The Three BridesYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
General
The Three Brides
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
The delirium only came with the accesses of fever, and when
sensible, he was very quiet and patient, but always as one weighed
down by sense of failure in a trust. He never seemed to entertain a
hope of surviving. He had watched too many cases not to be aware
that his symptoms were those that had been almost uniformly fatal,
and he noted them as a matter of course. Dr. Easterby came to see
him, and was greatly touched; Herbert was responsive, but it was not
the ordinary form of comfort that he needed, for his sorrow was
neither terror nor despair. His heart was too warm and loving not
to believe that his heavenly Father forgave him as freely as did his
earthly father; but that very hope made him the more grieved and
ashamed of his slurred task, nor did he view his six weeks at
Wil'sbro' as any atonement, knowing it was no outcome of repentance,
but of mere kindliness, and aware, as no one else could be, how his
past negligence had hindered his full usefulness, so that he only
saw his failures. As to his young life, he viewed it as a mortally
wounded soldier does, as a mere casualty of the war, which he was
pledged to disregard. He _did_ perhaps like to think that the fatal
night with Gadley might bring Archie back, and yet Jenny did not
give him the full peace in her happiness which he had promised
himself.
Joanna had suffered terribly, far more than any one knew, and her
mind did not take the revulsion as might have been expected. Her
lighthouse was shining again when she thought it extinguished for
ever, but her spirits could not bear the uncertainty of the spark.
She could not enter into what Miles and Julius both alike told her,
of the impossibility of their mother beginning a prosecution for
money embezzled ten years back, when no living witness existed,
nothing but the scrap of paper written by Herbert, and signed by him
and Margaret Strangeways, authorizing Julius Charnock to use what
had been said by the dying, half-delirious man. What would a jury
say to such evidence? And when Julius said it only freed himself
morally from the secrecy, poor Jenny was bitter against his
scruples, even though he had never said more than that he should
have been perplexed. The most bitter anti-ritualist could hardly
have uttered stronger things than she thought, and sometimes said,
against what seemed to her to be keeping Archie in banishment; while
the brothers' reluctance to expose Mr. Moy, and blast his reputation
and that of his family, was in her present frame of mind an
incomprehensible weakness. People must bear the penalty of their
misdeeds, families and all, and Mrs. and Miss Moy did not deserve
consideration: the pretensions of the mother had always been half
scorn, half thorn, to the old county families, and the fast airs of
the daughter had been offensive enough to destroy all pity for her.
If an action in a Court of Justice were, as Miles and Julius told
her, impossible,--and she would not believe it, except on the word
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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