“Then you have seen her?” he inquired.
“Yes, and talked with her; and guessed who stole her from us—stole her away to shame, and grief, and suffering——”
At that point he interrupted her, vehemently, “Why should she be ashamed,” he asked, “for that which was no fault of hers? and was she not better, as she lived with me, believing herself to be a wife, than legally married to Harcourt—a man for whom she never cared two straws? Is not anything, any sin, any disgrace, any suffering, preferable to a loveless marriage? Answer me, truly, Mrs. Dudley,” he persisted; “do you not believe it is?”
With her cheeks on fire, Heather rose and answered him—“Why do you put such a question to me, Mr. Croft—to me, of all women living?” and then she covered her face, and wept aloud—wept for the life she could never live over again, and which had been so poor a counterfeit of existence that she might almost—but for her early training, but for the conviction, that it is better to “suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season”—have wished to change places with Bessie, in order to experience the sensation of being loved wildly and passionately, even though it were sinfully, and so round off the incompleted paragraph of her life; have the sad seventh resolved into the legitimate chord.
Heaven help her! she felt very weak and very miserable, surrounded by people, whose stories seemed all more perfect than her own; and Douglas Croft, listening to that unexpected outburst, felt in his soul there were more ways of deceiving a woman than by a sham marriage; more means of breaking a loving heart than by deceit, and falsehood, and wrong.
“God pardon me,” he thought, as he walked slowly home; “but yet, have I been worse than Dudley? Is it more sinful to love and betray a woman, than to marry her without love?” and, as is usual with all such questions, he decided the matter in his own favour—never reflecting that two wrongs cannot make a right, that a volume of platitudes will never patch up a woman’s reputation, nor enable her to go back again through the years, and begin her life anew.
CHAPTER X.
THE BUBBLE BURSTS.
All this time the affairs of the Protector were falling into a more hopeless state of confusion than ever.
No talk now of shares going up to a premium. If a man had offered a handful of them to a beggar in the street, they would scarcely have been accepted, excepting for pipe-lights. On the Stock Exchange, every person knew better than to touch them. The Company was given over by commercial doctors, and no one felt inclined to waste a guinea on propping it up. If trade would only take “a start,” the directors remarked; but then, unhappily, trade did nothing of the kind.
Within eighteen months of the promising child’s birth, one of the very objects for which Limited Companies are ostensibly established, namely, to provide such a capital as shall enable a certain number of traders to live through bad seasons, in the hope of better days coming—this object, I say, was utterly ignored.