‘How interesting!’ exclaimed Margaret; it was plain by her tone that she wanted to make amends to the young fellow. ‘Are any of his people still at Bristol?’
‘Oh yes, his sister lives there, a Mrs. Newton. I had a great deal of talk with her. She told me how angry he was with her on one occasion when she cut up some old deeds and other things he had brought home with him, and which she had thought valueless, to make into thread-papers; he collected them together, thread-papers and all, and carried them into his own room.’
‘Considering the use the poor young fellow made of them,’ observed Dennis gravely, ‘she had better have burnt them.’
‘Still, they did give him a certain spurious immortality,’ put in Margaret pitifully. ‘The other was out of his reach.’
‘Surely, my dear Miss Slade, you cannot mean that?’ remonstrated Dennis gently.
‘At all events, everybody was very hard upon him just because they were taken in,’ argued Margaret. ‘If he had acknowledged what they admired so much to have been his own, they would have seen nothing in it to admire. I think Horace Walpole behaved like a brute.’
‘That is very true,’ admitted Dennis. ‘Still, the lad was a forger.’
‘People are not starved to death, as he was, even for forging,’ rejoined Margaret. ‘His own people, too, did not care about him. He had no friends, poor fellow.’
Dennis listened to her with pleasure—though he thought her too lenient—because she took the side of the oppressed. William Henry was even more grateful, because he secretly compared his own position with that of Chatterton—for he too had written poems which nobody thought much of—and guessed that Margaret had his own case in her eye.