“Of course I know,” said Trevelyan, when the third twist up the mountain had been overcome, “that people talk about me and my wife. It is a part of the punishment for the mistake that one makes.”
“It is a sad affair altogether.”
“The saddest in the world. Lady Milborough has no doubt spoken to you about it.”
“Well;—yes; she has.”
“How could she help it? I am not such a fool as to suppose that people are to hold their tongues about me more than they do about others. Intimate as she is with you, of course she has spoken to you.”
“I was in hopes that something might have been done by this time.”
“Nothing has been done. Sometimes I think I shall put an end to myself, it makes me so wretched.”
“Then why don’t you agree to forget and forgive and have done with it?”
“That is so easily said;—so easily said.” After this they walked on in silence for a considerable distance. Mr. Glascock was not anxious to talk about Trevelyan’s wife, but he did wish to ask a question or two about Mrs. Trevelyan’s sister, if only this could be done without telling too much of his own secret. “There’s nothing I think so grand, as walking up a mountain,” he said after a while.
“It’s all very well,” said Trevelyan, in a tone which seemed to imply that to him in his present miserable condition all recreations, exercises, and occupations were mere leather and prunella.
“I don’t mean, you know, in the Alpine Club way,” said Glascock. “I’m too old and too stiff for that. But when the path is good, and the air not too cold, and when it is neither snowing, nor thawing, nor raining, and when the sun isn’t hot, and you’ve got plenty of time, and know that you can stop any moment you like and be pushed up by a carriage, I do think walking up a mountain is very fine—if you’ve got proper shoes, and a good stick, and it isn’t too soon after dinner. There’s nothing like the air of Alps.” And Mr. Glascock renewed his pace, and stretched himself against the hill at the rate of three miles an hour.
“I used to be very fond of Switzerland,” said Trevelyan, “but I don’t care about it now. My eye has lost all its taste.”
“It isn’t the eye,” said Glascock.
“Well; no. The truth is that when one is absolutely unhappy one cannot revel in the imagination. I don’t believe in the miseries of poets.”
“I think myself,” said Glascock, “that a poet should have a good digestion. By the by, Mrs. Trevelyan and her sister went down to Nuncombe Putney, in Devonshire.”
“They did go there.”
“Have they moved since? A very pretty place is Nuncombe Putney.”
“You have been there then?”
Mr. Glascock blushed again. He was certainly an awkward man, saying things that he ought not to say, and telling secrets which ought not to have been told. “Well;—yes. I have been there—as it happens.”
“Just lately do you mean?”
Mr. Glascock paused, hoping to find his way out of the scrape, but soon perceived that there was no way out. He could not lie, even in an affair of love, and was altogether destitute of those honest subterfuges—subterfuges honest in such position—of which a dozen would have been at once at the command of any woman, and with one of which, sufficient for the moment, most men would have been able to arm themselves. “Indeed, yes,” he said, almost stammering as he spoke. “It was lately;—since your wife went there.” Trevelyan, though he had been told of the possibility of Mr. Glascock’s courtship, felt himself almost aggrieved by this man’s intrusion on his wife’s retreat. Had he not sent her there that she might be private; and what right had anyone to invade such privacy? “I suppose I had better tell the truth at once,” said Mr. Glascock. “I went to see Miss Rowley.”
“Oh, indeed.”
“My secret will be safe with you, I know.”
“I did not know that there was a secret,” said Trevelyan. “I should have thought that they would have told me.”
“I don’t see that. However, it doesn’t matter much. I got nothing by my journey. Are the ladies still at Nuncombe Putney?”
“No, they have moved from there to London.”
“Not back to Curzon Street?”
“Oh dear, no. There is no house in Curzon Street for them now.” This was said in a tone so sad that it almost made Mr. Glascock weep. “They are staying with an aunt of theirs—out to the east of the city.”
“At St. Diddulph’s?”
“Yes;—with Mr. Outhouse, the clergyman there. You can’t conceive what it is not to be able to see your own child; and yet, how can I take the boy from her?”
“Of course not. He’s only a baby.”
“And yet all this is brought on me solely by her obstinacy. God knows, however, I don’t want to say a word against her. People choose to say that I am to blame, and they may say so for me. Nothing that anyone may say can add anything to the weight that I have to bear.” Then they walked to the top of the mountain
