English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
‘You are aware, my dear lord, Janey worships her brother. He was
defeated, by some dastardly contrivance, in a wager to do wonderful
feats--for money! money! money! a large stake. How we come off our
high horses! I hadn’t an idea of money before I was married. I think of
little else. My husband has notions of honour; he engaged himself to pay
a legacy of debts; his uncle would not pay debts long due to him. He
was reduced to the shift of wagering on his great strength and skill. He
could have done it. His enemy managed--enemy there was! He had to sell
out of the army in consequence. I shall never have Janey’s face of
suffering away from my sight. He is a soldier above all things. It seems
hard on me, but I cannot blame him for snatching at an opportunity to
win military distinction. He is in treaty for the post of aide to the
Colonel--the General of the English contingent bound for Spain, for the
cause of the Queen. My husband will undertake to be at the orders of his
chief as soon as he can leave this place. Janey goes with him, according
to present arrangements.’
Passing through a turnstile, that led from the road across a
meadow-slope to the broken land below, Henrietta had view of the earl’s
hard white face, and she hastened to say: ‘You have altered that, my
lord. She is devoted to her brother; and her brother running dangers...
and danger in itself is an attraction to her. But her husband will have
the first claim. She has her good sense. She will never insist on going,
if you oppose. She will be ready to fill her station. It will be-her
pride and her pleasure.’
Henrietta continued in the vein of these assurances; and Carinthia’s
character was shooting lightnings through him, withering that of
the woman who referred to his wife’s good sense and her station; and
certainly would not have betrayed herself by such drawlings if she had
been very positive that Carinthia’s disposition toward wealth and luxury
resembled hers. She knew the reverse; or so his contemptuously generous
effort to frame an apology for the stuff he was hearing considered it.
His wife was lost to him. That fact smote on his breast the moment he
heard of her desire to go with her brother.
Wildest of enterprises! But a criminal saw himself guilty of a large
part in the disaster the two heroical souls were striving desperately to
repair. If her Chillon went, Carinthia would go--sure as flame is drawn
to air. The exceeding splendour in the character of a young woman,
injured as she had been, soft to love, as he knew her, and giving her
husband no other rival than a beloved brother, no ground of complaint
save her devotion to her brother, pervaded him, without illuminating or
lifting; rather with an indication of a foul contrast, that prostrated
him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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