‘Oh, you are mistaken!’ she exclaimed, rising at once to the defence of a friend; ‘you do not know how much good he has done!’
‘No; but I do know some of the harm he has done.’ There was a sort of grim humour in voice and look, as if he were trying to subdue his bitterness of heart by smiling at the girl’s innocent trustfulness.
‘Harm!—Mr Hadleigh harm anybody! You judge him wrongly: he may look hard and—and unpleasant; but he has a kind nature, and suffers a great deal.’
‘He should suffer’ (this more gently now—more like himself, and as if he spoke in sorrow rather than in anger). ‘But, all the same he has done harm—cruel, wicked harm.’
‘To whom—to whom?’
‘To me and to your mother.’ A long pause, as if he were drawing breath for the words which at length he uttered in a faltering whisper: ‘His lies separated us.’
Madge stood mute and pale. She remembered what Aunt Hessy had told her: how there had come the rumour first, and then the confident assertion of the treachery of the absent lover—no one able to tell who brought the news which the loss of his letter in the wreck, and consequently apparent silence, seemed to confirm. Then all the sad days of hoping—of faith in the absent, whilst the heart was sickening and growing faint, as the weeks, the months passed, and the unbroken silence of the loved one slowly forced the horrible conviction upon her that the news must be true. He—Austin, whom she had prayed not to go away—had gone without answering that pathetic cry, and had broken his troth.
Poor mother, poor mother! Oh, the agony of it all! Madge could see it—feel it. She could see the woman in her great sorrow dumbly looking across the sea, hoping, still hoping that he would come back, until despair became her master. And now to know that all this misery had been brought about by a Lie! ... and the speaker of the lie had been Philip’s father! Two lives wrecked, two hearts broken by a lie. Was it not the cruelest kind of murder?—the two lives lingering along their weary way, each believing the other faithless.
She sprang into the present again—it was too horrible. She would not believe that any man could be so wicked, and least of all Philip’s father.
‘I will not believe it!’ she exclaimed with a sudden movement of the hands, as if sweeping the sad visions away from her.