“He liked you. When Sir Roderick liked anyone, he trusted that person blindly, I may say foolishly. Then he had just been disenchanted, awakened to the fact that his nephew Roderick is—what I have always thought him—a scamp.”
“How was he enlightened?” asked Hugh, drawing a long breath of relief.
“Oh! you know how curiously things get about. He was not a man to listen to gossip. But since the 45th were quartered at Aldershot rumours of Roderick’s looseness of conduct were in the air somehow.”
“Do you think he intended those two for each other?” asked Hugh.
“I cannot make out,” said the clergyman, slowly. “He made a fool of that lad; sometimes so much so that I felt uncomfortable, as if it were unreal, a cruel joke he was enjoying all to himself. You see, he hated the father.”
“I thought so,” said Hugh. Then he detailed the bitter speeches of the dying man, before Mr. Mervyn was fetched by Lilia.
“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Mervyn. “It is not to be wondered at that the old man’s back was up just now. Curious old man, that. A bit of a Pharisee, I fear. But not as guilty as his brother thought him, I believe.”
“Were you here then, Mr. Mervyn? When that affair of Lady Pym happened?”
“Who told you of the family scandal, eh, young man?”
Hugh recounted his father’s visit and its object.