He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (ebook reader with internet browser txt) 📖

said, slowly.

 

She sat silent for fully a minute, with her hands clasped; and then she

answered him in a whisper. ‘I do not know,’ she said.

 

He also was silent for a while before he spoke again. He ceased to poke

with his stick, and got up from his chair, and stood a little apart

from her, not looking at her even yet.

 

‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘I understand. Well, Miss Rowley, I quite

perceive that I cannot press my suit any further now. But I shall not

despair altogether. I know this, that if I might possibly succeed, I

should be a very happy man. Goodbye, Miss Rowley.’

 

She took his offered hand and pressed it so warmly, that had he not

been manly and big-hearted, he would have taken such pressure as a sign

that she wished him to ask her again. But such was his nature.

 

‘God bless you,’ he said, ‘and make you happy, whatever you may choose

to do.’

 

Then he left her, and she heard him walk down the stairs with heavy

slow steps, and she thought that she could perceive from the sound that

he was sad at heart, but that he was resolved not to show his sadness

outwardly.

 

When she was alone she began to think in earnest of what she had done.

If the reader were told that she regretted the decision which she had

been forced to make so rapidly, a wrong impression would be given of

the condition of her thoughts. But there came upon her suddenly a

strange capacity for counting up and making a mental inventory of all

that might have been hers. She knew—and where is the girl so placed

that does not know?—that it is a great thing to be an English peeress.

Now, as she stood there thinking of it all, she was Nora Rowley without

a shilling in the world, and without a prospect of a shilling. She had

often heard her mother speak fearful words of future possible days,

when colonial governing should no longer be within the capacity of Sir

Marmaduke. She had been taught from a very early age that all the

material prosperity of her life must depend on matrimony. She could

never be comfortably disposed of in the world, unless some fitting man

who possessed those things of which she was so bare, should wish to

make her his wife. Now there had come a man so thoroughly fitting, so

marvellously endowed, that no worldly blessing would have been wanting.

Mr Glascock had more than once spoken to her of the glories of

Monkhams. She thought of Monkhams now more than she had ever thought of

the place before. It would have been a great privilege to be the

mistress of an old time-honoured mansion, to call oaks and elms her

own, to know that acres of gardens were submitted to her caprices, to

look at herds of cows and oxen, and be aware that they lowed on her own

pastures. And to have been the mother of a future peer of England, to

have the nursing, and sweet custody and very making of a future senator

would not that have been much? And the man himself who would have been

her husband was such a one that any woman might have trusted herself to

him with perfect confidence. Now that he was gone she almost fancied

that she did love him. Then she thought of Hugh Stanbury, sitting as he

had described himself, in a little dark closet at the office of the ‘D.

R.,’ in a very old inky shooting-coat, with a tarnished square-cut

cloth cap upon his head, with a short pipe in his mouth, writing at

midnight for the next morning’s impression, this or that article

according to the order of his master, ‘the tallowchandler’; for the

editor of the Daily Record was a gentleman whose father happened to be

a grocer in the City, and Hugh had been accustomed thus to describe the

family trade. And she might certainly have had the peer, and the acres

of garden, and the big house, and the senatorial honours; whereas the

tallowchandler’s journeyman had never been so outspoken. She told

herself from moment to moment that she had done right; that she would

do the same a dozen times, if a dozen times the experiment could be

repeated; but still, still, there was the remembrance of all that she

had lost. How would her mother look at her, her anxious, heavily-laden

mother, when the story should be told of all that had been offered to

her and all that had been refused?

 

As she was thinking of this Mrs Trevelyan came into the room. Nora felt

that though she might dread to meet her mother, she could be bold

enough on such an occasion before her sister. Emily had not done so

well with her own affairs, as to enable her to preach with advantage

about marriage.

 

‘He has gone?’ said Mrs Trevelyan, as she opened the door.

 

‘Yes, he has gone.’

 

‘Well? Do not pretend, Nora, that you will not tell me.’

 

‘There is nothing worth the telling, Emily.’

 

‘What do you mean? I am sure he has proposed. He told me in so many

words that it was his intention.’

 

‘Whatever has happened, dear, you may be quite sure that I shall never

be Mrs Glascock.’

 

‘Then you have refused him because of Hugh Stanbury!’

 

‘I have refused him, Emily, because I did not love him. Pray let that

be enough.’

 

Then she walked out of the room with something of stateliness in her

gait as might become a girl who had had it in her power to be the

future Lady Peterborough; but as soon as she reached the sacredness of

her own chamber, she gave way to an agony of tears. It would, indeed,

be much to be a Lady Peterborough. And she had, in truth, refused it

all because of Hugh Stanbury! Was Hugh Stanbury worth so great a

sacrifice?