The Nun gasped. "That's thorough," she remarked. "So much for your opinion about Harry!"
"Yes, so much for that," Andy admitted.
"If there is a row, I hope you'll be there."
"Oh, I don't!" exclaimed Andy with a natural and human sincerity.
"To prevent bloodshed!" She laid her hand on his arm. "I'm not altogether joking. I didn't like Mr. Wellgood's eyes this afternoon." She patted his arm gently before she withdrew her hand. "Good-night, dear old Andy. You're terribly right as a rule. But about this—" She broke off, impatiently jerking her head.
With a clasp of her hand and a doleful smile, Andy let his legs drop on the pavement and departed.
So that was his verdict, given with all his deliberation, with all the weight of his leisurely broad-viewing judgment. The real thing to avoid was not the "row;" that was his conclusion. There was a thing, then, worse than the "row"—the thing for which Halton and Nutley—nay, all Meriton, would soon be making joyful preparation. His calm face had not moved even at her word "bloodshed." Oh yes, Andy was thorough! Not even that word swayed his mind. Perhaps he did not believe in her fears. But his look had not been scornful; it had been thoughtfully interrogative. He had possessed that knowledge of his for a long while; he had never used it. At first from loyalty to Harry—even now that would, she thought, be enough to make him very loth to use it. But another reason was predominant, born of his long silent brooding. He had come to a conclusion about his hero; the court had taken time for consideration; the judgment was advised. There was no helping some people. They must be left to their own ways, their own devices, their own doom. To help them was to harm others; to fight for them was to serve under the banner of wrong and of injustice. Friendship and loyalty could not justify that.
The conclusion seemed a hard one. She stood long at the big window—a dainty little figure thrown up by the light behind her—painfully reaching forward to the understanding of how what seems hardness may be a broader, a truer, a better-directed sympathy, how it may be a duty to leave a wastrel to waste, how not every drowning man is worth the labour that it takes to get him out of the water—for that once. At all events, not worth the risk of another, a more valuable life.
And that was his conclusion about his hero, the man to whom he owed, as he had said, almost everything he prized? Had he, then, any right to the conclusion, right in the abstract though it might be? It was a hard world that drove men to such hard conclusions.
The case was hard—and the conclusion. But not, of necessity, the man who painfully arrived at it. Yet the man might be biassed; sympathy for the deceived might paint the deceiver's conduct in colours even blacker than the truth demanded. Doris did not think of this, in part because the judgment had seemed too calm and too reluctant to be the offspring of bias, more because, if there were any partiality in it, she herself had become a no less strong, and a more impetuous, adherent of the same cause. Vivien had won all her fealty. The one pleasant feature of the afternoon had been when Vivien walked home with her and, wrought upon by the troubled atmosphere of Nutley even though ignorant of its cause, had opened her heart to Harry's old friend, to a girl who, as she felt, must know more of the world than she did, and perhaps, out of her experience, could comfort and even guide. With sweet and simple gravity, with a delicacy that made her confidence seem still reserved although it was well-nigh complete, she showed to her companion her love and her apprehension—a love so pure in quality, an apprehension based on so rare an understanding of the man she loved. She did not know the things he had done, nor the thing he was now doing; but the man himself she knew, and envisaged dimly the perils by which he was beset. Her loving sympathy tried to leap across the wide chasm that separated her life and her nature from his, and came wonderfully little short of its mark.