‘I should have still kept silence. I only suspected, remember. I was not quite sure. Moreover, Margaret herself might have been spared the knowledge of the truth, and it was not for me to undeceive her.’
‘You would have permitted her, then, for a delicate scruple, to entrust her happiness to a scoundrel?’
‘You press me hard, sir, though I do not say you have not a right to do so,’ replied Dennis, greatly agitated. ‘I have thought of this a thousand times; it has cost me days and nights of misery, Heaven knows. But on the whole I have satisfied my conscience. When one has lost all hope in a matter that has once concerned one to the uttermost, one takes a clear view of it. The young man of whom you speak has, doubtless, many faults; he is weak and vain, and greedy of applause, however gained; he is to some extent unprincipled, he has even committed a serious crime; but he is not altogether what you have called him, a scoundrel. He is not unkind; under less adverse circumstances than those in which, from the very first, he has been placed, he would have shown himself a better man. An exceptional temptation assailed him, and he succumbed to it. He would not necessarily—or I have tried to think so—have made a bad husband.’
This speech was uttered with grave deliberation, and the manner of it was most impressive; the speaker might have stood for some personification of Justice, weighing his words with equal hand. Indeed this man was more than just, he was magnanimous.
The antiquary could not withhold his admiration from his companion, though with his sentiments he was wholly unable to sympathise.
‘You are throwing good feeling away, Frank Dennis,’ he said, ‘upon a thankless cur. If you think to move me to compassion for him, you are pleading to deaf ears. He is henceforth as a dead man to me and mine.’
‘You will act as you think right, no doubt,’ said the young man quietly, ‘and I am only doing the same.’
He felt that whatever his own wrongs had been, the wrongs of his companion were far greater. Cajoled, deceived, and stricken in years, his reputation smirched, if not destroyed; humiliated in his own eyes, degraded in those of others; if he did not do well to be angry, it could hardly be said, being human, that he did ill.
Dennis gave the antiquary the address of his cottage, and the necessary information for reaching the spot, and bade him adieu with much emotion.
‘But you will not desert us?’ said Mr. Erin imploringly. ‘If you stand apart from us——’ His voice trembled and he left the sentence unfinished. He not only, as the other guessed, meant to imply that in such a case they would be friendless indeed, but that Dennis’s withdrawal from his society would be construed as condemnation.