“No mistake this time, I think, my dear. Anyway, Priscilla says that he is there.” Now in this there was a mistake. Priscilla had said nothing of the kind.
“You don’t mean that he is staying at the Clock House, Aunt Stanbury?”
“I don’t know where he is now. I’m not his keeper. And, I’m glad to say, I’m not the lady’s keeper either. Ah, me! It’s a bad business. You can’t touch pitch and not be defiled, my dear. If your mother wanted the Clock House, I would sooner have taken it for her myself than that all this should have happened—for the family’s sake.”
But Miss Stanbury, when she was alone, and when she had read her niece’s three letters again and again, began to understand something of Priscilla’s honesty, and began also to perceive that there might have been a great difficulty respecting the Colonel, for which neither her niece nor her sister-in-law could fairly be held to be responsible. It was perhaps the plainest characteristic of all the Stanburys that they were never wilfully dishonest. Ignorant, prejudiced, and passionate they might be. In her anger Miss Stanbury, of Exeter, could be almost malicious; and her niece at Nuncombe Putney was very like her aunt. Each could say most cruel things, most unjust things, when actuated by a mistaken consciousness of perfect right on her own side. But neither of them could lie—even by silence. Let an error be brought home to either of them—so as to be acknowledged at home—and the error would be assuredly confessed aloud. And, indeed, with differences in the shades, Hugh and Dorothy were of the same nature. They were possessed of sweeter tempers than their aunt and sister, but they were filled with the same eager readiness to believe themselves to be right—and to own themselves to others to be wrong, when they had been constrained to make such confession to themselves. The chances of life, and something probably of inner nature, had made Dorothy mild and obedient; whereas, in regard to Hugh, the circumstances of his life and disposition had made him obstinate and self-reliant. But in all was to be found the same belief in self—which amounted almost to conceit—the same warmth of affection, and the same love of justice.
When Miss Stanbury had again perused the correspondence, and had come to see, dimly, how things had gone at Nuncombe Putney—when the conviction came upon her mind that Priscilla had entertained a horror as to the coming of this Colonel equal to that which she herself had felt—when her imagination painted to her all that her niece had suffered, her heart was softened somewhat. She had declared to Dorothy that pitch, if touched, would certainly defile; and she had, at first, intended to send the same opinion, couched in very forcible words, to her correspondents at the Clock House. They should not continue to go astray for want of being told that they were going astray. It must be acknowledged, too, that there was a certain amount of ignoble wrath in the bosom of Miss Stanbury because her sister-in-law had taken the Clock House. She had never been told, and had not even condescended to ask Dorothy, whether the house was taken and paid for by her nephew on behalf of his mother, or whether it was paid for by Mr. Trevelyan on behalf of his wife. In the latter case, Mrs. Stanbury would, she thought, be little more than an upper servant, or keeper—as she expressed it to herself. Such an arrangement appeared to her to be quite disgraceful in a Stanbury; but yet she believed that such must be the existing arrangement, as she could not bring herself to conceive that Hugh Stanbury could keep such an establishment over his mother’s head out of money earned by writing for a penny newspaper. There would be a triumph of democracy in this which would vanquish her altogether. She had, therefore, been anxious enough to trample on Priscilla and upon all the affairs of the Clock House; but yet she had been unable to ignore the nobility of Priscilla’s truth, and having acknowledged it to herself she found herself compelled to acknowledge it aloud. She sat down to think in silence, and it was not till she had fortified herself by her first draught of beer, and till she had finished her first portion of bread and cheese, that she spoke. “I have written to your sister herself, this time,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever wrote a line to her before in my life.”
“Poor Priscilla!” Dorothy did not mean to be severe on her aunt, either in regard to the letters which had not been written, or to the one letter which now had been written. But Dorothy pitied her sister, whom she felt to be in trouble.
“Well; I don’t know about her being so poor. Priscilla, I’ll be bound, thinks as well of herself as any of us do.”
“She’d cut her fingers off before she’d mean to do wrong,” said Dorothy.
“But what does that come to? What’s the good of that? It isn’t meaning to do right that will save us. For aught I know, the Radicals may mean to do right. Mr. Beales means to do right—perhaps.”
“But, aunt—if everybody did the best they could?”
“Tush, my dear! you are getting beyond your depth. There are such things still, thank God! as
