What changes met me when I got there!

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.  The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect.  When I reached the church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious trace left to tell of the fire and the death.  A rough hoarding of boards had been knocked up before the vestry doorway.  Rude caricatures were scrawled on it already, and the village children were fighting and shouting for the possession of the best peep-hole to see through.  On the spot where I had heard the cry for help from the burning room, on the spot where the panic-stricken servant had dropped on his knees, a fussy flock of poultry was now scrambling for the first choice of worms after the rain; and on the ground at my feet, where the door and its dreadful burden had been laid, a workman’s dinner was waiting for him, tied up in a yellow basin, and his faithful cur in charge was yelping at me for coming near the food.  The old clerk, looking idly at the slow commencement of the repairs, had only one interest that he could talk about now—­the interest of escaping all blame for his own part on account of the accident that had happened.  One of the village women, whose white wild face I remembered the picture of terror when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old washing-tub.  There is nothing serious in mortality!  Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

As I left the place, my thoughts turned, not for the first time, to the complete overthrow that all present hope of establishing Laura’s identity had now suffered through Sir Percival’s death.  He was gone—­and with him the chance was gone which had been the one object of all my labours and all my hopes.

Could I look at my failure from no truer point of view than this?

Suppose he had lived, would that change of circumstance have altered the result?  Could I have made my discovery a marketable commodity, even for Laura’s sake, after I had found out that robbery of the rights of others was the essence of Sir Percival’s crime?  Could I have offered the price of my silence for his confession of the conspiracy, when the effect of that silence must have been to keep the right heir from the estates, and the right owner from the name?  Impossible!  If Sir Percival had lived, the discovery, from which (In my ignorance of the true nature of the Secret) I had hoped so much, could not have been mine to suppress or to make public, as I thought best, for the vindication of Laura’s rights.  In common honesty and common honour I must have gone at once to the stranger whose birthright had been usurped—­I must have renounced the victory at the moment when it was mine by placing my discovery unreservedly in that stranger’s hands—­and I must have faced afresh all the difficulties which stood between me and the one object of my life, exactly as I was resolved in my heart of hearts to face them now!