Murder at Mansfield Park

I, knowing that, allow her to pay the price for my own blindness and incompetency? I did the only thing left to me. I went to Maddox, and confessed to every thing.’
    ‘Not quite every thing. That was how he knew you were not telling him the truth.’
    He turned to look at her. ‘So you knew? About Julia? And yet you said nothing.’
    ‘I was there when she died. It was impossible not to know. But I was bound by a solemn promise of secrecy. And besides, that day at the belvedere, I believed you to be the
murderer. It was your name I had heard on Julia’s lips—it was you I thought had killed her. To keep her from betraying you.’
    His astonishment appeared to be beyond what he could readily express; he stared at her, then looked away. ‘There is a fine irony here, could I but appreciate it. Here I have been, thinking
you despised me for a fool, a coward, and a dupe, and all the time you believed me capable of killing two defenceless young women in the most brutal, cold-blooded manner.’ He laughed, but it
was a chill and hollow sound. ‘I should, I suppose, be flattered you deemed me capable of acting with such resolution! And yet, believing that, you trusted yourself, alone, in my company,
that day at the belvedere. You took such a terrible risk—merely to warn me?’
    Mary shook her head. ‘I do not think I really believed you guilty. I longed to hear you give a plausible explanation—to tell me some new fact that would prove you
innocent.’
    ‘And yet no such fact was forthcoming. Indeed, your worst fears must only have been confirmed, when you heard of my subsequent confession.’
    ‘I do not wish to speak of that,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It is past, and should be forgotten.’
    ‘And you wish to think only of the future.’ It was a statement, rather than a question.
    ‘I do not take your meaning.’
    ‘Come, Miss Crawford. The housemaids at the Park can talk of little else, and in my pitiful invalid state I cannot easily escape from their chatter. Mr Maddox is, I gather, growing
extremely particular in his attentions.’
    She flushed, but would not meet his gaze. ‘I have received a proposal of marriage, yes.’
    ‘And when am I to wish you joy?’
    ‘I have not yet made my decision. There are many things to consider.’
    Had Mary been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen a faint colour rush into his cheeks; the herald of an infinitesimal hope, when all before had been utterly hopeless.
    ‘If things were different, Miss Crawford,’ he said slowly, ‘if I were a proper man—a man able to stand on his own feet, and not the useless, vacillating weakling my
stepmother always said I was—then I would ask you myself—I would say—’ He threw up his hands in anguish. ‘But how can I do so? Look at me—confined to this damned
chair—with no money and no prospect of gaining any. How can I ask any woman—far less a woman like you—to make such a sacrifice? I can live on comfortably enough at the
Park—Sir Thomas has been very kind—but a man should give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from, not condemn her to a miserable dependence on the benevolence of others.
And it is not only my fortune I have lost. My reputation is gone—quite gone. As far as the world is concerned, I will for ever be a man who confessed to murder, and there will no doubt be
some who will always question whether I did not, in fact, commit those dreadful crimes. And if that were not enough, how can I ask another woman to become Mrs Norris, in the shadow of what has
happened to the last woman to bear that name?’
    They were silent.
    ‘It is true,’ she said gently, after a pause, ‘that you are not the happy and prosperous Mr Norris whom first I met.’
    ‘In truth, Miss Crawford, I was neither, even then. I did not know, at that time, that my prosperity was as much a chimaera as my happiness. You, by contrast, might now have both. You
might marry whom you choose.’
    ‘And I do choose, Mr Norris. Do you think my feelings are so evanescent, or my affections so easily bestowed? Do you think I care for what people think? And though I have lived all
my life under the narrow constraints of comparative poverty, I am now in the happy position of discarding such wearisome economies for ever. You talked just now of fine ironies; here is another:
the fortune that will now provide for me, is the fortune you should have had. Had you married Fanny, as everyone wished, you