"What God wills must happen," answered Amelia, "but you may bet your life, William, He won't will to bring them two together again; and nobody but a vain thinker and a man weak in faith would hope such a horror. However, you can very well leave Margery to her Maker and her mother; and as to her husband, if he was a man, he'd hang himself."
"Don't you be angry," urged Mr. Marydrew. "Your nephew have come out as he went in, without a shadow upon him. For the rest, don't you cast a stone. That ain't like you. Let charity conquer."
"You're his side we all know," answered Miss Winter; "and I'll give you a warning for yours. Don't let your sense of justice go down afore the wicked man. He'll gnash his teeth no doubt and wring his hands; but don't you try to come between him and his punishment, Billy, because you can't."
"True. I can't," he replied. "If you knew Bullstone like what I do, you'd have no fear he was going to escape anything."
Then Amelia astonished him by a penetration for which he had not given her credit. Her intuition may have sprung from anger—a fruitful source of bitter truth—but it threw a light upon what might presently happen, and William was not prepared, though much inclined, to contradict.
"You say that. But a woman always knows one side of men better than any man can, and old maid though I may be, I'll tell you this. Bullstone ain't the sort to lie in the dirt for his sins and scrape himself with potsherds. Don't you think that. He'll snatch at hope, like the drowning at a straw. He'll look at it all from his own point of view, as usual, and fifty to one he'll fool himself there's a way out. Yes—he won't see himself as all clean and honest men see him, William. He'll only see that his wife's a pure woman and that he was mistook to think her a whore. And what then? Have he got the decency to pour ashes on his head for shame, and slink away from the sight and sound of men? Not him! He'll say Margery's worthy of him, after all, and that he must have her home again. He'll expect presently to find her forgive him like the Christian she is, and it will be his fixed dream and hope to win her back at any cost—till he wakes from the dream and the hope dies. And not till then will his true punishment begin. That's Jacob Bullstone, and that's the man his wife knows, and we know, and you'll live to know. Far ways off what you pictured—eh?"
The ancient doubted.
"What you say about a woman knowing a side of man's mind that other men do not, be very likely true," he answered. "But I trust you will live to see yourself mistook in this matter. It's a great thought and you may be right; but if that happened, along with it would go a lot more that's in the man, which I know and no woman does. I can only say again, let time take charge, and I wish nobody else but time was going to have a hand in it."
While they talked, Adam Winter wandered, unseeing, among his sheep on the hill with his hands in his pockets and a sense of anticlimax in his soul. The excitement was ended. He had seen himself justified and cleared; he had seen an innocent woman pitied; and he had seen Bullstone confounded. Now he was in the midst of sweet things and breathing fresh air with the heights rolling before his eyes and the larks aloft. But no exhilaration, only a sense of sickness and misery hung over him. He, too, longed for the time to pass, that the sordid memories of the trial might grow fainter.
Elsewhere Jacob Bullstone travelled from London and sat wrapped in his thoughts. But they were no covering for him. They fled past in wild rags and tatters, as the steam across the train window; and he could not frame a consistent argument, or follow any line of reasoning. All was chaotic, confused, hurtling, and every thought lashed like a whip. He struggled against the rush of ideas as a man against a blinding storm. He could clutch at nothing for support; or perceive any steadfast glimpse through this welter of what the future held in store. He was too astonished to suffer much as yet, save unconsciously, as an animal suffers. The reality, as it had developed in a law court, took a form so utterly unlike that which he had accepted as reality, that simple amazement reigned in him for a long time. It supported him in a sense through the trial and, now, as he came home, it gradually gave place to bewilderment, which, in its turn, quieted down until the stormy waters of his mind grew sufficiently smooth to offer a reflection of the situation newly created, and he began to trace the picture of the future.