“To help you? whom do you want to help you? I should have helped you if you had shown any sense. Bedloe to George! Then it is the half of the money only that is to be for me? Oh, thank you for nothing, Miss Winnie, if you think I am to be put off with that. Look here! I came to you thinking you meant well, to show you a way out of it. But I’ve got a true respect for the governor’s will, if no one else has. Don’t you know that for years and years he had cut George out of it altogether, and that it was just Bedloe—Bedloe above everything—that he was not to have?”
Winifred shrank and trembled as if it were she who was the criminal. “Yes,” she said almost under her breath, “I know; but, Tom, think. He is the eldest, he has children who have done no wrong.”
“I don’t think anything about it,” said Tom. “The governor cut him out; and what reason have you got for giving him what was taken from him? What can you say for yourself? that’s what I want to know.”
“Tom,” said Winifred, trembling, with tears in her eyes, “there are the children: little George, who is called after my father, who is the real heir. His heart would have melted, I am sure it would, if he had seen the children.”
“Oh, the children! that woman’s children, and the image of her! Can’t you find a better reason than that?”
“Tom,” said Winifred again, “my father is dead, he can see things now in a different light. Oh, what is everything on the earth, poor bits of property and pride, in comparison with right and justice? Do you think they don’t know better and wish if they could to remedy what has been wrong here?”
“I don’t know what you mean by they,” said Tom sullenly. “If you mean the governor, we don’t know anything about him; whether—whether it’s all right, you know, or if”—Here he paused for an appropriate word, but, not finding one, cried out, as with an intention of cutting short the subject, “That’s all rubbish! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you go on with this folly, to drag the governor’s name through the mud, by Jove! I’ll tell Babington. I’ll put him up to what you’re after. Against my own interest? What do I care? I’ll tell Babington, by Jove! to spite you if nothing more!”
“I think you will kill me!” cried Winifred, at the end of her patience; “and that would be the easiest of all, for you would be my heirs, George and you.”
He stared at her for a moment as if weighing the suggestion, then, saying resentfully, “Always George,” turned and left her, shutting the door violently behind him. The noise echoed through the house, which was all silent and asleep, and Winifred, very lonely, deserted on all sides, leaned back in her chair and cried to herself silently, in prostration of misery and weakness. What was she to do? to whom was she to turn? She had nobody to stand by her. There was nothing but a blank and silence on every side wherever she could turn.