"It is another nail in your coffin," growled Mr. Snow, as he took his leave.

He went straight to the Bank. He asked to see Mrs. George G.o.dolphin.

Maria, in her pretty morning dress of muslin, was seated with Meta on her knees. She had been reading the child a Bible story, and was now talking to her in a low voice, her own face, so gentle, so pure, and so sad, bent towards the little one's upturned to it.

"Well, young lady, and how are all the dolls?" was the surgeon's greeting. "Will you send her away to play with them, Mrs. George?"

Meta ran off. She intended to come bustling down again with her arms full. Mr. Snow took his seat opposite Maria.

"Why does your husband not come back?" he abruptly asked.

The question seemed to turn Maria's heart to sickness. She opened her lips to answer, but stopped in hesitation. Mr. Snow resumed:

"His staying away is killing Thomas G.o.dolphin. I prescribe tranquillity for him; total rest: instead of which, he is obliged to come here day after day, and be in a continuous scene of worry. Your husband must return, Mrs. George G.o.dolphin."

"Y--es," she faintly answered, lacking the courage to say that considerations for his personal security might forbid it.

"Murder will not mend these unhappy matters, Mrs. George G.o.dolphin; nor would it be a desirable ending to them. And it will be nothing less than murder if he does not return, for Mr. G.o.dolphin will surely die."

All Maria's pulses seemed to beat the quicker. "Is Mr. G.o.dolphin worse?"

she asked.

"He is considerably worse. I have been called in to him this morning. My last orders to him were, not to attempt to come to the Bank. His answer was, that he must come: there was no help for it. I believe there is no help for it, George being away. You must get him home, Mrs. George."

She looked sadly perplexed. Mr. Snow read it correctly.

"My dear, I think there would be no danger. Lord Averil is a personal friend of Mr. G.o.dolphin's. I think there's none for another reason: if the viscount's intention had been to stir unpleasantly in the affair, he would have stirred in it before this."

"Yes--I have thought of that," she answered.

"And now I must go again," he said, rising. "I wish to-day was twenty-four hours long, for the work I have to do in it; but I spared a few minutes to call in and tell you this. Get your husband here, for the sake of his good brother."

The tears were in Maria's eyes. She could scarcely think of Thomas G.o.dolphin and his unmerited troubles without their rising. Mr. Snow saw the wet eyelashes, and laid his hand on the smoothly-parted hair.

"You have your share of sorrow just now, child," he said; "more than you ought to have. It is making you look like a ghost. Why does he leave you to battle it out alone?" added Mr. Snow, his anger mastering him, as he gazed at her pale face, her rising sobs. "Prior's Ash is crying shame upon him. Are you and his brother of less account than he, in his own eyes, that he should abandon you to it?"

She strove to excuse her husband--he _was_ her husband, in spite of that cruel calumny divulged by Margery--but Mr. Snow would not listen. He was in a hurry, he said, and went bustling out of the door, almost upsetting Meta, with her dolls, who was bustling in.

Maria sent the child to the nursery again after Mr. Snow's departure, and stood, her head pressed against the frame of the open window, looking unconsciously on to the terrace, revolving the words recently spoken. "It is killing Thomas G.o.dolphin. It will be nothing less than murder, if George does not return."

Every fibre of her frame was thrilling to it in answer: every generous impulse of her heart was stirred to its depths. He _ought_ to be back.

She had long thought so. For her sake--but she was nothing; for Thomas G.o.dolphin's; for her husband's own reputation. Down deep in her heart she thrust that dreadful revelation of his falsity, and strove to bury it as an English wife and gentlewoman has no resource but to do. Ay! to bury it; and to keep it buried! though the concealment eat away her life--as that scarlet letter A, you have read of, ate into the bosom of another woman renowned in story. It seemed to Maria that the time was come when she must inquire a little into the actual state of affairs, instead of hiding her head and spending her days in the indulgence of her fear and grief. If the whole world spoke against him,--if the whole world had cause to speak,--she was his wife still, and his interests and welfare were hers. Were it possible that any effort she could make would bring him back, she must make it.

The words of Mr. Snow still rang in her ears. How was she to set about it? A few minutes given to reflection, her aching brow pressed to the cold window-frame, and she turned and rang the bell. When the servant appeared, she sent him into the Bank with a request that Mr. Hurde would come and speak with her for five minutes.

Mr. Hurde was not long in obeying the summons. He appeared with a pen behind his ear, and his spectacles pushed up on his brow.

It was not a pleasant task, and Maria had to swallow a good many lumps in her throat before she could make known precisely what she wanted.

"Would Mr. Hurde tell her the exact state of things? What there was, or was not, against her husband."

Mr. Hurde gave no very satisfactory reply. He took off his gla.s.ses and wiped them. Maria had invited him to a chair, and sat near him, her elbow leaning on the table, and her face slightly bent. Mr. Hurde did not know what Mrs. George G.o.dolphin had or had not heard, or how far it would be expedient for him to speak. She guessed at his dilemma.

"Tell me all, Mr. Hurde," she said, lifting her face to his with imploring eagerness. "It is well that you should, for nothing can be more cruel than the uncertainty and suspense I am in. I know about Lord Averil's bonds."

"Ay?" he replied. But he said no more.

"I will tell you why I ask," said Maria. "Mr. Snow has been here, and he informs me that coming to the Bank daily and the worry are killing Mr.

G.o.dolphin. He says Mr. George ought to be back in his brother's place. I think if he can come, he ought to do so."

"I wish he could," returned Mr. Hurde, more quickly and impressively than he usually spoke. "It _is_ killing Mr. G.o.dolphin--that, and the bankruptcy together. But I don't know that it would be safe for him, on account of these very bonds of Lord Averil's."

"What else is there against him?" breathed Maria.

"There's nothing else."

"Nothing else?" she echoed, a shade of hope lighting up her face and her heart.

"Nothing else. That is, nothing that he can be made _criminally_ responsible for," added the old clerk, with marked emphasis, as if he thought that there was a great deal more, had the law only taken cognizance of it. "If Lord Averil should decline to prosecute, he might return to-morrow. He must be back soon, whether or not, to answer to his bankruptcy; or else----"

"Or else--what?" asked Maria falteringly, for Mr. Hurde had stopped.

"Speak out."

"Or else never come back at all; never be seen, in fact, in England again. That's how it is, ma'am."

"Would it not be well to ascertain Lord Averil's feelings upon the subject, Mr. Hurde?" she rejoined, breaking a silence.

"It would be very well, if it could be done. But who is to do it?"

Maria was beginning to think that she would do it. "You are sure there is nothing else against him?" she reiterated.

"Nothing, ma'am, that need prevent his returning to Prior's Ash."

There was no more to be answered, and Mr. Hurde withdrew. Maria lost herself in thought. Could she dare to go to Lord Averil and beseech his clemency? Her brow flushed at the thought. But she had been inured to humiliation of late, and it would be only another drop in the cup of pain. Oh, the relief it would be, could the dreadful suspense, the uncertainty, end! The suspense was awful. Even if it ended in the worst, it would be almost a relief. If Lord Averil should intend to prosecute, who knew but he might forego the intention at her prayers? If so--if so--why, she should ever say that G.o.d had sent her to him.

There was the reverse side of the picture. A haughty reception of her--for was she not the wife of the man who had wronged him?--and a cold refusal. How she should bear that, she did not like to think.

Should she go? Could she go? Even now her heart was failing her----

What noise was that? A sort of commotion in the hall. She opened the dining-room door and glanced out. Thomas G.o.dolphin had come, and was entering the Bank, leaning on his servant Bexley's arm, there to go through his day's work, looking more fit for his coffin. It was the turning of the scale.

"I _will_ go to him!" murmured Maria to herself. "I will go to Lord Averil, and hear all there may be to hear. Let me do it! Let me do it!--for the sake of Thomas G.o.dolphin!" And she prepared herself for the visit.

This proposed application to Lord Averil may appear but a very slight affair to the careless and thoughtless: one of those trifling annoyances which must occasionally beset our course through life. Why should Maria have shrunk from it with that shiveringly sensitive dread?--have set about it as a forced duty, with a burning cheek and failing heart?

Consider what it was that she undertook, you who would regard it lightly; pause an instant and look at it in all its bearings. Her husband, George G.o.dolphin, had robbed Lord Averil of sixteen thousand pounds. It is of no use to mince the matter. He had shown himself neither more nor less than a thief, a swindler. He, a man of the same social stamp as Lord Averil, moving in the same sphere of county society, had fallen from his pedestal by his own fraudulent act, to a level (in crime) with the very dregs of mankind. Perhaps no one in the whole world could ever feel it in the same humiliating degree as did his wife--unless it might be Thomas G.o.dolphin. Both of them, unfortunately for them--yes, I say it advisedly--unfortunately for them in this bitter storm of shame--both of them were of that honourable, upright, ultra-refined nature, on which such a blow falls far more cruelly than death. Death! death! If it does come, it brings at least one recompense: the humiliation and the trouble, the bitter pain and the carking care are escaped from, left behind for ever in the cruel world. Oh! if these miserable ill-doers could but bear in their own person all the pain and the shame!--if George G.o.dolphin could only have stood out on a pinnacle in the face of Prior's Ash and expiated his folly alone! But it could not be. It never can or will be. As the sins of the people in the Israelitish camp were laid upon the innocent and unhappy scape-goat, so the sins which men commit in the present day are heaped upon unconscious and guileless heads. As the poor scape-goat wandered with his hidden burden into the remote wilderness, away from the haunts of man, so do these other heavily-laden ones stagger away with their unseen load, only striving to hide themselves from the eyes of men--anywhere--in patience and silence--praying to die.

Every humiliation which George G.o.dolphin has brought upon himself,--every harsh word cast on him by the world,--every innate sense of guilt and shame which must accompany such conduct, was being expiated by his wife. Yes, it fell worst upon her: Thomas was but his brother; she was part and parcel of himself. But that G.o.d's ways are not as our ways, we might feel tempted to ask why it should be that these terrible trials are so often brought upon the head of such women as Maria G.o.dolphin--timid, good, gentle, sensitive--the least of all able to bear them. That such is frequently the case, is indisputable. In no way was Maria fitted to cope with this. Many might have felt less this very expedition to Lord Averil: to her it was as the very bitterest humiliation. She had hitherto met Lord Averil as an equal--she had entertained him at her house as such--she had stood before him always in her calm self-possession, with a clear face and a clear conscience; and now she must go to him a humble pet.i.tioner--bow before him in all her self-conscious disgrace--implore him to save her husband from the consequences of his criminal act; standing at the felon's bar, and its sequel--transportation. She must virtually ask Lord Averil to put up quietly with the loss of the sixteen thousand pounds, and to make no sign.

With a cheek flushed with emotion,--with a heart sick unto faintness,--Maria G.o.dolphin stepped out of her house in the full blaze of the midday sun. A gloomy day, showing her less conspicuously to the curious gazers of Prior's Ash, had been more welcome to her. She had gone out so rarely since the crash came--but that once, in fact, when she went to her mother--that her appearance was the signal for a commotion. "There's Mrs. George G.o.dolphin!" and Prior's Ash flocked to its doors and its windows, as if Mrs. George G.o.dolphin had been some unknown curiosity in the animal world, never yet exhibited to the eyes of the public. Maria shielded her burning face from observation as well as she could with her small parasol, and pa.s.sed on.

Lord Averil, she had found, was staying with Colonel Max, and her way led her past the Rectory of All Souls', past the house of Lady Sarah Grame. Lady Sarah was at the window, and Maria bowed. The bow was not returned. It was not returned! Lady Sarah turned away with a haughty movement, a cold glance. It told cruelly upon Maria: had anything been wanted to prove to her the estimation in which she was now held by Prior's Ash, that would have done it.