“Oswald!” said his father, “I hardly expected you so early.”
“I have come early. I came across country, and slept at Birmingham. I suppose Violet is here.”
“Yes, she is here—and Laura. They will be very glad to see you. So am I.” And the father took the son’s hand for the second time.
“Thank you, sir,” said Lord Chiltern, looking his father full in the face.
“I have been very much pleased by this engagement,” continued the Earl.
“What do you think I must be, then?” said the son, laughing. “I have been at it, you know, off and on, ever so many years; and have sometimes thought I was quite a fool not to get it out of my head. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. And now she talks as though it were she who had been in love with me all the time!”
“Perhaps she was,” said the father.
“I don’t believe it in the least. She may be a little so now.”
“I hope you mean that she always shall be so.”
“I shan’t be the worst husband in the world, I hope; and I am quite sure I shan’t be the best. I will go and see her now. I suppose I shall find her somewhere in the house. I thought it best to see you first.”
“Stop half a moment, Oswald,” said the Earl. And then Lord Brentford did make something of a shambling speech, in which he expressed a hope that they two might for the future live together on friendly terms, forgetting the past. He ought to have been prepared for the occasion, and the speech was poor and shambling. But I think that it was more useful than it might have been, had it been uttered roundly and with that paternal and almost majestic effect which he would have achieved had he been thoroughly prepared. But the roundness and the majesty would have gone against the grain with his son, and there would have been a danger of some outbreak. As it was, Lord Chiltern smiled, and muttered some word about things being “all right,” and then made his way out of the room. “That’s a great deal better than I had hoped,” he said to himself; “and it has all come from my going in without being announced.” But there was still a fear upon him that his father even yet might prepare a speech, and speak it, to the great peril of their mutual comfort.
His meeting with Violet was of course pleasant enough. Now that she had succumbed, and had told herself and had told him that she loved him, she did not scruple to be as generous as a maiden should be who has acknowledged herself to be conquered, and has rendered herself to the conqueror. She would walk with him and ride with him, and take a lively interest in the performances of all his horses, and listen to hunting stories as long as he chose to tell them. In all this, she was so good and so loving that Lady Laura was more than once tempted to throw in her teeth her old, often-repeated assertions, that she was not prone to be in love—that it was not her nature to feel any ardent affection for a man, and that, therefore, she would probably remain unmarried. “You begrudge me my little bits of pleasure,” Violet said, in answer to one such attack. “No;—but it is so odd to see you, of all women, become so lovelorn,” “I am not lovelorn,” said Violet, “but I like the freedom of telling him everything and of hearing everything from him, and of having him for my own best friend. He might go away for twelve months, and I should not be unhappy, believing, as I do, that he would be true to me.” All of which set Lady Laura thinking whether her friend had not been wiser than she had been. She had never known anything of that sort of friendship with her husband which already seemed to be quite established between these two.
In her misery one day Lady Laura told the whole story of her own unhappiness to her brother, saying nothing of Phineas Finn—thinking nothing of him as she told her story, but speaking more strongly perhaps than she should have done, of the terrible dreariness of her life at Loughlinter, and of her inability to induce her husband to alter it for her sake.
“Do you mean that he—ill-treats you?” said the brother, with a scowl on his face which seemed to indicate that he would like no task better than that of resenting such ill-treatment.
“He does not beat me, if you mean that.”
“Is he cruel to you? Does he use harsh language?”
“He never said a word in his life either to me or, as I believe, to any other human being, that he would think himself bound to regret.”
“What is it then?”
“He simply chooses to have his own way, and his way cannot be my way. He is hard, and dry, and just, and dispassionate, and he wishes me to be the same. That is all.”
“I tell you fairly, Laura, as far as I am concerned, I never could speak to him. He is antipathetic to me. But then I am not his wife.”
“I am;—and I suppose I must bear it.”
“Have you spoken to my father?”
“No.”
“Or to Violet?”
“Yes.”
“And what does she say?”
“What can she say? She has nothing to say. Nor have you. Nor, if I am driven to leave him, can I make the world understand why I do so. To be simply miserable, as I am, is nothing to the world.”
“I could never understand why you married him.”
“Do not be cruel to me, Oswald.”
“Cruel! I will stick by you in any
