That morning John Hanbury awoke to the most unpleasant thoughts about Dora. What ought he to do in the matter? Had he not acted badly to her in not writing the next morning after the scene in the drawing-room?--the very night?
Unquestionably it would have been much better if he had written at once. But then at the time he reached home, he was in no state of mind to write to any one, and when he read his father's letter, the contents of it drove all other matters into the background, and made it seem that they could easily wait. Now he had been to Derbyshire, and knew all that was to be learned at Castleton, and had seen Mrs. Grace and Miss Grace and told them of the discovery he had made. His mother had undertaken to go see them, and for the present there was nothing to press in front of his thought of Dora.
He had behaved very badly indeed to her. At the interview he had acted more like a lunatic brute than a sane gentleman, and afterwards his conduct had been--yes, cowardly. Curse it! was he always to behave like a coward in her eyes? She had reproached him with cowardice the other day, and he fully deserved her reproach. That is, he fully deserved the reproach of an impartial and passionless judge. But was the attitude of an impartial and passionless judge exactly the one a man expected from his sweetheart? Surely the ways of life would be very dusty and dreary if a man found his severest critics always closest to his side, if any deficiencies in the public indictment of his character or conduct were to be supplied by a voice from his own hearth, by his other self, by his wife?
John Hanbury had from his first thinking of Dora more than of any other girl he had met, looked on her as a possible wife. When he went further and made up his mind to ask her to marry him, he had regarded her as a future wife more than a present sweetheart. He had felt that she would be a credit and an ornament to him and that they should get on well together. He had never for an hour been carried away by his feelings towards her. He had never lost his head. He told himself he had lost his heart, because he was more happy in her society than in the society of any other young woman he had met.
He was an imaginative man, of good education, strong impulse, and skilful in the use of words. Yet he had not addressed a single piece of verse to her. She had not moved him to adopt that unfamiliar form of expression. He had nothing in his mind about her that he could not express in prose. This alone was a suspicious circumstance. He knew he was not a poet, and he felt it would be absurd to try to be a poet, because he was going to marry a woman he liked very much.
This was ample evidence she had not touched the inner springs of love in him. The young man who keeps his reason always about him, and won't make a fool of himself for the woman he wants to marry, isn't in love at all. There may be fifty words describing beautifully the excellence of his intentions towards the young woman, but love is not one of those words. He had felt all along that they were about to enter into a delicious partnership; not that he was going to drink the wine of a heavenly dream.
This morning he was wrestling and groaning in spirit when the servant brought the letters to his door. He recognised her writing at once, and tore the envelope open hastily.
He read the letter slowly and with decaying spirit. When he had finished he folded it up deliberately and put it back into the envelope. His face was pale, his lips were apart, his eyes dull, expressionless.
"Be it so," he said at length. "She is right," he added bitterly. "She is always right. She would always be right, and I when I differed from her always wrong. That is not the position a husband should occupy in a wife's esteem."
Then he sat down in the easy chair he had occupied two nights before, and fell into a reverie. He did not heed how time went. When he roused himself he learned that his mother had gone out. He did not want to meet her now. He did not want to meet anyone. He wished to be alone with his thoughts. Where can man be more alone than in the streets of a great city?