'True. But how was he to know that?' 'I don't know. I never thought of anything of that kind,' said
Margaret, reddening, and looking hurt and offended.
'And perhaps he never would, but for the lie,--which, under the
circumstances, I maintain, was necessary.' 'It was not. I know it now. I bitterly repent it.' There was a long pause of silence. Margaret was the first to
speak.
'I am not likely ever to see Mr. Thornton again,'--and there she
stopped.
'There are many things more unlikely, I should say,' replied Mr.
Bell.
'But I believe I never shall. Still, somehow one does not like to
have sunk so low in--in a friend's opinion as I have done in
his.' Her eyes were full of tears, but her voice was steady, and
Mr. Bell was not looking at her. 'And now that Frederick has
given up all hope, and almost all wish of ever clearing himself,
and returning to England, it would be only doing myself justice
to have all this explained. If you please, and if you can, if
there is a good opportunity, (don't force an explanation upon
him, pray,) but if you can, will you tell him the whole
circumstances, and tell him also that I gave you leave to do so,
because I felt that for papa's sake I should not like to lose his
respect, though we may never be likely to meet again?' 'Certainly. I think he ought to know. I do not like you to rest
even under the shadow of an impropriety; he would not know what
to think of seeing you alone with a young man.' 'As for that,' said Margaret, rather haughtily, 'I hold it is
"Honi soit qui mal y pense." Yet still I should choose to have it
explained, if any natural opportunity for easy explanation
occurs. But it is not to clear myself of any suspicion of
improper conduct that I wish to have him told--if I thought that
he had suspected me, I should not care for his good opinion--no!
it is that he may learn how I was tempted, and how I fell into
the snare; why I told that falsehood, in short.' 'Which I don't blame you for. It is no partiality of mine, I
assure you.' 'What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is
nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate
conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any
more, if you please. It is done--my sin is sinned. I have now to
put it behind me, and be truthful for evermore, if I can.' 'Very well. If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so. I
always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box,
for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So
I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.
"Wonderful," say I, "to think that you have been concealed so
long, and in so small a compass, that I really did not know of
your existence. Pray, sir, instead of growing larger and larger
every instant, and bewildering me with your misty outlines, would
you once more compress yourself into your former dimensions?" And
when I've got him down, don't I clap the seal on the vase, and
take good care how I open it again, and how I go against Solomon,
wisest of men, who confined him there.' But it was no smiling matter to Margaret. She hardly attended to
what Mr. Bell was saying. Her thoughts ran upon the Idea, before
entertained, but which now had assumed the strength of a
conviction, that Mr. Thornton no longer held his former good
opinion of her--that he was disappointed in her. She did not feel
as if any explanation could ever reinstate her--not in his love,
for that and any return on her part she had resolved never to
dwell upon, and she kept rigidly to her resolution--but in the
respect and high regard which she had hoped would have ever made
him willing, in the spirit of Gerald Griffin's beautiful lines, 'To turn and look back when thou hearest The sound of my name.' She kept choking and swallowing all the time that she thought
about it. She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what
he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was.
But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight
of her regret. She had twenty questions on the tip of her tongue
to ask Mr. Bell, but not one of them did she utter. Mr. Bell
thought that she was tired, and sent her early to her room, where
she sate long hours by the open window, gazing out on the purple
dome above, where the stars arose, and twinkled and disappeared
behind the great umbrageous trees before she went to bed. All
night long too, there burnt a little light on earth; a candle in
her old bedroom, which was the nursery with the present
inhabitants of the parsonage, until the new one was built. A
sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and
disappointment, over-powered Margaret. Nothing had been the same;
and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater
pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to
recognise it.