“Nothing whatever.”
“I may leave you at the church door if I please?”
“At the church door, with your fee in your pocket.”
“Paid from the money in your own possession?”
“Certainly! How else should I pay it?”
Captain Wragge took off his hat, and passed his handkerchief over his face with an air of relief.
“Give me a minute to consider it,” he said.
“As many minutes as you like,” she rejoined, reclining on the bank in her former position, and returning to her former occupation of tearing up the tufts of grass and flinging them out into the air.
The captain’s reflections were not complicated by any unnecessary divergences from the contemplation of his own position to the contemplation of Magdalen’s. Utterly incapable of appreciating the injury done her by Frank’s infamous treachery to his engagement—an injury which had severed her, at one cruel blow, from the aspiration which, delusion though it was, had been the saving aspiration of her life—Captain Wragge accepted the simple fact of her despair just as he found it, and then looked straight to the consequences of the proposal which she had made to him.
In the prospect before the marriage he saw nothing more serious involved than the practice of a deception, in no important degree different—except in the end to be attained by it—from the deceptions which his vagabond life had long since accustomed him to contemplate and to carry out. In the prospect after the marriage he dimly discerned, through the ominous darkness of the future, the lurking phantoms of Terror and Crime, and the black gulfs behind them of Ruin and Death. A man of boundless audacity and resource, within his own mean limits; beyond those limits, the captain was as deferentially submissive to the majesty of the law as the most harmless man in existence; as cautious in looking after his own personal safety as the veriest coward that ever walked the earth. But one serious question now filled his mind. Could he, on the terms proposed to him, join the conspiracy against Noel Vanstone up to the point of the marriage, and then withdraw from it, without risk of involving himself in the consequences which his experience told him must certainly ensue?