It was arranged that when Harry came to the door, Mrs. Burton should go up alone to the drawing-room and receive him there, remaining with her husband in the dining-room till he should come. Twice while sitting downstairs after the cloth was gone she ran upstairs with the avowed purpose of going into the nursery, but in truth that she might see that the room was comfortable, that it looked pretty, and that the chairs were so arranged as to be convenient. The two eldest children were with them in the parlour, and when she started on her second errand, Cissy reminded her that baby would be asleep. Theodore, who understood the little manoeuvre, smiled but said nothing, and his wife, who in such matters was resolute, went and made her further little changes in the furniture. At last there came the knock at the door—the expected knock, a knock which told something of the hesitating unhappy mind of him who had rapped, and Mrs. Burton started on her business. “Tell him just simply why you are there alone,” said her husband.
“Is it Harry Clavering?” Cissy asked, “and mayn’t I go?”
“It is Harry Clavering,” her father said, “and you may not go. Indeed, it is time you went somewhere else.”
It was Harry Clavering. He had not spent a pleasant day since he had left Mr. Beilby’s offices in the morning, and, now that he had come to Onslow Crescent, he did not expect to spend a pleasant evening. When I declare that as yet he had not come to any firm resolution, I fear that he will be held as being too weak for the role of hero even in such pages as these. Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint from Nature, how little that is heroic should he describe! How many young men, subjected to the temptations which had befallen Harry Clavering—how many young men whom you, delicate reader, number among your friends—would have come out from them unscathed? A man, you say, delicate reader, a true man can love but one woman—but one at a time. So you say, and are so convinced; but no conviction was ever more false. When a true man has loved with all his heart and all his soul—does he cease to love—does he cleanse his heart of that passion when circumstances run against him, and he is forced to turn elsewhere for his life’s companion? Or is he untrue as a lover in that he does not waste his life in desolation, because he has been disappointed? Or does his old love perish and die away, because another has crept into his heart? No; the first love, if that was true, is ever there; and should she and he meet after many years, though their heads be gray and their cheeks wrinkled, there will still be a touch of the old passion as their hands meet for a moment. Methinks that love never dies, unless it be murdered by downright ill-usage. It may be so murdered, but even ill-usage will more often fail than succeed in that enterprise. How, then, could Harry fail to love the woman whom he had loved first, when she returned to him still young, still beautiful, and told him, with all her charms and all her flattery, how her heart stood towards him?
But it is not to be thought that I excuse him altogether. A man, though he may love many, should be devoted only to one. The man’s feeling to the woman whom he is to marry should be this:—that not from love only, but from chivalry, from manhood, and from duty, he will be prepared always, and at all hazards, to defend her from every misadventure, to struggle ever that she may be happy, to see that no wind blows upon her with needless severity, that no ravening wolf of a misery shall come near her, that her path be swept clean for her—as clean as may be, and that her rooftree be made firm upon a rock. There is much of this which is quite independent of love—much
