The New Magdalen

There was silence in the room. The eyes of all the persons present

turned more or less anxiously on Julian. Mercy was vaguely surprised and

alarmed. Horace, like Lady Janet, felt offended, without clearly knowing

why. Even Grace Roseberry herself was subdued by her own presentiment

of some coming interference for which she was completely unprepared.

Julian's words and actions, from the moment when he had written on the

card, were involved in a mystery to which not one of the persons round

him held the clew.

The motive which had animated his conduct may, nevertheless, be

described in two words: Julian still held to his faith in the inbred

nobility of Mercy's nature.

He had inferred, with little difficulty, from the language which Grace

had used toward Mercy in his presence, that the injured woman must have

taken pitiless advantage of her position at the interview which he had

interrupted. Instead of appealing to Mercy's sympathies and Mercy's

sense of right--instead of accepting the expression of her sincere

contrition, and encouraging her to make the completest and the speediest

atonement--Grace had evidently outraged and insulted her. As a necessary

result, her endurance had given way--under her own sense of intolerable

severity and intolerable wrong.

The remedy for the mischief thus done was, as Julian had first seen it,

to speak privately with Grace, to soothe her by owning that his opinion

of the justice of her claims had undergone a change in her favor, and

then to persuade her, in her own interests, to let him carry to Mercy

such expressions of apology and regret as might lead to a friendly

understanding between them.

With those motives, he had made his request to be permitted to speak

separately to the one and the other. The scene that had followed, the

new insult offered by Grace, and the answer which it had wrung

from Mercy, had convinced him that no such interference as he had

contemplated would have the slightest prospect of success.

The only remedy now left to try was the desperate remedy of letting

things take their course, and trusting implicitly to Mercy's better

nature for the result.

Let her see the police officer in plain clothes enter the room. Let her

understand clearly what the result of his interference would be. Let her

confront the alternative of consigning Grace Roseberry to a mad-house or

of confessing the truth--and what would happen? If Julian's confidence

in her was a confidence soundly placed, she would nobly pardon the

outrages that had been heaped upon her, and she would do justice to the

woman whom she had wronged.

If, on the other hand, his belief in her was nothing better than the

blind belief of an infatuated man--if she faced the alternative and

persisted in asserting her assumed identity--what then?

Julian's faith in Mercy refused to let that darker side of the question

find a place in his thoughts. It rested entirely with him to bring the

officer into the house. He had prevented Lady Janet from making any

mischievous use of his card by sending to the police station and warning

them to attend to no message which they might receive unless the card

produced bore his signature. Knowing the responsibility that he was

taking on himself--knowing that Mercy had made no confession to him

to which it was possible to appeal--he had signed his name without an

instant's hesitation: and there he stood now, looking at the woman whose

better nature he was determined to vindicate, the only calm person in

the room.