“And I must see him,” said Lady Laura slowly.
Lady Chiltern looked at her husband, and his face became redder than usual with an angry flush. When his sister had pressed him to take her message about the money, he had assured her that he suspected her of no evil. Nor had he ever thought evil of her. Since her marriage with Mr. Kennedy, he had seen but little of her or of her ways of life. When she had separated herself from her husband he had approved of the separation, and had even offered to assist her should she be in difficulty. While she had been living a sad lonely life at Dresden, he had simply pitied her, declaring to himself and his wife that her lot in life had been very hard. When these calumnies about her and Phineas Finn had reached his ears—or his eyes—as such calumnies always will reach the ears and eyes of those whom they are most capable of hurting, he had simply felt a desire to crush some Quintus Slide, or the like, into powder for the offence. He had received Phineas in his own house with all his old friendship. He had even this morning been with the accused man as almost his closest friend. But, nevertheless, there was creeping into his heart a sense of the shame with which he would be afflicted, should the world really be taught to believe that the man had been his sister’s lover. Lady Laura’s distress on the present occasion was such as a wife might show, or a girl weeping for her lover, or a mother for her son, or a sister for a brother; but was extravagant and exaggerated in regard to such friendship as might be presumed to exist between the wife of Mr. Robert Kennedy and the member for Tankerville. He could see that his wife felt this as he did, and he thought it necessary to say something at once, that might force his sister to moderate at any rate her language, if not her feelings. Two expressions of face were natural to him; one eloquent of good humour, in which the reader of countenances would find some promise of coming frolic;—and the other, replete with anger, sometimes to the extent almost of savagery. All those who were dependent on him were wont to watch his face with care and sometimes with fear. When he was angry it would almost seem that he was about to use personal violence on the object of his wrath. At the present moment he was rather grieved than enraged; but there came over his face that look of wrath with which all who knew him were so well acquainted. “You cannot see him,” he said.
“Why not I, as well as you?”
“If you do not understand, I cannot tell you. But you must not see him;—and you shall not.”
“Who will hinder me?”
“If you put me to it, I will see that you are hindered. What is the man to you that you should run the risk of evil tongues, for the sake of visiting him in gaol? You cannot save his life—though it may be that you might endanger it.”
“Oswald,” she said very slowly, “I do not know that I am in any way under your charge, or bound to submit to your orders.”
“You are my sister.”
“And I have loved you as a sister. How should it be possible that my seeing him should endanger his life?”
“It will make people think that the things are true which have been said.”
“And will they hang him because I love him? I do love him. Violet knows how well I have always loved him.” Lord Chiltern turned his angry face upon his wife. Lady Chiltern put her arm round her sister-in-law’s waist, and whispered some words into her ear. “What is that to me?” continued the half-frantic woman. “I do love him. I have always loved him. I shall love him to the end. He is all my life to me.”
“Shame should prevent your telling it,” said Lord Chiltern.
“I feel no shame. There is no disgrace in love. I did disgrace myself when I gave the hand for which he asked to another man, because—because—” But she was too noble to tell her brother even then that at the moment of her life to which she was alluding she had married the rich man, rejecting the poor man’s hand, because she had given up all her fortune to the payment of her brother’s debts. And he, though he had well known what he had owed to her, and had never been easy till he had paid the debt, remembered nothing of all this now. No lending and paying back of money could alter the nature either of his feelings or his duty in such an emergency as this. “And, mind you,” she continued, turning to her sister-in-law, “there is no place for the shame of which he is thinking,” and she pointed her finger out at her brother. “I love him—as a mother might love her child, I fancy; but he has no love for me; none;—none. When I am with him, I am only a trouble to him. He comes to me, because he is good; but he would sooner be with you. He did love me once;—but then I could not afford to be so loved.”
“You can do no good by seeing him,” said her brother.
“But I will see him. You need not scowl at me as though you wished to strike me. I have gone through that which makes me different from other women, and I care not what they say of me. Violet understands it all;—but you understand nothing.”
“Be calm, Laura,” said her sister-in-law, “and Oswald will do all that can be done.”
“But they will hang him.”
“Nonsense!” said her brother. “He has not been as yet committed
