“It is so absurd!” said Winifred, keenly ashamed, and trying to laugh. “They say Marmaduke discovered the secret, and to avoid its becoming known you consented to—to—”
“Let him share the spoils. I see. Has Mr Pitt returned to London?”
“I believe so. A word from you will set it right.”
“It should never have been wrong,” he said bitterly. “After what you have said I must get home to catch the post. Good by. You don’t mind walking back alone? Indeed, it doesn’t seem as if my company would do you much credit.”
He was gone almost before she heard, and a cold desolation crept over her as she stood still, turning her back upon the little network of fields, and watched him striding away along the muddy lane. What a fierceness there had been in his last words! What a sense of separation he had left behind him! It had required all her resolution to take this task upon her, and it was cruel that it should thus recoil upon herself; a sense of injustice must have stirred her into indignation, had it not been for the womanly tenderness which at once turned it aside with compassionate excuses. No wonder that the very breath of such an accusation should have angered him; no wonder that his first thought should have been to hurry to refute it; no wonder, ah, no wonder, that he should forget her.
She little thought that it was wrath instead of forgetfulness which was uppermost in Anthony’s mind as he splashed through little innocent pools of water with angry steps. Like most reserved men, he was exceeding impatient of reserve in others, and he wanted her to have protested her disbelief in the slander which had met him, while such a protest would have seemed a positive insult to Winifred, who had never dreamed of doubting him. Her words had given him a terrible blow, and the charge was quickly fermented by his imagination into a distorted form. Conscious that he had not sought the old man’s favour, that it had been hateful to him to replace Marmaduke, that he was even now setting inquiries after Ellen Harford on foot, he was accused, nevertheless, of committing what he called a crime to gain this fortune to which he was indifferent. I am not defending his manner of receiving the accusation. If he had been a hero it would have been very different; but, so far as one sees, heroes seldom leap into the world in complete armour; they are more likely to grow out of trials and temptations, yes, out of many a slip and fall, in which they seem to be beaten down and overwhelmed. Anthony had the stuff in him which would bear the furnace, although there were little overgrowths hiding its goodness; he had a ready generosity, high imaginings, longings to better the world; but these were the very feelings upon which such an accusation came like a stream of icy water. If people ceased to believe in him, he felt as if he could believe in nothing.
As he went quickly through Thorpe, he held aloof from the people, but noticed them jealously, fancying he could read meanings in their faces of which, it is needless to say, they were guiltless. Ill report of a man flies fast, but this was not the sort of report to gain wings quickly, for if any of the people heard it, to what did it amount? To the fact that before Mr Tregennas died he put it to Mr Anthony whether or not he should change his will. “A’d ha’ bin a big fule for’s pains if a’d said a wudd,” would have been the heaviest verdict that Anthony could have received from their lips.
But we place our own thoughts in other people’s hearts, and so Anthony heard a hundred unspoken things on his way through Thorpe.