But even on that night Clara resolved that he should
have some meed of praise. “Has he not been
noble?” she said, appealing to him who was to
be her husband; “has he not been very noble?”
Herbert, too happy to be jealous, acknowledged that
it was so.
PLAYING ROUNDERS
My story is nearly at its close, and all readers will
now know how it is to end. Those difficulties
raised by Mr. Die were all made to vanish; and though
he implored Mr. Prendergast over and over again to
go about this business with a moderated eagerness,
that gentleman would not consent to let any grass
grow under his heels till he had made assurance doubly
sure, and had seen Herbert Fitzgerald firmly seated
on his throne. All that the women in Spinny Lane
had told him was quite true. The register was
found in the archives of the parish of Putney, and
Mr. Prendergast was able to prove that Mr. Matthew
Mollett, now of Spinny Lane, and the Mr. Matthew Mollett
then designated as of Newmarket in Cambridgeshire,
were one and the same person; therefore Mr. Mollett’s
marriage with Miss Wainwright was no marriage, and
therefore, also, the marriage between Sir Thomas Fitzgerald
and that lady was a true marriage; all which things
will now be plain to any novel-reading capacity, mean
as such capacity may be in respect to legal law.
And I have only further to tell in respect to this
part of my story, that the Molletts, both father and
son, escaped all punishments for the frauds and villanies
related in these pages—except such punishment
as these frauds and villanies, acting by their own
innate destructive forces and poisons, brought down
upon their unfortunate heads. For so allowing
them to escape I shall be held by many to have been
deficient in sound teaching. “What!”
men will say, “not punish your evil principle!
Allow the prevailing evil genius of your book to escape
scot free, without administering any of that condign
punishment which it would have been so easy for you
to allot to them! Had you not treadmills to your
hand, and all manner of new prison disciplines?
Should not Matthew have repented in the sackcloth
of solitary confinement, and Aby have munched and crunched
between his teeth the bitter ashes of prison bread
and water? Nay, for such offences as those did
you wot of no penal settlements? Were not Portland
and Spike Islands gaping for them? Had you no
memory of Dartmoor and the Bermudas?”
Gentle readers, no; not in this instance shall Spike
Island or the Bermudas be asked to give us their assistance.
There is a sackcloth harsher to the skin than that
of the penal settlement, and ashes more bitter in
the crunching than convict rations. It would be
sad indeed if we thought that those rascals who escape
the law escape also the just reward of their rascality.
May it not rather be believed that the whole life
of the professional rascal is one long wretched punishment,
