"I hope not--I trust not," said Dugdale in a low constrained voice. "If I know anything of her, the idea of the scene you describe taking place while she was in the midst of happiness and luxury would make her wretched for many a day. Think of her having to endure that, after having already lived through the horror of believing that the man she had loved, and sacrificed herself for, was murdered."
Meredith looked at James, closely and inquiringly, for a moment. This intense comprehension, this almost painful, truth and excess of sympathy, puzzled him. While the external consequences of the discovery which had been made, the results to Mrs. Baldwin herself, her husband, and her child pressed upon his own attention, James was lost in the sentimental bearing of the matter, in the retrospective personal grief which it must cause to Margaret, estimating her feelings at a high degree of refinement and intensity. Meredith could not make this out very clearly, but thinking "it is just like him; he always was a strange dreamy creature, who never looked at anything like other people," he went on to discuss the subject from his own point of view.
"That is all very true, Dugdale," he continued, "and, as I said before, I really do not see that she need ever know more than the fact stated in that paper. But what you and I have got to consider, without unnecessary delay, and to act upon with all possible promptitude, is this fact: at the present moment Margaret is not Mr. Baldwin's wife, and her daughter, who, if I understand your statement aright, is heiress to all her father's property, is illegitimate."
"The child would inherit all if there were no son," said James.
"Precisely so. Now, you see, Dugdale, this is the great question. If we can contrive to inform Mr. Baldwin of what has happened, and get him to break it as gently as possible to Margaret, and then have them married privately, of course there need not be any difficulty about that; and without an hour's unnecessary delay things may be all right, and no one in the world but ourselves and themselves a bit the wiser. If the first child had been a son, it would indeed have been a bad, a hopeless business; but the little girl will be no worse off if her mother has a son, and I daresay she will have half-a-dozen. Cheer up, Dugdale; you see it is not so black as it looked at first; there is some unpleasantness to be gone through, and then you will see all will come right."
"Perhaps," said Dugdale dubiously. The expression of pain and foreboding deepened in his face with every moment. "But it is a dreadful misfortune. Margaret lives for that child; she loves it wonderfully; she will break her heart over the knowledge that little Gerty is illegitimate, though no one in the world but herself should ever know it."
"Nonsense," said Meredith, "she will do nothing of the kind; or, if she does, she must be a very different woman from the Mrs. Hungerford I knew; she must be much softer both of head and of heart."
"She is a very different woman," said James, "and her heart is softer. I never saw anything like the influence happiness has had upon her, and I dread, more than I can express, the change which such a blow as this falling upon her in the midst of her joy, and when her health is delicate too, may produce."
"Her health delicate, is it?" said Meredith. "Ah, by the bye, you said so when you mentioned her being abroad. Another child expected?"
"I believe so."