"And so," he went on slowly, "I'm no judge. I should sin against my conscience if I were to judge. The question is not for me—let her go to Amyas himself."
I was glad at heart—we had escaped bullying; only in one moment of temper had I hinted at it, and that moment seemed now far away. It was easy to see the defects of this man, and easier still to feel them as a vaguely chilling influence. His virtues were harder to see and to appreciate—his justice, his candor of mind, his rectitude, the humility beneath his pride.
"Lord Lacey attaches enormous importance to your opinion. I know that as well as you do. Can't you go a little further?"
"I thought I had gone about as far as could be expected."
"Not quite. Won't you tell your son what you would do if you were in his place?"
"I think you'd better not ask me to do that. I'm less sure of what I should do than I am of what he will do. What he'll do will, I think, content you—I might think too much of who his father is, and of who her father was, and from whose hand these splendid benefits come. I think I'd better not advise Amyas."
"But you'll accept his decision? You'll not dissuade him?"
"I daren't dissuade him," he answered briefly and turned his back on me again. He added in a tone that at least strove to be lighter, "My grandchildren might rise up and call me cursed! But if she looks for thanks—not from this generation!"
For the first time—though I sacrifice finally my character for morality by that confession—I was genuinely, in my heart and not in my pretenses or professions, inclined to regret the night at Hatcham Ford—the discovery and the flight. All said, he was a man. After much conflict they might have come together. If she had known then that it was man against man—not man against name, title, position, respectability—why, the case might have seemed changed, the issue have been different. But he was so seldom able to show what he was. He had no spontaneous power of expressing himself; the revelation had to be wrung out by force—peine forte et dure; he had to be pressed almost to death before he would plead for himself, for his case, for what he felt deep down within him. All that was too late to think about—unless some day, in the future, it might avail to make them decently friendly—avail against the deep wound to pride on one side, against the obstinate championship of the dead on the other.
But to-day he had opened himself frankly enough to absolve me from formalities.