“Uncle,” said Horace, at last, the words bursting from his lips in an eager paroxysm of defence against himself, and vindication to his own conscience—“Uncle, I did him no harm.”
“I am very thankful to hear it, Horace,” said the Colonel, very gravely; then he made another pause—“unless it will relieve your mind tell me no more,” he said, quickly—“only, Horace, remember, you have been very near the grave; perhaps you know yourself that you have been near something more terrible than the grave; you should pause and think now while you can; for every evil intention, as well as for every act of sin, there is pardon with God, for Jesus’ sake.”
He said it simply, but with a solemn, almost judicial gravity. He could not help guessing what had been going on in the troubled spirit beside him, of which he knew so little; he could not help shuddering at the thought of the horrible guilt from which, by accident, as it appeared, and interposition of God, the young man had been unwittingly preserved. God help him!—so young, so wretched, to drag the hideous burden of that remembrance through all his days of life! The deepest pity, even amid his horror, struck the old soldier’s noble, innocent heart. He could not comprehend the guilt—but he felt the remorse, with a compassion that was half divine.
Horace made no reply—he shrank, in spite of himself, as though he would have crept away morally out of his uncle’s presence; for the instant the young man realized, with a desperate force of conviction, the “gulf fixed” between heaven and hell which none can pass over; he felt it in his guilt a thousand times more deeply than the pure heart beside him did, in its tender depths of pity. He lay still in his weakness, with a mortified consciousness of humiliation and inferiority, insufferable to his arrogant spirit. Then it occurred to him that there was still one thing, by which he might drag himself up fictitiously to that higher elevation, which he recognized vaguely in his downfall, and envied, though he knew it not. He turned once more towards the watcher by his bed with a sudden movement, which was so quick as to give him pain.
“You think very badly of me,” he said, hastily; “but I have got something to tell you—something to tell Roger Musgrave, which will remedy one evil at least, and change, more than you can suppose, his position in the world.”
The Colonel waved his hand, with the action of a man who knows what another is about to say. “My dear boy,” he said, compassionately, “I am grieved that you cannot have the satisfaction of doing, at least, this piece of justice—but you are too late. The Kenlisle attorney, hearing of your connection with Musgrave, and of some promise you had made him when you heard of your father’s illness, sent to beg an interview with Roger and Sir John, and confessed the whole transaction. That matter has been arranged while you have been ill.”
“Do you mean Pouncet?—Pouncet has consented to his own ruin?” cried Horace, with a pang of disappointment. He had still been reckoning on this as a moral compensation which it would always be in his power to make, to balance more or less his personal guilt.
“Not to his ruin—they have made terms,” said the Colonel. “He restores the property, and pays something to Roger besides, and there will be no prosecution or exposure. He loses Armitage’s confidence, of course, and is no longer his man of business; but he preserves his character, and eases his conscience. All that is arranged. My dear Horace, you are extremely weak: try to compose yourself, and forget these troublesome affairs. If you can, for your health’s sake, endeavour to sleep.”
Horace turned his face sullenly towards the wall, and said no more. Perhaps this sharp pang of unexpected mortification and disappointment eased him of his heavier load. He set his teeth as he turned away and relieved himself from the sight of Uncle Edward’s compassionate and kind face: everything humiliated him in that self-importance which was so strong a power within him. He once had it in his power to be at least Roger Musgrave’s magnanimous deliverer, and to expose the fraud which had left the youth penniless; but he had lost his opportunity, and even that moral make-up for his other grievous guilt had slid away from him. He lay here powerless, known to one man, at least, in all the blackness of his evil intention, and to more than one man, stood revealed and visible, a willing accomplice in a fraud, left in the lurch by the principal sinner. His disappointment—his failure—the humiliation of his guilt—sickened him to the heart; he closed his eyes upon the light, disgusted and miserable. He had his reward!