There was a long pause of silence. Margaret was the first to speak.
“I am not likely ever to see Mr. Thornton again,”—and there she stopped.
“There are many things more unlikely, I should say,” replied Mr. Bell.
“But I believe I never shall. Still, somehow one does not like to have sunk so low in—in a friend’s opinion as I have done in his.” Her eyes were full of tears, but her voice was steady, and Mr. Bell was not looking at her. “And now that Frederick has given up all hope, and almost all wish of ever clearing himself, and returning to England, it would be only doing myself justice to have all this explained. If you please, and if you can, if there is a good opportunity, (don’t force an explanation upon him, pray,) but if you can, will you tell him the whole circumstances, and tell him also that I gave you leave to do so, because I felt that for poor papa’s sake I should not like to lose his respect, though we may never be likely to meet again?”
“Certainly. I think he ought to know. I do not like you to rest even under a shadow of an impropriety; he would not know what to think of seeing you alone with a young man.”
“As for that,” said Margaret, rather haughtily, “I hold it is ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ Yet still I should choose to have it explained, if any natural opportunity for easy explanation occurs. But it is not to clear myself of any suspicion of improper conduct that I wish to have him told—if I thought that he had suspected me, I should not care for his good opinion—no! it is that he may learn how I was tempted, and how I fell into the snare; why I told that falsehood, in short.”
“Which I don’t blame you for. It is no partiality of mine, I assure you.”
“What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please. It is done—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful for evermore, if I can.”
“Very well. If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so. I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genii. ‘Wonderful,’ says I, ‘to think that you have been concealed so long, and in so small a compass, that I really did not know of your existence. Pray, sir, instead of growing larger and larger every instant, and bewildering me with your misty outlines, would you once more compress yourself into your former dimensions?’ And when I’ve got him down, don’t I clap the seal on the vase, and take good care how I open it again, and how I go against Solomon, wisest of men, who confined him there.”
But it was no smiling matter to Margaret. She hardly attended to what Mr. Bell was saying. Her thoughts ran upon the idea, before entertained, but which now had assumed the strength of a conviction, that Mr. Thornton no longer held his former good opinion of her—that he was disappointed in her. She did not feel as if any explanation could ever reinstate her—not in his love, for that and any return on her part she had resolved never to dwell upon, and she kept rigidly to her resolution—but in the respect and high regard which she had hoped would have ever made him willing, in the spirit of Gerald Griffin’s beautiful lines,