“Do,” said the old lawyer, getting up. He took Dick’s hand and wrung it in his own with a pressure that, though the thin old fingers had but little force, was painful in its energy. “You don’t ask my silence, but I’ll promise it you—except in one contingency,” and here he wrung Dick’s hand again. “Should I hear of any marriage—after what you have said, I shall certainly think it my duty to interfere.”
When Dick came out the day seemed to have grown dark to him; the sky was all covered with threads of black; he could scarcely see his way.
XL
Nevertheless Dick went down to Highcombe on the following Saturday. There are two ways in which advice can work: one by convincing the man who receives it to abandon his own evil way, and adopt the good way set before him, which of course is the object of all good advice, although but rarely attained to; the other is to make him far more hotly and determinedly bent upon his own way, with a sort of personal opposition to the adviser, and angry sense that he has not properly understood the subject, or entered into those subtle reasons below the surface which make a certain course of action, not generally desirable, perhaps, the only one that can be appropriately adopted in this particular case. This was the effect produced upon Dick. He spent the intervening time in turning it over and over in his mind, as he had already done so often, until all the outlines were blurred. For a long time he had been able to put that early, fatal, mad marriage out of his mind altogether, finding himself actually able to forget it; so that if anyone had suddenly accused him of being, as his old friend said, a married man, he would have, on the first shock, indignantly denied the imputation. It had lasted so short a time, it had ended in such miserable disaster! Scarcely a week had passed before he had discovered the horror and folly of what he had done. He had not, like many men, laid the blame upon the unhappy creature who had led him into these toils. She was no unhappy creature, but one of those butterfly-women without any soul, to whom there are no distinctions of right and wrong. He discovered afterwards that if he had not himself been honourable, it was not she who would have insisted upon the bond of marriage, and whether she had ever intended to be bound by it he could not tell. Her easy, artless independence of all moral laws had been a revelation to the young man such as arrested his very life, and filled him with almost awe in the midst of his misery, disgust, and horror. Without any soul, or heart, or shame, or sense that better was required from her—this was what she was. All the evil elements of corrupt civilisation and savage freedom seemed to have got mixed in her blood: half of the worst of the old world, half of the rudest and wildest of the new. She had been a captivating wonder to the young Englishman, accustomed to all the domestic bonds and decorums, when he saw her first, a fresh wildflower, as he thought, with the purity as well as the savagery of primitive nature. But afterwards it seemed an uncertain matter whether she had ever known what purity was, or whether those links which bound him to her had not bound other men even before his day. She had flung in his face those marriage lines which women of the lower classes generally hold in such reverence, and had laughed and assured him that they were so much waste paper, and that as she did not mean to be bound by them, neither need he; and then she had disappeared, and for years he had not known that she existed. The awful discovery that she was in the neighbourhood of his friends, and that he himself might by chance meet her any moment on the common road, had turned him to stone. Lizzie Hampson had been her maid during the brief period in which she was his wife, and had loved and clung to her, the subject of a fascination not uncommon between women, after every other trace of that episode in her life had passed away. Dick Cavendish had not for years thought of that miserable episode in his until he had by chance recognised Lizzie at Underwood. He had even lent himself with no serious purpose, yet with a light heart, to that scheme of his family and friends about the nice girl who was to convert him into a steady member of society. No doubt the moment it had become serious he must have felt himself brought face to face with the burdens and hindrances of his previous career, even had he not seen Lizzie Hampson. This reminder of what had been, however, came at the exact crisis when Chatty Warrender had (as his errant imagination always pictured her) pushed open lightly the door of his heart and walked in with the bowl of roses in her hands: and hence all the tumults and storms which had suddenly seized again upon a life almost forgetful of any cause for these tempests. He knew what he ought to have done then. He ought to have flown from Chatty and every other “nice girl,” as indeed he had done at once, to do him justice. But who could have foreseen that meeting in London, who provided against the necessity of “paying a little attention” to the mother and sister of his friend? And now here was this invitation, which meant—what did it mean?
It meant at least that Mrs. Warrender did not object to the continuance of that intercourse, that perhaps Chatty
