“Or else never come back at all; never be seen, in fact, in England again. That’s how it is, ma’am.”
“Would it not be well to ascertain Lord Averil’s feelings upon the subject, Mr. Hurde?” she rejoined, breaking a silence.
“It would be very well, if it could be done. But who is to do it?”
Maria was beginning to think that she would do it. “You are sure there is nothing else against him?” she reiterated.
“Nothing, ma’am, that need prevent his returning to Prior’s Ash.”
There was no more to be answered, and Mr. Hurde withdrew. Maria lost herself in thought. Could she dare to go to Lord Averil and beseech his clemency? Her brow flushed at the thought. But she had been inured to humiliation of late, and it would be only another drop in the cup of pain. Oh, the relief it would be, could the dreadful suspense, the uncertainty, end! The suspense was awful. Even if it ended in the worst, it would be almost a relief. If Lord Averil should intend to prosecute, who knew but he might forego the intention at her prayers? If so—if so—why, she should ever say that God had sent her to him.
There was the reverse side of the picture. A haughty reception of her—for was she not the wife of the man who had wronged him?—and a cold refusal. How she should bear that, she did not like to think. Should she go? Could she go? Even now her heart was failing her——
What noise was that? A sort of commotion in the hall. She opened the dining-room door and glanced out. Thomas Godolphin had come, and was entering the Bank, leaning on his servant Bexley’s arm, there to go through his day’s work, looking more fit for his coffin. It was the turning of the scale.
“I will go to him!” murmured Maria to herself. “I will go to Lord Averil, and hear all there may be to hear. Let me do it! Let me do it!—for the sake of Thomas Godolphin!” And she prepared herself for the visit.
This proposed application to Lord Averil may appear but a very slight affair to the careless and thoughtless: one of those trifling annoyances which must occasionally beset our course through life. Why should Maria have shrunk from it with that shiveringly sensitive dread?—have set about it as a forced duty, with a burning cheek and failing heart? Consider what it was that she undertook, you who would regard it lightly; pause an instant and look at it in all its bearings. Her husband, George Godolphin, had robbed Lord Averil of sixteen thousand pounds. It is of no use to mince the matter. He had shown himself neither more nor less than a thief, a swindler. He, a man of the same social stamp as Lord Averil, moving in the same sphere of county society, had fallen from his pedestal by his own fraudulent act, to a level (in crime) with the very dregs of mankind. Perhaps no one in the whole world could ever feel it in the same humiliating degree as did his wife—unless it might be Thomas Godolphin. Both of them, unfortunately for them—yes, I say it advisedly—unfortunately for them in this bitter storm of shame—both of them were of that honourable, upright, ultra-refined nature, on which such a blow falls far more cruelly than death. Death! death! If it does come, it brings at least one recompense: the humiliation and the trouble, the bitter pain and the carking care are escaped from, left behind for ever in the cruel world. Oh! if these miserable ill-doers could but bear in their own person all the pain and the shame!—if George Godolphin could only have stood out on a pinnacle in the face of Prior’s Ash and expiated his folly alone! But it could not be. It never can or will be. As the sins of the people in the Israelitish camp were laid upon the innocent and unhappy scape-goat, so the sins which men commit in the present day are heaped upon unconscious and guileless heads. As the poor scape-goat wandered with his hidden burden into the remote wilderness, away from the haunts of man, so do these other heavily-laden ones stagger away with their unseen load, only striving to hide themselves from the eyes of men—anywhere—in patience and silence—praying to die.