She smiled again. The man in his wrath seemed to have seized on a child's weapon. He interpreted her smile, and said,—
"My position will be well understood, if another is the bearer. And I wish it to be. I wish men to know that I have no hand in this business. The church is a persecutor. I, her son, am ashamed of her."
"It has given me my opportunity to make a defence. And I can make none, Mr. Muir. My great mistake was in remaining here. Ruin, however, is not so rare a thing in these days that I should be surprised by it, even if it overtake me."
"Ruin! Aye. What curses thicken for their heads who have brought this upon us! Unborn millions will repeat them, and God Almighty sanction and enforce them."
Mr. Muir paused. What arrested him? Merely the countenance of the woman before him. If all those curses had gathered into legions of devils, crowding, swarming, furious, armed with lash and brand, about the form of one who represented love, joy, beauty, all preciousness to her, the terror and the anguish looking from her face could not have been intensified. But she said no word.
How should she speak?
As if in spite of him, and of all he had been wont to hold most sacred and potential, in spite of church and congregation, Constitution and country, the minister had spoken simply for humanity under oppression; had he not earned her confidence? Did he not deserve to know at least what real ground there was for the suspicions roused against her?
Nay, nay! When did ever Love seek deliverance at the cost of the beloved? What woman ever betrayed to secret friend the sin of him she loves? Let all creation read the patent facts, behind them still remains the inviolate, sacred arcanum, and before it stands sentinel Silence, and around it are walls of fire.
Not from this woman's lips should mortal ever learn she was a Rebel's wife!
For Mr. Muir, in his present mood, it was only torture to prolong this interview. He felt himself unfit for counsel or argument,—unfit even for confidence, had it been vouchsafed. But he held, with a tenacity that could not but have its influence on his future acts and life, to the purpose that had broken from him so suddenly, and not less to his own surprise than to the organist's. From this day she was at liberty to seek protection under his roof from threatened mobs and hot-headed church-wardens. Mr. Deane was one man, he himself was another; and if a day was ever coming to the world when Christian magnanimity must rise in its majesty and its strength, that day had surely dawned; if the Christian ministry was ever to know a period when the greatness of its prerogatives was to be made manifest, that period had certainly begun.