'It would at least relieve your heart. You have yet to learn, dearest Mary, that with too many in this world the growth of love is unlike every other growth: it often expands and blooms strongest amid sorrow and gloom and the chill blasts of adversity.'
'I am afraid, Sir Piers,' said Mrs. Garth on one occasion, 'the girl is simply breaking her heart!'
'Simply breaking her fiddlestick!' growled the general, who was terribly worried by the whole situation; 'yet I should not be angry with poor little Mary,' he added in a gentler tone; 'God is very good! He took pity on me, a childless old man, and, seeing an empty corner in my heart, sent her to fill it.'
Mary could hear, incidentally, from time to time, the general in his pure dismay that a Cameronian should cause such esclandre, Mrs. Garth acting in his interests, even Annabelle in her sorrow, and not knowing very well what to think (as she had her doubts of mankind in general), all inferring by casual remarks that Falconer was quite unworthy of her—that she had made a lucky escape, and so forth; but they 'forgot that' the woman never yet lived who could cast a true love out of her heart, because the object of it was unworthy of her, and that all she can do is to struggle against it in secret; and poor Mary was no exception to the rest of her sex generally.
'Look a little beyond the present, dear Mary,' said Sir Piers, as he caressed her head, that nestled beside his knee, and passed his old shrivelled hand through her rich brown hair; 'I dare say you think Providence very short-sighted in sweeping out of our circle this interloper, who thought to come between Hew and yourself, a ne'er-do-well, an utter black sheep in birth and bearing!' he added, angrily; for in his rage at the probable slur cast on the regiment—his regiment—he was pitiless with regard to Cecil, who, for a time, had come between the wind and his nobility; and Mary knew not exactly how Hew, artfully, insidiously, and openly, by turns, had succeeded in influencing Sir Piers against the victim of his own treachery, but she replied simply and firmly, as Cecil's love for her seemed something too sacred and too precious to be referred to so bluntly as it too often was:
'Talk not to me of Hew; had Cecil Falconer never been born, I never could have loved Hew Montgomerie!'
Hew was one of the many in this age of refined civilisation, who, though they have no fear of God, have a wholesome fear of the police! Thus, with all his malevolent hatred of Falconer, he shrank from using a dagger or pistol, even secretly; but he had resorted to a means of revenge more subtle and cruel than either.
The great military influence of Sir Piers might have arrested the tide of ruin that was setting in against Falconer, and might ultimately have been brought to bear upon the president and members of a court so honourable and impartial as a military one; but Sir Piers was enraged by the whole affair, and his mind was so full of it that for a time he ceased even to prose about Central India. Thus, for many reasons patent to the reader, his influence, if used at all, was thrown into the opposite scale; and so Falconer was left to his destiny, an inexorable one, by the code militaire.
'Surely it is sharp work, Sir Piers, resorting to a court-martial at once,' said Fotheringhame on one occasion; 'could not your influence with the general commanding——'
'Don't speak of it, sir,' said Sir Piers, testily, with a wave of his hand.