“No, indeed!” cried Rebecca: “if you will but believe me.”
“Do not I believe you? Have you not confessed?”
“You will not pretend to unsay what you have said,” cried her eldest sister: “that would be making things worse.”
“Go, go out of my sight!” said her father. “Take your child with you to your chamber, and never let me see either of you again. I do not turn you out of my doors to-day, because I gave you my word I would not, if you revealed your shame; but by to-morrow I will provide some place for your reception, where neither I, nor any of your relations, shall ever see or hear of you again.”
Rebecca made an effort to cling around her father, and once more to declare her innocence: but her sisters interposed, and she was taken, with her reputed son, to the chamber where the curate had sentenced her to remain, till she quitted his house for ever.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The curate, in the disorder of his mind, scarcely felt the ground he trod as he hastened to the dean’s house to complain of his wrongs. His name procured him immediate admittance into the library, and the moment the dean appeared the curate burst into tears. The cause being required of such “very singular marks of grief,” Mr. Rymer described himself “as having been a few moments ago the happiest of parents; but that his peace and that of his whole family had been destroyed by Mr. Henry Norwynne, the dean’s nephew.”
He now entered into a minute recital of Henry’s frequent visits there, and of all which had occurred in his house that morning, from the suspicion that a child was concealed under his roof, to the confession made by his youngest daughter of her fall from virtue, and of her betrayer’s name.
The dean was astonished, shocked, and roused to anger: he vented reproaches and menaces on his nephew; and “blessing himself in a virtuous son, whose wisdom and counsel were his only solace in every care,” sent for William to communicate with him on this unhappy subject.
William came, all obedience, and heard with marks of amazement and indignation the account of such black villainy! In perfect sympathy with Mr. Rymer and his father, he allowed “no punishment could be too great for the seducer of innocence, the selfish invader of a whole family’s repose.”