As he here ended, the lawyer precisely refolded the papers, tied all together, put the packet aside, and crossing his hands over his crossed knees, waited for the other to speak.
A silence of some minutes succeeded. Then said the distitled legatee, rousing himself with a sigh:
“I thank you, Mr. Creel, for your kindly discernment in hitherto withholding from me this intelligence. I confess it comes bitter to me. I rejoice in that re-assurance of my father’s integrity—which my heart, in truth, little misdoubted—but I confess the nature of this revelation a little overcomes me. ’Tis a bone to a dog, in all sovereign contempt.”
“Nay, Sir Robert, Sir Robert. ’Tis the anxious medicine to a soul wounded of its own rashness.”
“Well, sir, well. Pride may follow a fall, I find. Yet, if I may question the methods of a virtuous man, I could discover a flaw in my father’s particular morality. For the Crown, by all custom, is entitled to the reversion of an outlaw’s estates.”
“No doubt,” answered Creel, with a little dry snigger, “that is strictly so. The man’s possessions were forfeit of right to the Crown, it being his good fortune only that he passed unhung of the law that he had defied. But—his guilt being conjectural, and not, as it were, brought home to him—your father, in one of those Canterbury-gallops of conscience wherewith honest souls sometimes over-ride our fears for their guilelessness, would consider it no duty of his to forego the estate quixotically, and for a supposition of which the law had failed to take cognizance. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I will not throw the first stone at him whose immunity is my profit. And, as to the estate, I can apply it—saving the grace of his majesty, whose means are not restricted—to some worthy purpose which was doubtless forecast by the Providence that hath conducted the matter so far.’ And in this he was firm—not to outlaw the dead man, though he took no personal advantage of his bequest. ‘For,’ he declared, ‘he meant well by me, when all is said and done.’”
Mr. Tuke rose, and the attorney with him.
“I suppose,” said the former, rather sadly, “that no man may profit by repentance so far as to lay the ghost of his past. ’Tis the privilege of the virtuous to hunt down reformed sinners with the spectre-hounds of their own dead passions. I have sought honestly to redeem my name, and to do my best with the new life offered me. Yet, should I have accepted the trust, had I known in what spirit its reversion to me was conceived?”
“I hope so,” said the other; “for love, under all the show of rigour, prompted the bequest.”
He spoke with some deprecation. Perhaps, in his heart, was a little protesting sympathy with his young friend’s point of view.