"To be sure, or I should not have said so," replied the Lieutenant, with much displeasure in his tone. "If I chose to tell lies to screen you, you might stay here, following your own fancies, till doomsday. It is because I always will speak the truth about those who belong to me that I request you to go away, if you must do things which make the truth painful for you to hear and for me to tell."
"Well, my good sir, do not be in a passion. I only thought you were telling a convenient fib, such as everybody tells about such matters, in the Custom-house and out of it."
"Not everybody, as you now find," replied the officer; "and I hope this is the last time you will expose me to the suspicion of fibbing in your behalf."
Matilda half withdrew her arm from her husband's, terrified at a mode and strength of rebuke which would have almost annihilated her; but Elizabeth bore it with wonderful indifference, wishing him good morning, as on ordinary days.
"She is a good creature," the Lieutenant observed, in his customary phrase, after walking on a few paces in silence. "She is a good creature, but monstrously provoking sometimes. A pretty scrape she had nearly got herself and all of us into."
"Remember how lately it was that you were defending the desire for foreign commodities in general, and Elizabeth's in particular," observed Matilda.
"Well! all that I said was very true, I believe," replied the officer, half laughing under a sense of his own inconsistency. "I have as firm a faith as ever in the truth of what I then said."
"Your doctrine, then, is, that Elizabeth is right in having the desire, and in gratifying it; but that she is wrong in being caught in the fact."
"Why, it does come pretty nearly to that, I am afraid. It comes to the fact that duties clash in a case like this; so that, one's conscience being at fault, an appeal to the law must settle the matter. I see no crime in Elizabeth's taste, apart from the means she may take to gratify it; but the law pronounces her wrong, so we must conclude she is wrong."
"Duties do, indeed, clash," replied Matilda; "and if so painfully in one case, what must be the extent of the evil if we consider all who are concerned? Even in this little neighbourhood, here is Mr. Pim unable to teach honour, as he says, without giving the notion that it is a merit to conceal fraud, and pointing out a whole class as objects of contempt and hatred. The dwellers near, almost to a man, look upon the government as a tyrant, its servants as oppressors, its laws as made to be evaded, and its powers defied. Oaths are regarded as mere humbug; and the kindliest of social feelings are nourished in direct relation to fraud, and pleaded as its sanction. There is not a man near us who does not feel it necessary, nor a woman who does not praise it as virtuous, nor a child who is not trained up in the love and practice of it. This is the morality which one institution teaches from village to village all along our shores,--mocking the clergyman, setting at nought the schoolmaster, and raising up a host of enemies to the government by which it is maintained; and all for what?"