The Honour of the Clintons

by Archibald Marshall

"Dick has gone up to London," he said, raising his eyes, when Humphrey had shut the door and come back to the table.

"Yes," said Humphrey. "But Virginia had the money, and said that Dick would like her to give it. He had told her that Gotch ought to be helped to go away."

"He never said that to me," said the Squire, with no clear sense of relief at the news, except that it meant that a decision had been taken out of his hands.

"Well, he had said it to her, or she wouldn't have done it. She and I went to Gotch together. She said just the right things, and he was as grateful as possible. He takes it that he's forgiven for holding out. I told him that you wouldn't do it yourself after all you had said, but you had withdrawn your opposition."

"Why do you say these things, Humphrey?" asked the Squire, in a pained and almost querulous voice. "None of them are lies, exactly, but they are not the truth, either."

"I shouldn't care if they were lies," said Humphrey. "I'm long past caring about that."

The Squire sighed deeply. "I won't talk about it over the table," he said, rising, and leaving his glass of port half full. "We will go and ask Joan to play to us, and talk in my room later."

As Joan played, he sat in his chair thinking. Relief was beginning to find its way into his sombre thoughts. He took it to be in answer to his prayer. If you took your difficulties to God, a way of escape would be opened out. The old aunts who had brought him up in his childhood had impressed that upon him, and he had never doubted it, although he had had no occasion hitherto to try the experiment. He had not made it a subject of prayer when Walter had so annoyed him by refusing to take Holy Orders with a view to the family living, and insisted on studying medicine, which no Clinton had ever done before; or when Cicely had gone off to stay in London without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave; or when Dick had gone against his strong wishes and insisted upon marrying Virginia; or when Humphrey had come to him with debts; or even when Joan had refused to make a marriage which he thought to be well for her to make. Soothed by Joan's playing, his thoughts ran reflectively through these and other disturbances and difficulties that had marked his otherwise equable, prosperous life, and he saw for the first time how little he had really had to complain of.

But that enlightenment only seemed to deepen the black shadows that lay in the gulf opened out before him. The props of position and wealth that had sustained him were of no avail here. They had supported him in other troubles; they would only make this one worse to bear. It would find him stripped naked for the world to jeer at. This was the sort of trouble in which a man wanted help from above.

And the help had come, promptly; perhaps all the more promptly because he had acted uprightly. He could not have given in to Humphrey's request, whatever the consequences, knowing what he did. But that it should have been immediately met, in a way to which no objection could be taken, elsewhere, seemed to show that it was not the will of God that disgrace should overwhelm the innocent as well as the guilty. He could look that disgrace in the face now, or rather in the flank, as a peril past; and he went through almost unendurable pangs as he did so. He turned in his chair, and the perspiration broke out on his brow as the horror of what he had escaped came home to him. He thanked God that he had acted aright. If he had pictured to himself fully what might come from his refusal, he might have stained his honour with almost any act that would avert such appalling humiliation.