THE FEET OF CLAY.
It is a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career. He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again.
Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of proving himself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believed then, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie?
It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.
Yet as she opened the manuscript and her eyes fell on the well-known handwriting, they filled with unbidden tears. Great heavens! how she had believed in him, how she had loved him! Nay, how she had sympathised unwittingly with his very frauds, and longed and prayed for their success. Prayed for it—the thought of this especially appalled her. She found herself, for the first time, face to face with the mystery of life; with the difficulties of spiritual things. It is strange enough (what happens often enough), that we should fall on our knees and implore the divine assistance to avert misfortunes from our dear ones that (if we did but know) have already happened; but that we should implore it (if we did but know) on behalf of falsehood, fraud—with the intent to prosper wickedness! This man, among his other villanies, almost made her doubt of the goodness of God!
The manuscript was voluminous. It was written in the form of a diary, but interspersed with reflections and protestations.
‘I protest,’ it began, ‘that I had no premeditated design or the idea of any continued course of duplicity when my first error—the production of the Hemynge note of hand—was committed.’
‘He calls it “an error,”’ thought Margaret with a moan, and indeed the opening remark was the keynote of the whole composition, significant of all that was to come. He had been weak, it avowed, but never wicked; the victim not so much of temptation, but of overwhelming circumstances. ‘You know, Margaret——’
This unexpected personal appeal came upon her like a thunderclap; it was as though in that solitary room and in that solemn hour when night and morning were about to meet, his very voice had addressed her. ‘You know, Margaret, what sort of relations existed at that time between Mr. Erin and myself: how, though he permitted me to pass as his son, he was far from having any paternal feelings towards me; that he had no sympathy with my tastes, no interest in my doings, and that he grudged me the cost of my very maintenance. Was it so very reprehensible that, having attempted in vain to gain his affection by the usual road to a father’s heart, by diligence and duty, that I looked about me for some other way? Knowing his passion for any reliques of Shakespeare, it struck me that I might conciliate him by affecting to discover that of which he was always in search. I do not seek to justify what I did, but there was surely some extenuation for it.