He was checked, and did not answer.
‘I see how it is,’ continued Honor; ‘my boy, as far as I am concerned, I look on your confession as made. You will be much alone while thus hovering near your sister among the mountains and by the streams. Let it be a time of reflection, and of making your peace with Another. You may do so the more earnestly for not having cast off the burthen on me. You are no child now, to whom your poor Honey’s pardon almost
seems an absolution. I sometimes think we went on with that too long.’
‘No fear of my ever being a boy again,’ said Owen, heavily, as he put the draft into his purse, and then bent his tall person to kiss her with the caressing fondness of his childhood, almost compensating for what his sister caused her to undergo.
Then, at the door, he turned to say, ‘Remember, you would not hear.’ He was gone, having left a thorn with Honor, in the doubt whether she ought not to have accepted his confidence; but her abstinence had been such a mortification both of curiosity and of hostility to the Charterises that she could not but commend herself for it. She had strong faith in the efficacy of trust upon an honourable mind, and though it was evident that Owen had, in his own eyes, greatly transgressed, she reserved the hope that his error was magnified by his own consciousness, and admired the generosity that refused to betray another. She believed his present suffering to be the beginning of that growth in true religion which is often founded on some shock leading to self-distrust.
Alas! how many falls have been counted by mothers as the preludes to rising again, like the clearing showers of a stormy day.
CHAPTER VIII
Fearless she had tracked his feet
To this rocky, wild retreat,
And when morning met his view,
Her mild glances met it too.
Ah! your saints have cruel hearts,
Sternly from his bed he starts,
And with rude, repulsive shock,
Hurls her from the beetling rock.—T. Moore
The deed was done. Conventionalities were defied, vaunts fulfilled, and Lucilla sat on a camp-stool on the deck of a steamer, watching the Welsh mountains rise, grow dim, and vanish gradually.
Horatia, in common with all the rest of the womankind, was prostrate on the cabin floor, treating Cilly’s smiles and roses as aggravations of her misery. Had there been a sharer in her exultation, the gay pitching and dancing of the steamer would have been charming to Lucy, but when she retreated from the scene of wretchedness below, she felt herself lonely, and was conscious of some surprise among the surviving gentlemen at her reappearance.