“Oh, very well,” and then Miss Biggs took her bedcandle and left the room. Was it not hard upon her that she should be forced to absent herself at this moment, when the excitement of the battle was about to begin in earnest? Her footsteps lingered as she slowly retreated from the drawing-room door, and for one instant she absolutely paused, standing still with eager ears. It was but for an instant, and then she went on upstairs, out of hearing, and sitting herself down by her bedside allowed the battle to rage in her imagination.
Mr. Furnival would have sat there silent till his wife had gone also, and so the matter would have terminated for that evening—had she so willed it. But she had been thinking of her miseries; and, having come to some sort of resolution to speak of them openly, what time could she find more appropriate for doing so than the present? “Tom,” she said—and as she spoke there was still a twinkle of the old love in her eye, “we are not going on together as well as we should do—not lately. Would it not be well to make a change before it is too late?”
“What change?” he asked; not exactly in an ill humour, but with a husky, thick voice. He would have preferred now that she should have followed her friend to bed.
“I do not want to dictate to you, Tom, but—! Oh Tom, if you knew how wretched I am!”
“What makes you wretched?”
“Because you leave me all alone; because you care more for other people than you do for me; because you never like to be at home, never if you can possibly help it. You know you don’t. You are always away now upon some excuse or other; you know you are. I don’t have you home to dinner not one day in the week through the year. That can’t be right, and you know it is not. Oh Tom! you are breaking my heart, and deceiving me—you are. Why did I go down and find that woman in your chamber with you, when you were ashamed to own to me that she was coming to see you? If it had been in the proper way of law business, you wouldn’t have been ashamed. Oh, Tom!”
The poor woman had begun her plaint in a manner that was not altogether devoid of a discreet eloquence. If only she could have maintained that tone, if she could have confined her words to the tale of her own grievances, and have been contented to declare that she was unhappy, only because he was not with her, it might have been well. She might have touched his heart, or at any rate his conscience, and there might have been some enduring result for good. But her feelings had been too many for her, and as her wrongs came to her mind, and the words heaped themselves upon her tongue, she could not keep herself from the one subject which she should have left untouched. Mr. Furnival was not the man to bear any interference such as this, or to permit the privacy of Lincoln’s Inn to be invaded even by his wife. His brow grew very black, and his eyes became almost bloodshot. The port wine which might have worked him to softness, now worked him to anger, and he thus burst forth with words of marital vigour:
“Let me tell you once forever, Kitty, that I will admit of no interference with what I do, or the people whom I may choose to see in my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. If you are such an infatuated simpleton as to believe—”
“Yes; of course I am a simpleton; of course I am a fool; women always are.”
“Listen to me, will you?”
“Listen, yes; it’s my business to listen. Would you like that I should give this house up for her, and go into lodgings somewhere? I shall have very little objection as matters are going now. Oh dear, oh dear, that things should ever have come to this!”
“Come to what?”
“Tom, I could put up with a great deal—more I think than most women; I could slave for you like a drudge, and think nothing about it. And now that you have got among grand people, I could see you go out by yourself without thinking much about that either. I am very lonely sometimes—very; but I could bear that. Nobody has longed to see you rise in the world half so anxious as I have done. But, Tom, when I know what your goings on are with a nasty, sly, false woman like that, I won’t bear it; and there’s an end.” In saying which final words Mrs. Furnival rose from her seat, and thrice struck her hand by no means lightly on the loo table in the middle of the room.
“I did not think it possible that you should be so silly. I did not indeed.”
“Oh, yes, silly! very well. Women always are silly when they mind that kind of thing. Have you got anything else to say, sir?”
“Yes, I have; I have this to say, that I will not endure this sort of usage.”
“Nor I won’t,” said Mrs. Furnival; “so you may as well understand it at once. As long as there was nothing absolutely wrong, I would put up with it for the sake of appearances, and because of Sophia. For myself I don’t mind what loneliness I may have to bear. If you had been called on to go out to the East Indies or even to China, I could have put up with it. But this sort of thing I won’t put up with;—nor I won’t be blind to what I can’t help seeing. So now, Mr. Furnival, you may know that I have made up my mind.” And then,
