After due time, he came to condole with her on the death of Lally, and then his visits were repeated and repeated until Heather, who could not avoid guessing the nature of the feeling which drew him towards any of Bessie’s kith or kin, began to grow uncomfortable—to imagine she ought to cut short the intimacy somehow, though it was beyond her imagination to conceive how she ought, under the circumstances, to do so.
Perhaps her manner showed her difficulty; perhaps Mr. Croft fancied truly, as the days went by, there was less cordiality in her smile, in the touch of her hand, in the tone of her voice! Anyhow, be that as it will, he took courage one day, and made his confession.
He attempted no apology; he did not strive to whiten the blackness of his sin to her. He did not even speak the name of the woman he had wronged. He merely said, “Some day she may come to you; some day she may want money. Let me leave a sufficient sum in your hands to keep her—if she be living—from absolute poverty. Be to me my good angel! do not believe my repentance insincere because I cannot talk much about it. You are my last hope. If it be impossible for me to reach her through you, then indeed my case is desperate.”
Naked he laid his sin out before her—naked as the new-born child, and yet he prayed her not to look askance upon it, but to pity and forgive. Well he understood—this man to whom the world and its ways were roads he knew from beginning to end, from the first chapter to the last—that to the woman whom he addressed the book of sin was almost as a dead letter, as a language unlearned, as a science incomprehensible.
Passion died out in her presence, vice found no defence sustainable when pleaded before that calm, impartial judge. She could not go with him in his agony of love, of struggling virtue, of wicked strategy, of unavailing repentance—she, whose life had never known the rush and tumult of an overpowering affection, who had never been adored, idolized, wronged, by any man, as it was in Douglas Croft’s nature to adore, idolize, and wrong,—she, who was pure in thought and deed, pure almost as one of God’s angels—how could he tell her of the over-mastering love which had overleapt all boundaries of prudence, all restraints of society, all divine laws, all human restrictions?
But he could appeal to her pity, and to her generosity. He could lay his future at her feet, and pray her to do with it as she would; to give him Bessie’s address, if it came to her knowledge, or to withhold it; to mention his name to Bessie, or to preserve silence concerning him; to say, if Bessie ever wrote or came near, or to ignore her existence, as she pleased—as she deemed best.
“I make no conditions, I ask no mercy, Mrs. Dudley,” he said. “I place myself in your hands; and I merely entreat that you will do whatever seems to you best, regardless of my feelings. If I could only know she is living!” he added.
“She is living,” Heather interrupted.
“Then you have seen her!” he said, eagerly; “is she in London?”
“You must not question me,” Mrs. Dudley replied. “All I can tell you is—that—the girl, whose future you have made so wretched, is living. The greatest kindness you can do her now is to forget that such a person ever existed. I will keep this money, if you wish, in case she should ever really be in want of it. At present, I know, she would not take sixpence from you, and I cannot wonder at, her feeling as she does towards you.”