“Of you, dear? Not for a moment—how dare yon suppose such a thing? But Arthur, with all his kindness of nature, has some hard notions—I think his father was a Baptist, or something of that kind, and brought his children up very sternly. He dragged them to chapel three times on Sundays, and scolded them if they went to sleep, or did not remember the texts. I know they rather hated him.”
“I never saw any sternness about Arthur.”
“You have never seen him except at pleasant times. I have been much more in the house, and I have watched. I never heard him say an unkind or ungentlemanly thing, but I have seen enough to make me believe that, on provocation, he would deal hard measure.”
“Serve anybody right who gave a good man provocation.”
“Ah! Charles, dear, I don’t know that that is the rule we ought to go by. One thing I do know, that it is not yours.”
“Mine! No. I’m afraid I resemble Lord Ogleby, and like my own frailties too well to be hard upon those of other people.”
“Do not you speak as if you were ashamed of being a kind, forgiving man. If you do, I shall be ashamed of you, for the first time in all my life.”
“Beatrice, dear,” said her husband, “I do not wish to return to a subject which—well, which does not grow more pleasant as we recur to it, but we must look it in the face. Arthur Lygon puts his daughter out of the way, while he goes on an expedition which may or may not be what—what has been said, but which his friend’s wife must believe to be so. This Mrs. Berry would not dare to invent such a story, nor is it likely she would. Arthur himself may have suspicious only, but I think you must see that he has imparted his suspicions to his adviser at Lipthwaite.”
“It is not the name,” persisted Mrs. Hawkesley.
“Is it probable that he would have two confidential friends there?—besides, I am certain of the name, now. I recollect some foolish joke I made about it one evening—something on the word berry, and Arthur’s answering with an imitation of the stock speech a snob makes: ‘Put that in your next play.’ The name is Berry.”
“Then Mr. Allingham must be dead.”
“Possibly. But do not you see the force of what I say?”
“My dearest Charles, I am determined to see no force in anything until I have had Laura’s two hands in my two, and have asked her with my own lips why she went away.”
“I only hope that she may be able to place her hands in yours, my dear, for that would mean that all was right indeed.”
Beatrice looked earnestly at her husband for a moment or two, and then said, in a lower voice:—
“I fear you are all alike.”
“I do not quite understand, dear.”
“Let me alone. I won’t say what I mean—you do not deserve that I should. Yes, you do, and I will,” she added hastily, taking his hand. “I mean that you, like other men, will be ready utterly to condemn Laura, if it should prove that she has done wrong.”
“I have said no such thing.”
“Dear, you said it this moment. You said that if I could take her hand she must be innocent. That is a man’s thought.”
“And a woman’s, I trust,” said the husband.
“And suppose—we have no right to do so, and you know that I have no secrets from you, and that I have no right whatever to suppose such a thing—but if this Lipthwaite hag—”
“She deserves the word, but do not you use it.”
“Let me speak. If there should be a foundation for anything that the woman has said—if—”
“If Laura has wronged her husband—there?”
“Yes, and were kneeling before me on that rug, as she used to do in the old days when we were girls, and as the youngest she often would say her prayers so—and if she told me of her sin, and what had led her to it, and poured out her heart in shame and sorrow—my hand is yours, Charles, what should I do with it? No, do not say that you hope such an hour may never come, but answer me as frankly as I speak to you.”
“I know how one man whom you honour would reply—I mean Robert Urquhart.”
“He is a religious man, in his way, and he would quote the Bible, and tell her to go and sin no more; but he is a proud man, too, and he would never speak to her again in this world. But what would my husband say? Answer me. Would he ask me to stand up, and tell Laura that with all desire to make every allowance for her, I could find no excuse for her conduct, and though we should willingly make every effort to place her out of the way of future temptation, it would of course be impossible for us to meet her any more?”
“I think that is a speech which, if repeated in the Divorce Court, would be unanimously pronounced as quite worthy of persons of our high character, and as combining tenderness for the erring with a proper regard to what is due to ourselves and to society.”
“And you would have me say this to Laura, if she were kneeling here?”
“Wait until we hear her at the door, and then I will tell you,” said Hawkesley.
“I know you better, my own one,” said his wife, impetuously. “And though God grant the day may never come, and that there may be no reason for its coming,” she added, tearfully, “if it ever should come, I will trust your heart as 1 will trust my own, and though you do not often quote the Bible,” she said, with something of a smile through her tears, “I know that you have read about One who did not break a bruised reed.”
“I will trust, with you, that the reed has not been bruised,” said Hawkesley.
But as he looked into the pretty little room where Clara was sleeping,
“A dove, out-wearied with her flight,”
