‘But you don’t mean to let it alone?’ I cried indignantly.
He hesitated in a manner that painfully recalled his failing, and said at last, ‘I don’t know; I suppose I ought not.’
‘Suppose?’ I cried.
‘It is not so easy as you think,’ he answered, ‘especially for one who has forfeited the right to be believed. I must wait till I have an opportunity of speaking to Mr. Castleford, and then I can hardly do more than privately give him a hint to be watchful. You don’t know how things are in such houses as ours. One may only ruin oneself without doing any good.’
‘You cannot write to him?’
‘Certainly not. He has taken his family to Mrs. Castleford’s home in the north of Ireland for a month or six weeks. I don’t know the address, and I cannot run the risk of the letter being opened at the office.’
‘Can’t you speak to my father?’
‘Impossible! it would be a betrayal. He would do things for which I should never be forgiven. And, after all, remember, it is no business of mine. I know of agents at the docks who do such things as a matter of course. It is only that I happen to know that Harris at Liverpool does not. Very possibly old Frith knows all about it. I should only get scored down as a meddlesome prig, worse hypocrite than they think me already.’
He said a good deal more to this effect, and I remember exclaiming, ‘Oh, Clarence, the old story!’ and then being frightened at the whiteness that came over his face.
Little did I know the suffering to which those words of mine condemned him. For not only had he to make up his mind to resistance, which to his nature was infinitely worse than it was to Griffith to face a raging mob, but he knew very well that it would almost inevitably produce his own ruin, and renew the disgrace out of which he was beginning to emerge. I did not—even while I prayed that he might do the right—guess at his own agony of supplication, carried on incessantly, day and night, sleeping and waking, that the Holy Spirit of might should brace his will and govern his tongue, and make him say the right thing at the right time, be the consequences what they might. No one, not constituted as he was, can guess at the anguish he endured. I knew no more. Clarence did not come home the next Saturday, to my mother’s great vexation; but on Tuesday a small parcel was given to me, brought from our point of contact with the Bristol coach. It contained some pencils I had asked him to get, and a note marked private. Here it is—