Her companion said nothing more for a moment. She had been conscious that Honora was not satisfied, but had preferred to take no notice of it, and to quiet her without seeming aware that she needed quieting.
"Poor Mr. Schöninger!" she said presently. "I pity him with all my heart. It is, of course, impossible to believe that this arrest is anything but a mistake which will soon be corrected. Still, the affair must be very painful to him. How indignant Lawrence will be! I wish he might hear nothing of it till he comes home, for I really think he would come sooner if he knew what has happened. He thought a good deal of Mr. Schöninger."
"Yes, it must soon be corrected," repeated Honora, passing over the rest. "I cannot imagine on what grounds the arrest was made; but some are ready to believe of a stranger what they would never listen to if said of one they knew. One might parody that proverb about the absent, and say that the foreigner is always wrong. Only imagine what it must be, Mrs. Gerald"—Honora's brown eyes dilated with a sort of terror,—"imagine what it must be to find one's self in trouble and disgrace alone in a foreign land. No person has any special interest in the stranger; no one knows him well enough to defend him; his reputation is a bubble that the first breath may break; and if he is wrong, no one understands what excuses may be made for him. Fancy Lawrence alone in some European country, and arrested for a great crime."
Mrs. Gerald had listened at first with sympathy; but at the name of Lawrence her face changed.
"My dear Honora," she said with decision, "I cannot possibly imagine my son, no matter how far away, nor how friendless he might be—I cannot imagine him being arrested on a charge of robbery and murder! It is too great a flight of fancy, and too unjust. But that does not prevent my pitying Mr. Schöninger."
Mrs. Gerald would not have shown such asperity, probably, had her son never given people anything to forgive in him. Tremblingly alive to his faults, she gladly seized on any charge which it was possible to cast indignantly aside.
Honora perceived too well her feelings and the mistake that she herself had made to be in the least annoyed at the reply. It may be that she understood better than ever before what might be the pain of one whose affections are engaged by an object which has not her entire approval. Not that she loved Mr. Schöninger, or for a moment fancied that she did; it was only that he had come near enough to excite her imagination on the subject of love.
"Fortunately," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "the people of Crichton are liberal."
It was such an opinion as might have been expected from her character and experience. Life had shown her but little of those deeper causes which underlie so much of the apparent inconsistency of mankind. She had not learned to distinguish between that firm liberality which is founded on principle, and is but another name for justice, and its unstable namesake, which floats on the surface of a soul that has no convictions. The former can be relied on; the latter may at any time give place to a violent bigotry. It has an immense vanity beneath, and fiercely resents on others its own mistakes.
The gradations of the change might have been precisely calculated beforehand. At first, an astonishment which was unanimous; followed, after the natural pause, by individual voices in various tones, the loud ones harmless, the whispering ones poisonous. Crichton was a city where there could be but one sensation at a time. Whatever of moment happened there, everybody knew it and everybody talked about it. The loud voices grew lower, the whispers increased. We have heard orchestra music like that, where, after the first crash and pause, the instruments start their several ways, and one scarcely hears the whisper of violins that runs through the heavy brass, till presently that whisper becomes an audible hiss, then a sharp cry, and finally its shrieks overtop trumpet and organ.