The last two days had been very trying ones for the little household in Norfolk Street, and, though success had crowned their hopes, they bore marks of the struggle that evening. Even young William Henry, who, like the antiquarian Duchess (but with a difference), seemed to have been born before nerves had come into fashion, showed signs of the terrible ordeal through which he had passed; he was tender-footed, after the red-hot ploughshares.
The antiquary himself was almost in a state of collapse; while Margaret, as sensible and self-contained a girl as was to be found on either side of the Thames, between gratitude to Heaven and love to man, became for the first time in her life hysterical. All was well for her Willie at last, but she doubted; and with reason, whether, exposed to the brunt of the battle, and fighting for what was dearer to him than life itself, his honour, he had suffered as much as she had done, sitting in her little room apart from the mêlée and picturing to herself the terrors of defeat.
She listened to their narrative of the proceedings with a fearful joy, deemed at first Mr. Pye the basest, and presently the best of men, and felt a secret gratitude to Mr. Albany Wallis that she would have found it difficult to explain: she had an impression that he was not their ally, but that a strong sense of justice, mingled perhaps with remorse for the part he had on a former occasion taken against them, had made him something more than neutral. Remorse, too, she herself felt as regarded the person to whom the final triumph was after all mainly owing.
‘Where is Mr. Talbot, Willie?’ she said excitedly. ‘I should like to tell him, not only how much indebted I am to him, but how wrong was the judgment I had previously formed of him.’
‘To be sure,’ observed the antiquary naïvely; ‘where is Talbot?’ When the city has been preserved, as the Scripture says, nobody remembers the name of the obscure individual who saved it, and in the glow of victory Mr. Erin had clean forgotten his young Irish ally. ‘I suppose his modesty prevented him from waiting to receive our acknowledgments.’
‘No doubt it was his modesty,’ said William Henry drily. ‘But as for your gratitude, Maggie, I think it is somewhat misplaced; if he has now done us good, he once did his best to do us harm, and thus far we are only quits.’
‘That was a dirty trick his following Samuel to the Temple,’ observed Mr. Erin; ‘though, as it happened, it has turned out to our advantage.’
‘Still, it is not every one who is ready to make reparation for an error,’ said Margaret gravely.
To this there was no reply from her uncle. Margaret hardly expected any. He was a man who took the gifts which Heaven vouchsafed him without any excess of fervour; but from Willie she had looked for more generosity of spirit; on the other hand, he might be a little jealous (she had a vague impression that the young Irish gentleman had made some clumsy attempt in confederation with his eye-glass to recommend himself to her attention), in which case of course Willie was forgiven.