"Ay, George," answered the maiden, as she burst into tears at the recollection of her former love, and the sight of her unhappy lover. "I hae been sair dealt wi'; but I forgie ye; and I forgie also your wife. I will dree the scorn o' an ill warld; but till you and she are dead, my lips will never mention the wrangs I hae suffered from my auld freend, and him I could hae dee'd to serve."
"Miserable man that I am!" exclaimed the youth. "How much do your generosity and kindness show me I have lost, and lost for ever? Whither now shall I fly!—to the arms o' a murderer, the wife o' my bosom—or to the wide world, to roam, a houseless man, to whom there is nae city o' refuge on earth?"
Unable longer to bear the poignancy of his feelings, he rushed out of the house.
For several years after the scene we have now described, Wallace was not heard of. None but his father knew whither he had gone. His wife was absolutely discarded from the farmhouse; and, her habits getting gradually worse, she became a street vagrant, and renounced herself to the dominion of the evil power that had, from an early period, ruled her, but whose workings she had so artfully, for a time, attempted to conceal. She paid many visits to Inverleith Mains, but was rejected by the old farmer, who attributed to her the ruin of his son. On these occasions, she broke forth in wild execrations; and, on her return, did not fail to assail the widow and her daughter as the instruments of her ruin. The old story of the child was published at the door in the words of drunken delirium; and often mixed with stray sentences of triumph that, to any one possessed of the secret, would have appeared a sufficient condemnation of herself. Yet the construction was all the other way; for Menie had never been cleared by evidence, and the virulent expressions of the vagabond were, according to the laws which too often regulate mundane belief, taken as inculpation; and hence the prejudice against the innocent victim was kept up, and the lives of her and her mother embittered to a degree that called for all the aids of their "sacred remeid" to ameliorate sufferings that seemed destined to have no end upon earth. But the ways of Heaven are wonderful. A boisterous sea may wreck, but the sufferer may be carried to the shore by a wave which, if less impetuous, might have been his grave. Wallace's wife at last died from the effects of that dissipation that had opened the evil heart to give forth the confession of her own shame; and, after this relief, the husband's father paid regular visits to Menie and her mother. He never spoke of the secret that had driven his son away, nor of the place to which he had fled; but he showed sufficiently, by his attentions and kindness, that he knew all. The house of the widow and her daughter was now kept full by supplies from the farm; money, too, was given to them in abundance, and, in so far as regarded worldly means, the two inmates had, at no period of their lives, been so well provided for.
Five years had now elapsed since the disappearance of Wallace. One night, as Menie and her mother were sitting by the fire, the door was opened, and Wallace stood before them. His manner was now very different from what it was on that day when he rushed like a madman from the house. He stood for a moment, looking at the couple who had suffered so much from his wrongs; and the first words he uttered were—
"Menie Dempster, ye have been true to your promise, and ye have been rewarded. That woman is gone to her trial, and yours is ended. Now shall truth triumph."
Menie was unable to utter a word. Her eyes were alternately turned to Wallace and to the fire. The mother laid her hand solemnly on the Bible, and addressing the inspired volume—
"Thus are yer secrets brought to light—ay, even out o' darkness. They wha trust in ye shall not fail in the end, though they should stumble seven times, yea, seven times seven."
"If I had trusted mair to that," said Wallace, "than to the whisperins o' my ain heart, I might never have been a miserable husband, or a banished man. But it's no yet owre late. I am resolved. Menie, will ye now consent to be the wife o' him wha wrought, maybe unwittingly, to your ruin?"
Menie was yet silent.