Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been carried off to Europe by
Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of
that continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of her ward.
Hewson heard that she was not to be gone a great while; it was well into
the winter when they started, and he understood that they were merely
going to Rome for the end of the season, and were then going to work
northward, and after June in London were coming home. He did not fail to
see her again before she left for any want of wishing, but he did not
happen to meet her at other houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she
had one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any function. In
thinking the point over it occurred to Hewson that this was so because he
was not wanted there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself; for it had
been in his brief experience of her that she let people know what she
wanted, and that with Mrs. Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her
name but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. If Miss
Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would
have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and
not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together.
Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad
Hewson’s folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected
in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not
cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It
seeing even more active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself
sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and
reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in
every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out
that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his
debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort
of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had
accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty
took the form that was most of all distasteful to him: the form of
publicity in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to
the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her
reporter’s Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an
interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary
of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the
apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while
tastefully disguising Hewson’s identity in the figure of A Well-Known
Society-man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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