Hewson had begun now to feel a keen, persistent, painful sympathy for the
apparition itself as for some one whose confidence had been abused; and
this feeling was none the less, but all the more, poignant because it was
he himself who was guilty towards it. He pitied it in a sort as if it had
been the victim of a wrong more shocking perhaps for the want of taste in
it than for any real turpitude. This was a quality of the event not
without a strange consolation. In arraying him on the side of the
apparition, it antagonized him with what he had done, and enabled him to
renounce and disown it.
From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not again tell the story of his
apparition, though the opportunities to do so now sought him as
constantly as he had formerly sought them. They offered him a fresh
temptation through the different perversions of the fact that had got
commonly abroad, but he resisted this temptation, and let the
perversions, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes amusingly, but always more
and more wildly, wide of the reality, take their course. In his reticence
he had the sense of atoning not only to the apparition but to Miss
Hernshaw too.
[Illustration: “‘I’M AFRAID I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT’”]
Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been carried off to Europe by
Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of
that continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of her ward.
Hewson heard that she was not to be gone a great while; it was well into
the winter when they started, and he understood that they were merely
going to Rome for the end of the season, and were then going to work
northward, and after June in London were coming home. He did not fail to
see her again before she left for any want of wishing, but he did not
happen to meet her at other houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she
had one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any function. In
thinking the point over it occurred to Hewson that this was so because he
was not wanted there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself; for it had
been in his brief experience of her that she let people know what she
wanted, and that with Mrs. Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her
name but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. If Miss
Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would
have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and
not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together.
Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad
Hewson’s folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected
in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not
cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It
seeing even more active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself
sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and
reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in
every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out
that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his
debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort
of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had
accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty
took the form that was most of all distasteful to him: the form of
publicity in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to
the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her
reporter’s Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an
interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary
of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the
apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while
tastefully disguising Hewson’s identity in the figure of A Well-Known
Society-man.
When Hewson read this Story (and it seemed to him that no means of
bringing it to his notice at the club, and on the street, and by mail was
left unemployed), he had two thoughts: one was of St. John, and one was
of Miss Hernshaw. In all his exploitations of his experience he had
carefully, he thought religiously, concealed the scene, except that one
only time when Miss Hernshaw suddenly got it out of him by that demand of
hers, “Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early and
went for a cup of coffee at the inn?” He had confided so absolutely in
her that his admission had not troubled him at the time, and it had not
troubled him since, till now when he found the fact given this hideous
publicity, and knew that it could have become known only through her:
through her who had seemed to make herself the protectress of his
apparition and to guard it with indignation even against his own slight!
He could not tell himself what to think of her, and in this disability he
had at least the sad comfort of literally thinking nothing of her; but he
could not keep his thoughts away from St. John. It appeared to him that
he thought and lived nothing else till his dread concreted itself in the
letter which came from St. John as soon as that fatal newspaper could
reach him, and his demand for an explanation could come back to Hewson.
He wrote from St. Johnswort, where he had already gone for the season,
and he assumed, as no doubt he had a right to do, that the whole thing
was a fake, and that if Hewson was hesitating about denying it for fear
of giving it further prominence, or out of contempt for it, he wished
that he would not hesitate. There were reasons, which would suggest
themselves to Hewson, why the thing, if merely and entirely a fake,
should be very annoying, and he thought that it would be best to make the
denial immediate and imperative. To this end he advised Hewson’s sending
the newspaper people a lawyer’s letter; with the ulterior trouble which
this would intimate they would move in the matter with a quickened
conscience.
Apparently St. John was very much in earnest, and Hewson would eagerly
have lied out of it, he felt in sudden depravity, from a just regard for
St. John’s right to privacy in his own premises, but no lying, not the
boldest, not the most ingenious, could now avail. Scores of people could
witness that they had heard Hewson tell the story at first hand; at
second hand hundreds could still more confidently affirm its truth. But
if he admitted the truth of the fact and denied merely that it had
happened at St. Johnswort, he would have Miss Hernshaw to deal with and
what could he hope from truth so relentless as hers? She was of a moral
make so awful that if he ventured to deny it without appeal for her
support (which was impossible), she was quite capable of denying his
denial.
He did the only thing he could. He wrote to St. John declaring that the
newspaper story, though utterly false in its pretensions to be an
interview with him, was true in its essentials. The thing _had_ really
happened, he _had_ seen an apparition, and he had seen it at St.
Johnswort that morning when St. John supposed his house to have been
invaded by burglars. He vainly turned over a thousand deprecatory
expressions in his mind, with which to soften the blow but he let his
letter go without including one.