CHAPTER XII

Lady Lucy did not reply at once.  She slowly drew forward the neglected tea-table, made tea, and offered it to Sir James.  He took it impatiently, the Irish blood in him running hot and fast; and when she had finished her cup, and still the silence lasted, except for the trivial question-and-answer of the tea-making, he broke in upon it with a somewhat peremptory—­

“Well?”

Lady Lucy clasped her hands on her lap.  The hand which had been so far bare was now gloved like the other, and something in the spectacle of the long fingers, calmly interlocked and clad in spotless white kid, increased the secret exasperation in her companion.

“Believe me, dear Sir James,” she said at last, lifting her clear brown eyes, “I am very grateful to you.  It must have been a great effort for you to tell me this awful story, and I thank you for the confidence you have reposed in me.”

Sir James pushed his chair back.

“I did it, of course, for a special reason,” he said, sharply.  “I hope I have given you cause to change your mind.”

She shook her head slowly.

“What have you proved to me?  That Mrs. Sparling’s crime was not so hideous as some of us supposed?—­that she did not fall to the lowest depths of all?—­and that she endured great provocation?  But could anything really be more vile than the history of those weeks of excitement and fraud?—­of base yielding to temptation?—­of cruelty to her husband and child?—­even as you have told it?  Her conduct led directly to adultery and violence.  If, by God’s mercy, she was saved from the worst crimes imputed to her, does it make much difference to the moral judgment we must form?”

He looked at her in amazement.

“No difference!—­between murder and a kind of accident?—­between adultery and fidelity?”

Lady Lucy hesitated—­then resumed, with stubbornness:  “You put it—­like an advocate.  But look at the indelible facts—­look at the future.  If my son married the daughter of such a woman and had children, what must happen?  First of all, could he, could any one, be free from the dread of inherited lawlessness and passion?  A woman does not gamble, steal, and take life in a moment of violence without some exceptional flaw in temperament and will, and we see again and again how such flaws reappear in the descendants of weak and wicked people.  Then again—­Oliver must renounce and throw away all that is implied in family memories and traditions.  His wife could never speak to her children and his of her own mother and bringing up.  They would be kept in ignorance, as she herself was kept, till the time came that they must know.  Say what you will, Juliet Sparling was condemned to death for murder in a notorious case—­after a trial which also branded her as a thief.  Think of a boy at Eton or Oxford—­a girl in her first youth—­hearing for the first time—­perhaps in some casual way—­the story of the woman whose blood ran in theirs!—­What a cloud on a family!—­what a danger and drawback for young lives!”