Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed to say nothing.
Calhoun was for publishing the affair.
“The man’s dangerous,” said he; “some day or another he’ll do the same thing again to some one and succeed and swing.”
“I think he’s had his lesson,” said Pinckney; “he went clean mad for the moment. Then there’s the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything into consideration, we’ll let it be. I don’t feel any animosity against him, not half as much as if he’d stabbed me behind the back with a libel— He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and I don’t want to push the thing against him.”
“I don’t think he will do it again,” said Phyl.
She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by the Devil.
They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things.
“Well,” said Calhoun, “it’s not my affair; if you choose to take pity on him, well and good; if it were my business I’d give him a cold bath, that might stop him from doing a thing like that again. I’ll say nothing.”
Though Miss Pinckney was in ignorance of the affair she was strangely silent during the drive home and when Phyl went to her room to bid her good night, she found her in tears, a very rare occurrence with Miss Pinckney.
She was seated in an armchair crying and Phyl knelt down beside her and took her hand.