CHAPTER XXXIX. TWO PARTS OF A TOKEN.
Anthony had, as his father surmised, gone to see his Aunt Magdalen. His heart was soft within him—softened at the sense of his own unworthiness, and with the return flow of his old love to Urith. And as he did not desire at once to go back to Willsworthy, and at the same time remembered that some time had elapsed since he had seen his aunt, he went to her house. There he found his grandmother, Mistress Penwarne. Some of the bitterness of the old woman seemed to be rubbed away. Perhaps daily association with the gentleness of Luke Cleverdon had done this.
She was in tears when Anthony entered. Magdalen had been talking with her over the plan mapped out for Bessie, to the complete, final exclusion of Anthony from return to his father's house.
"Now—now does the righteous God pay back to old Anthony Cleverdon all the wrong he did my daughter," she said. "See—drop for drop of gall. Where there fell one on my child's heart, his own son spirts a drop on to his father's heart. There is retribution in this world."
"Oh, Mistress Penwarne," remonstrates Magdalen. "How can you take delight in this?"
"I delight only in seeing justice done," answered the old woman. "You hold with your brother—naturally—to some extent; but you never loved my daughter. You never showed her kindness——"
"Indeed, now," interrupted Magdalen, "there you do me a wrong. It was Margaret who would not suffer me to enter the house and be of any consequence more in Hall, who withstood me when I would draw near to my brother."
"She had no power to withstand any one. That you know full well. She weighed naught with her husband. But let that be. If you sinned against her, God is bringing the whip down on your shoulders as well, for I know that what is now falling out is to you great pain and affliction."
"That it is indeed," sighed Magdalen.
"Anthony is used by the hand of Providence as its rod with the father; Heaven rewards on the proud Squire of Hall every heartache, every humiliation to which he subjected my child. You know not how I have prayed that I might be suffered to see the day when the rod should fall and beat and bruise the back of the offender."