“Do not think of it now, my boy. I forgive you, whatever it is.”
Thereupon Dr. Dagger entered. He turned every one out except Mrs. Halfpenny, and gave a draught, which silenced the patient and put him to sleep in a few minutes. While Bernard hastily satisfied the parents that a good deal was exaggerated feeling, and that an old soldier must have known of a good many worse things in his time, though not so near home.
There was a general sense of relief in the morning, for Wilfred’s attack had become an ordinary, though severe one, and the other cases were going on well. But Sir Jasper, who had not been able to grasp the extent of Wilfred’s delinquency, and had been persuaded by his despair that it was much more serious than it really was, called his son-in-law into council, and demanded whether the whole could have been told.
Bernard was certain that it was so, and related his transactions with Captain Henderson, much of course to the father’s relief, so far as the outer world was concerned; but what principally grieved him, besides the habits thus discovered, was his son’s abject terror of him, not only in the exaggeration of illness, but in his mode of speaking of him.
It had never been thus with any of his sons before.
Claude, the soldier, had always been satisfactory, so had Harry the clergyman, though often widely separated from the parents in their wandering life; but the bond of confidence had never been broken. Jasper had never teased any one but his sisters. Fergus, too, the youngest of all the sons, and of an individual, rather peculiar nature, was growing up in straight grooves of his own; but Wilfred, who from delicate health, had been the most at home, had never seemed to open to his father. The family discipline of the General seemed only to oppress and terrify him, and the irregularities and subterfuges that had from time to time been detected had been met with just anger, never received in such a manner as to call forth the tenderness of forgiveness. Each discovery of a misdemeanour had only been the prelude to fresh and worse concealments and hardening.
And experience of mankind did not give any decided hope that even the last day’s agony of repentance would be the turning over of a new leaf, when convalescence should bring the same surroundings and temptations, and perhaps the like disproportionate indignation and impatience in dealing with errors and constitutional weakness. “And the example of my brother’s poor son is not encouraging,” he added. “He who seems to have owed everything to your brother and sister.”
“Yet poor Fulbert and I were to our homes, perhaps not the black sheep, but at any rate the vagrant ones.”
“And what made a difference to you, may I ask?”
“Strong infusion by character and example of principle,” said Bernard thoughtfully; “then, real life, and having to be one’s own safeguard, with nothing to fall back on. As my brother told me at his last, I should swim when my plank was gone.”