“The fat’s in the fire now,” she said, smiling inanely, divided between vague curiosity over the outcome and gratification over the baby’s appearance in its new finery.
Lanty had given Hemans salutary punishment, but his heart sickened within him.
He knew what a leech Hemans would have proved if he had once got a hold upon him; and if he had refused to be blackmailed——?
Lanty knew well with what insidious, untraceable persistency a scandal springs and grows and spreads in the country. He knew how hard it is to kill, how difficult to locate, like trying to catch mist in one’s hands. He had heard often that wicked proverb which says, “Where there’s smoke there must be some fire.” A man has often self-possession to extricate himself from a danger, the retrospect of which makes him nearly die of fear. And so it was with Lanty, as there grew upon him the sense of what a calamity might have overtaken him.
How Mabella might have been tortured by this horrible falsehood. Mabella, his wife, who blushed still like the girl that she was! It was a very tender greeting he gave his wife and child when he reached home, and he made Mabella very happy by his account of Ann’s delight over her gift. And then he strode off to his fields, and all day long he remembered two things—that Mabella’s charity to the poor disgraced girl had already brought its blessing back to the giver, and that one phrase of Ann’s, “being as you drank.”
Lanty had never realized fully before what he was doing. But his eyes opened. He could look forward to the future, but the thought of the past gave him a sense of helplessness which made his heart ache.
With every honest effort of his hands that day he registered a vow. The peril he had escaped had opened his eyes to the other dangers which threatened the heaven, which he had thought he possessed so securely, of wife and child.
The real purification of Lanty’s life from the sporadic sin which had beset him took place that day as he worked in his fields, but his friends and neighbours always thought the change dated from another day a few weeks later.
For although we have learned our lesson well, yet Destiny, like a careful schoolmaster, takes us by the hand, and leading us over sharp flints and through thorny thickets, revises the teachings of our sufferings.