall never give it up till I learn that you are to be married to someone else.”

“What can I say, Mr. Carbury?”

“That you will love me.”

“But if I don’t?”

“Say that you will try.”

“No; I will not say that. Love should come without a struggle. I don’t know how one person is to try to love another in that way. I like you very much; but being married is such a terrible thing.”

“It would not be terrible to me, dear.”

“Yes;⁠—when you found that I was too young for your tastes.”

“I shall persevere, you know. Will you assure me of this⁠—that if you promise your hand to another man, you will let me know at once?”

“I suppose I may promise that,” she said, after pausing for a moment.

“There is no one as yet?”

“There is no one. But, Mr. Carbury, you have no right to question me. I don’t think it generous. I allow you to say things that nobody else could say because you are a cousin and because mamma trusts you so much. No one but mamma has a right to ask me whether I care for anyone.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“No.”

“If I have offended you it is because I love you so dearly.”

“I am not offended, but I don’t like to be questioned by a gentleman. I don’t think any girl would like it. I am not to tell everybody all that happens.”

“Perhaps when you reflect how much of my happiness depends upon it you will forgive me. Goodbye now.” She put out her hand to him and allowed it to remain in his for a moment. “When I walk about the old shrubberies at Carbury where we used to be together, I am always asking myself what chance there is of your walking there as the mistress.”

“There is no chance.”

“I am, of course, prepared to hear you say so. Well; goodbye, and may God bless you.”

The man had no poetry about him. He did not even care for romance. All the outside belongings of love which are so pleasant to many men and which to many women afford the one sweetness in life which they really relish, were nothing to him. There are both men and women to whom even the delays and disappointments of love are charming, even when they exist to the detriment of hope. It is sweet to such persons to be melancholy, sweet to pine, sweet to feel that they are now wretched after a romantic fashion as have been those heroes and heroines of whose sufferings they have read in poetry. But there was nothing of this with Roger Carbury. He had, as he believed, found the woman that he really wanted, who was worthy of his love, and now, having fixed his heart upon her, he longed for her with an amazing longing. He had spoken the simple truth when he declared that life had become indifferent to him without her. No man in England could be less likely to throw himself off the Monument or to blow out his brains. But he felt numbed in all the joints of his mind by this sorrow. He could not make one thing bear upon another, so as to console himself after any fashion. There was but one thing for him;⁠—to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.

He felt almost sure in his heart of hearts that the girl loved that other, younger man. That she had never owned to such love he was quite sure. The man himself and Henrietta also had both assured him on this point, and he was a man easily satisfied by words and prone to believe. But he knew that Paul Montague was attached to her, and that it was Paul’s intention to cling to his love. Sorrowfully looking forward through the vista of future years, he thought he saw that Henrietta would become Paul’s wife. Were it so, what should he do? Annihilate himself as far as all personal happiness in the world was concerned, and look solely to their happiness, their prosperity, and their joys? Be as it were a beneficent old fairy to them, though the agony of his own disappointment should never depart from him? Should he do this, and be blessed by them⁠—or should he let Paul Montague know what deep resentment such ingratitude could produce? When had a father been kinder to a son, or a brother to a brother, than he had been to Paul? His home had been the young man’s home, and his purse the young man’s purse. What right could the young man have to come upon him just as he was perfecting his bliss and rob him of all that he had in the world? He was conscious all the while that there was a something wrong in his argument⁠—that Paul when he commenced to love the girl knew nothing of his friend’s love⁠—that the girl, though Paul had never come in the way, might probably have been as obdurate as she was now to his entreaties. He knew all this because his mind was clear. But yet the injustice⁠—at any rate, the misery was so great, that to forgive it and to reward it would be weak, womanly, and foolish. Roger Carbury did not quite believe in the forgiveness of injuries. If you pardon all the evil done to you, you encourage others to do you evil! If you give your cloak to him