“You do love me?” Bella said to him. It was natural that she should ask him; but it would have been better perhaps if she had held her tongue. Had she spoken to him about his house, or his income, or the servants, or the duties of his parish church, it would have been easier for him to make a comfortable reply.
“Yes;—I love you,” he replied; “of course I love you. We have always been friends, and I hope things will go straight now. I have had a great deal to go through, Bella, and so have you;—but God will temper the wind to the shorn lambs.” How was the wind to be tempered for the poor lamb who had gone forth shorn down to the very skin!
Soon after this Mrs. French returned to the room, and then there was no more romance. Mrs. French had by no means forgiven Mr. Gibson all the trouble he had brought into the family, and mixed a certain amount of acrimony with her entertainment of him. She dictated to him, treated him with but scant respect, and did not hesitate to let him understand that he was to be watched very closely till he was actually and absolutely married. The poor man had in truth no further idea of escape. He was aware that he had done that which made it necessary that he should bear a great deal, and that he had no right to resent suspicion. When a day was fixed in June on which he should be married at the church of Heavitree, and it was proposed that he should be married by banns, he had nothing to urge to the contrary. And when it was also suggested to him by one of the prebendaries of the Cathedral that it might be well for him to change his clerical duties for a period with the vicar of a remote parish in the north of Cornwall—so as to be out of the way of remark from those whom he had scandalised by his conduct—he had no objection to make to that arrangement. When Mrs. MacHugh met him in the Close, and told him that he was a gay Lothario, he shook his head with a melancholy self-abasement, and passed on without even a feeling of anger. “When they smite me on the right cheek, I turn unto them my left,” he said to himself, when one of the cathedral vergers remarked to him that after all he was going to be married, at last. Even Bella became dominant over him, and assumed with him occasionally the air of one who had been injured.
Bella wrote a touching letter to her sister;—a letter that ought to have touched Camilla, begging for forgiveness, and for one word of sisterly love. Camilla answered the letter, but did not send a word of sisterly love. “According to my way of thinking, you have been a nasty sly thing, and I don’t believe you’ll ever be happy. As for him, I’ll never speak to him again.” That was nearly the whole of her letter. “You must leave it to time,” said Mrs. French wisely; “she’ll come round some day.” And then Mrs. French thought how bad it would be for her if the daughter who was to be her future companion did not “come round” some day.
And so it was settled that they should be married in Heavitree Church—Mr. Gibson and his first love—and things went on pretty much as though nothing had been done amiss. The gentleman from Cornwall came down to take Mr. Gibson’s place at St. Peter’s-cum-Pumpkin, while his duties in the Cathedral were temporarily divided among the other priest-vicars—with some amount of grumbling on their part. Bella commenced her modest preparations without any of the éclat which had attended Camilla’s operations, but she felt more certainty of ultimate success than had ever fallen to Camilla’s lot. In spite of all that had come and gone, Bella never feared again that Mr. Gibson would be untrue to her. In regard to him, it must be doubted whether Nemesis ever fell upon him with a hand sufficiently heavy to punish him for the great sins which he had manifestly committed. He had encountered a bad week or two, and there had been days in which, as has been said, he thought of Natal, of ecclesiastical censures, and even of annihilation; but no real punishment seemed to fall upon him. It may be doubted whether, when the whole arrangement was settled for him, and when he heard that Camilla had yielded to the decrees of Fate, he did not rather flatter himself on being a successful man of intrigue—whether he did not take some glory to himself for his good fortune with women, and pride himself amidst his self-reproaches for the devotion which had been displayed for him by the fair sex in general. It is quite possible that he taught himself to believe that at one time Dorothy Stanbury was devotedly in love with him, and that when he reckoned up his sins she was one of those in regard to whom he accounted himself to have been a sinner. The spirit of intrigue with women, as to which men will flatter themselves, is customarily so vile, so mean, so vapid a reflection of a feeling, so aimless, resultless, and utterly unworthy! Passion exists and has its sway. Vice has its votaries—and there is, too, that worn-out longing for vice, “prurient, yet passionless, cold-studied lewdness,” which drags on a feeble continuance with the aid of money. But the commonest folly of man in regard to women is a weak taste for intrigue, with little or nothing on which to feed it;—a worse than feminine aptitude for male coquetry, which never ascends beyond a desire that somebody shall hint that there is something peculiar; and which is shocked and retreats backwards into its boots when anything like a consequence forces itself on
