Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral chimes. They kept me awake all night.
* * * * *
Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's "lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing had happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long. Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence. Appearances were dead against her.
It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful memory?
It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for her, and that I had come to do it.
The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour. He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances, wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving terms his admiration of my moral beauty.
And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without Mrs. Thesiger's.
I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.
I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them—they must have had some idea of what I had come for.
He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.