CHAPTER XXIX
DIVERS OPINIONS
The consternation created at Sunnyside by the breaking off of Sara's engagement had spent itself at last. Selwyn had said but little, only his saint's eyes held the wondering, hurt look that the inexplicable sins of humanity always had the power to bring into them. Characteristically, he hated the sin but overflowed in sympathy for the sinner.
“Poor devil!” he said, when the whole story of Trent's transgression and its consequences had been revealed to him. “What a ghastly stone to hang round a man's neck for the term of his natural life! If they'd shot him, it would have been more merciful! That would at least have limited the suffering,” he went on, taking Sara's hand and holding it in his strong, kindly one a moment. “Poor little comrade! Oh, my dear”—as she shrank instinctively—“I'm not going to talk about it—I know you'd rather not. Condolence platitudes were never in my line. But my pal's troubles are mine—just as she once made mine hers.”
Jane Crab's opinions were enunciated without fear or favour, and, in defiance of public opinion, she took her stand on the side of the sinner and maintained it unwaveringly.
“Well, Miss Sara,” she affirmed, “unless you've proof as strong as 'Oly Writ, as they say, I'd believe naught against Mr. Trent. Bluff and 'ard he may be in 'is manner, but after the way he conducted himself the night Miss Molly ran away, I'll never think no ill of 'im, not if it was ever so!”
Sara smiled drearily.
“I wish I could feel as you do, Jane dear. But—Mrs. Durward knows.”
“Mrs. Durward! Huh! One of them tigris women I calls 'er,” retorted Jane, who had formed her opinion with lightning rapidity when Elisabeth made a farewell visit to Sunnyside before leaving Monkshaven. “Not but what you can't help liking her, neither,” went on Jane judicially. “There's something good in the woman, for all she looks at you like a cat who thinks you're after stealing her kittens. But there! As the doctor—bless the man!—always says, there's good in everybody if so be you'll look for it. Only I'd as lief think that Mrs. Durward was somehow scared-like—too almighty scared to be her natchral self, savin' now and again when she forgets.”
To Mrs. Selwyn, the breaking off of Sara's engagement, and the manner of it, signified very little. She watched the panorama of other people's lives unfold with considerably less sympathetic concern than that with which one follows the ups and downs that befall the characters in a cinema drama, since they were altogether outside the radius of that central topic of unfailing interest—herself.