‘I am not afraid for myself; I am sure he will never harm me. Indeed, Mr. Wallis, I cannot leave him in his solitude and wretchedness.’
‘He will not be solitary, Miss Margaret. I will drop a hint to Mr. Dennis, whose intention I know it is to call upon him this afternoon, to take up his quarters with him for a while.’
At the mention of Frank Dennis’s name Margaret changed colour; the idea of meeting him had suddenly become intolerable.
‘If your sister will give me an asylum for a few days,’ she hurriedly replied, ‘I think I will take advantage of your most kind offer.’
In a few minutes she had made her preparations for departure; she trembled lest there should come a knock at the front door while she was yet in the house. She glanced apprehensively up the little street, as she sallied forth on Mr. Wallis’s arm, lest some one with eyes that spoke reproof, without intending it, should come across her before she had gained the shelter of another roof. Some one whom she had never estimated at his true worth, or treated as he deserved; some one she had blamed for his coldness and incredulity, but who had suspected all along—she was as convinced of it as of the fraud itself—the deception which had been practised upon her, but whom the nobleness of a nature that shrank from the exposure of a rival had kept silent.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A COMFORTER.
There is nothing more astonishing in the history of mankind than the high estimation in which credulity—under the form of belief—has been held by all nations who have had the least claim to be civilised. Yet the vast majority of the human race, mere slaves as they are to custom and convention, imbibing their faith with their mother’s milk, and as disinclined to change as a wheel that has found its rut, are absolutely unable to be sceptical. This is probably why persecution has been so lightly permitted—even among Christians, whose connivance at it is otherwise unintelligible; those who suffered for their scepticism were comparatively so few that their martyrdom was disregarded. It is an immense recommendation to a creed, that the mere fact of accepting it is accounted the highest virtue, since ninety-nine persons out of a hundred who have been brought up in it, find no sort of difficulty in fulfilling its chief obligation. With the same ease with which the doctrines of Mahomet or of Buddha are embraced by their disciples, had the story of the discovery of the Shakespeare manuscripts been accepted by Mr. Samuel Erin. Nay, he had not been only a disciple but a devotee. He had been looking forward all his life to some revelation of a similar kind, and it had been manifested under circumstances that not only corroborated his views, but flattered his amour propre. A member of his own house had been the discoverer of the MSS., and he himself their apostle and exponent. To confess, even to himself, that he had been preaching a false faith, and been the dupe of a lying boy, seemed impossible. The very idea of it was wormwood to him. Even the discovery that Margaret had taken him at his word and left his roof did not at first shake him. It even strengthened his suspicion that the whole affair was a trick to catch his consent to her marriage with William Henry. It was only done to frighten him into submission.