Chapter 38

CHAPTER XXXVIII - PROMISES FULFILLED

'Then proudly, proudly up she rose,

Tho' the tear was in her e'e,

"Whate'er ye say, think what ye may,

Ye's get na word frae me!"'

SCOTCH BALLAD.

It was not merely that Margaret was known to Mr. Thornton to have
spoken falsely,--though she imagined that for this reason only
was she so turned in his opinion,--but that this falsehood of
hers bore a distinct reference in his mind to some other lover.
He could not forget the fond and earnest look that had passed
between her and some other man--the attitude of familiar
confidence, if not of positive endearment. The thought of this
perpetually stung him; it was a picture before his eyes, wherever
he went and whatever he was doing. In addition to this (and he
ground his teeth as he remembered it), was the hour, dusky
twilight; the place, so far away from home, and comparatively
unfrequented. His nobler self had said at first, that all this
last might be accidental, innocent, justifiable; but once allow
her right to love and be beloved (and had he any reason to deny
her right?--had not her words been severely explicit when she
cast his love away from her?), she might easily have been
beguiled into a longer walk, on to a later hour than she had
anticipated. But that falsehood! which showed a fatal
consciousness of something wrong, and to be concealed, which was
unlike her. He did her that justice, though all the time it would
have been a relief to believe her utterly unworthy of his esteem.
It was this that made the misery--that he passionately loved her,
and thought her, even with all her faults, more lovely and more
excellent than any other woman; yet he deemed her so attached to
some other man, so led away by her affection for him as to
violate her truthful nature. The very falsehood that stained her,
was a proof how blindly she loved another--this dark, slight,
elegant, handsome man--while he himself was rough, and stern, and
strongly made. He lashed himself into an agony of fierce
jealousy. He thought of that look, that attitude!--how he would
have laid his life at her feet for such tender glances, such fond
detention! He mocked at himself, for having valued the mechanical
way in which she had protected him from the fury of the mob; now
he had seen how soft and bewitching she looked when with a man
she really loved. He remembered, point by point, the sharpness of
her words--'There was not a man in all that crowd for whom she
would not have done as much, far more readily than for him.' He
shared with the mob, in her desire of averting bloodshed from
them; but this man, this hidden lover, shared with nobody; he had
looks, words, hand-cleavings, lies,