The Young Step-Mother eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 787 pages of information about The Young Step-Mother.

The Young Step-Mother eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 787 pages of information about The Young Step-Mother.

Mr. Ferrars defended him no longer.  He could not help being much moved by the youth’s self-abasement, but that might be only because it was new to him, and he did not even try to recommend him to her mercy; he knew her own heart might be trusted to relent, and it would not hurt Gilbert in the end to be made to feel the full weight of his offence.

‘I must go,’ he said, ’though I am sorry to leave you in perplexity.  I am afraid I can do nothing for you.’

‘Nothing—­but feel kindly to Gilbert,’ said Albinia.  ’I can’t do so yet.  I don’t feel as if I ever could again, when I think what he was doing with Maurice.  Yes, and how easily he could have brought poor Lucy to her senses, if he had been good for anything!  Oh!  Maurice, this is sickening work!  You should be grateful to me for not scolding you for having taken me from home!’

‘I do not repent,’ said her brother.  ’The explosion is better than the subterranean mining.’

‘It may be,’ said Albinia, ’and I need not boast of the good I did at home!  My poor, poor Lucy!  A little discreet kindness and watchfulness on my part would have made all the difference!  It was all my running my own way with my eyes shut, but then, I had always lived with trustworthy people.  Well, I wont keep you listening to my maundering, when Winifred wants you.  Oh! why did that Polysyllable ever come near the place?’

Mr. Ferrars said the kindest and most cheering things he could devise, and drove away, not much afraid of her being unforgiving.

He was disposed to stake all his hopes of the young man on the issue of his advice to make a direct avowal to his father.  And Gilbert made the effort, though rather in desperation than resolution, knowing that his condition could not be worse, and seeing no hope save in Mr. Ferrars’ counsel.  He was the first to seek Mr. Kendal, and dreadful to him as was the unaltering melancholy displeasure of the fixed look, the steadily penetrating deep dark eyes, and the subdued sternness of the voice, he made his confession fully, without reserve or palliation.

It was more than Mr. Kendal had expected, and more, perhaps, than he absolutely trusted, for Gilbert had not hitherto inspired faith in his protestations that he spoke the whole truth and nothing but the truth, nor had he always the power of doing so when overpowered by fright.  The manner in which his father laid hold of any inadvertent discrepancy, treating it as a wilful prevarication, was terror and agony; and well as he knew it to be the meed of past equivocation, he felt it cruel to torture him by implied suspicion.  Yet how could it be otherwise, when he had been introducing his little brother to his own corrupters, and conniving at his sister’s clandestine correspondence with a man whom he knew to be worthless?’

The grave words that he obtained at last, scarcely amounted to pardon; they implied that he had done irreparable mischief and acted disgracefully, and such forgiveness as was granted was only made conditional on there being no farther reserves.

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The Young Step-Mother from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.