Dead and buried—dead and buried. Do you know, I sometimes wish it were so; that she had been left, peacefully widowed—knowing his soul was safe with God. I thought, when papa and I—papa who that night kissed me, for the first time since one night you know—sat by Penelope's bed, watching her—“If Francis had only died!”
After she was quiet, and I had persuaded papa to go to rest, he sent for me and desired me to read a psalm, as I used to do when he was ill—you remember? When it was ended, he asked me, had I any idea what Francis had done that Penelope could not pardon?
I told him, difficult and painful as it was to do it, all I suspected—indeed, felt sure of. For was it not the truth?—the only answer I could give. For the same reason I write of these terrible things to you without any false delicacy—they are the truth, and they must be told.
Papa lay for some time, thinking deeply. At last he said:—
“My dear, you are no longer a child, and I may speak to you plainly. I am an old man, and your mother is dead. I wish she were with us now, she might help us: for she was a good woman, Dora. Do you think—take time to consider the question—that your sister is acting right?”
I said, “quite right.”
“Yet, I thought you held that doctrine, 'the greater the sinner the greater the saint;' and believed every crime a man can commit may be repented, atoned, and pardoned?”
“Yes, father; but Francis has never either repented or atoned.”
No; and therefore I feel certain my sister is right. Ay, even putting aside the other fact, that the discovery of his long years of deception must have so withered up her love,—scorched it at the root, as with a stroke of lightning—that even if she pitied him, she must also despise. Fancy, despising one's husband! Besides, she is not the only one wronged. Sometimes, even sitting by my sister's bedside, I see the vision of that pretty young creature—she was so pretty and innocent when she first came to live at Rockmount,—with her boy in her arms; and my heart feels like to burst with indignation and shame, and a kind of shuddering horror at the wickedness of the world—yet with a strange feeling of unutterable pity lying at the depth of all.
Max, tell me what you think—you who are so much the wiser of us two; but I think that even if she wished it still, my sister ought not to marry Francis Charteris.