with careful , rehearsed words she swiftly painted robert as she truly saw him-a young man who had been driven by pain and deprivation to wrongly seek vengeance against her husband ; a young man whom her husband had saved from the gallows or lifelong imprisonment by charitably having him put on a ship and taken abroad ; a young man who had then suffered , through his own unintentional actions , great trials and even vicious beatings for which he had wrongly blamed ian thornton .