It showed her correct estimate of her brother's character, that she
never for a second accused him of connivance in the deceit practised
upon his relations and neighbors. He would not have scrupled to wed
a widow, knowing and acknowledging her to be such. Nothing--not
love, tenfold more ardent and irrational than that he felt for his
siren wife--could have wrought upon him to introduce to the world,
as Mrs. Aylett of Ridgeley, one who had been before married, and was
ashamed, for any cause whatever, to avow this. The blemish left by
the acrid breath of common scandal upon a woman's fame was to him
ineffaceable by any process yet discovered by pitying man or angels.
The maligned one may not have erred from the straitest road of
virtue and discretion, but she had been "talked about," and was no
consort for him. In his State and caste, private marriages were
things disallowed, and but one shade more respectable than liasons
that did not pretend to the sanctity of wedlock. What would he say
when the contents of this dingy pocket-book were spread before him?
Ought his sister to do this?
COULD she? He had not earned compassionate consideration from her by
any act of gentleness and forbearance. He had handled the
lopping-knife without ruth, and let the gaping wounds bleed as long
as the bitter ichor would ooze from her heart. She had learned
hardness and self-control from the lesson, but not vindictiveness.
Now that the power was hers to visit upon his haughty spirit
something of the humiliation and distress he had not spared her;
that it was her turn to harangue upon mesalliances and love-matches,
and want of circumspect investigation into early records before
committing one's self to a contract of marriage--she recoiled at
the thought; felt, in her exceeding pity for the trustful husband, a
stirring of the love she had herself once borne him in the days when
the changed homestead was her world, and its master a king among
men.
And yet--and yet--was it the truest friendship--the most prudent
course to prolong the ignorance which left him liable at any moment
to be shocked into the perpetration of some desperate deed by the
discovery, through some other channel, of his wife's perfidy, and
the abominable snare that bad been woven about him!