United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"There is no one that I can ask to act for me in the matter but you, and I ask you, March, to go to my sister-in-law for me." I shook my head. "That I can't do, Tedham." "Ah!" he urged, "what harm could it do you?" "Look here, Tedham!" I said. "I don't know why you feel authorized to come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else.
She did explain, at much greater length than she needed, and she was still giving me some very solemn charges when the bell rang, and I knew that Tedham had come. "Now, remember what I've told you," she called after me, as I went to the door, "and be sure to tell me, when you come back, just how he takes it and every word he says. Oh, dear, I know you'll make the most dreadful mess of it!"
He has made quite enough already; and it wasn't his fault that you were not tried and convicted in his place." "There wasn't the slightest danger of that " "He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your wife and children." "Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don't think I never thought that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on me.
We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man's heart, and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there.
If it was to be prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very fond of her, I don't deny that; I don't think it was any merit in him to love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was willing it should count.
"I know you must say so," Tedham replied, with more dignity and force than I could have expected, "and I know how kind you and Mr. March have been. But you must see that I am right that she is the only one to be considered at all." "Right! How are you right? Have you been suggesting that, my dear?" demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.
Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake, not to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer. "The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally, and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the affair had taken interested me greatly.
The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous. But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds to let God manage.
A curious thing about it is," and Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than Tedham did, and he's flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it's so.
That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever he has. It seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."
Word Of The Day