"And has paid for it. The banned life he has been obliged to live since was surely an expiation. His punishment was greater than he could bear; it was prolonged and prolonged, and his heart broke."
Mr. Edwin Barley had his eyes fixed on the dead face, possibly tracing the likeness to the handsome young man of nine or ten years ago.
"Of other crime towards you he was innocent," pursued Sir Harry. "He never injured you or yours; there might have been folly in his heart in the heyday of his youth and spirits; there was no sin. You have been unreasonably vindictive."
"I say NO," returned Mr. Edwin Barley, striving to suppress an emotion that was rising and would not be suppressed. "Had I ever injured George Heneage, that he should come into my home and make it desolate? What had my wife or my ward done to him that he should take their lives? He killed both of them: the one deliberately, the other indirectly, for her death arose out of the trouble. Charlotte Delves—Mrs. Penn now, of whom you complain,—lost her only relative, saving myself, when she lost Philip King. And for me? I was left in that same desolate home, bereft of all I cared for, left to go through life alone. Few men have loved a wife as I loved mine: she was my one little ewe lamb, Harry Chandos. Vindictive! Think of my wrongs."
Looking there at each other, the dead face lying between them, it might be that both felt there was much to forgive. Certainly Harry Chandos had never until that moment realized the misery it had brought to Edwin Barley.
"I see; we have all alike suffered. But he who caused the suffering is beyond reproach now."
"As things have turned out the game is yours, Sir Harry," said Mr. Edwin Barley, who was too much a man of the world to persist in denying him the title, now that he found it was beyond dispute his. "For my actions I am accountable to none; and were the time to come over again, I should do as I have done."
He turned to quit the room as he spoke, and Mr. Chandos followed him downstairs. A word exchanged at their foot caused Mr. Barley to inquire what it was Mrs. Penn had done: and then Sir Harry gave him the full particulars, with the additional information that she was assumed to have been acting for him, Edwin Barley.
"She was not," said Mr. Barley, shortly. "I knew nothing of this. Placed in the house by me, Sir Harry? She placed herself in the house, as I conclude; certainly I did not place her."
"You have met her in secret in the grounds."