'It is a phase to be passed through,' said Mr. Ryder. 'Indeed, a good deal of it is fashion and vanity.'
'Mr. Audley thinks so,' replied Felix. 'He said he thought poor Edgar did not think enough to have real doubt, but that he considered other people's a dispensation from attending to the subject at all.'
'Exactly,' said Mr. Ryder, 'except so far as repeating what he has caught up seems to him knowing, and according to the spirit of the time, fit to dazzle us down here. Whatever may deepen him will probably change all that—I do not say into what you or your father would wish; but what is jargon now will pass away into something more real, for better or—'
'For worse?' asked Felix anxiously, as he paused.
'I do not say so,' returned Mr. Ryder. 'Perhaps what I chiefly wished at this moment was to clear myself in your eyes of treachery to your father.'
'No, sir, that I never could suspect.'
But the conversation might well leave heaviness behind it. Was it come to Edgar's views being such as to startle Mr. Ryder! who, for that matter, had of late shown much less laxity of opinion than in his younger and more argumentative days; and there was little comfort in supposing that these were not real honest doubts at all, only apologies for general carelessness and irreligion.
Yet with even this trouble in the recess of the heart, this was the merriest winter the Underwood household had known since their father's time.
Edgar chose to frame the play upon the Italian form of the story, where the impostor is a starveling poet, nicknamed Signor Topo, or Master Ratton, because his poverty had brought him to live in a hay-loft. This character he assumed, and no doubt it fitted him better than either the English cobbler or the German doctor; besides, as he said, sham court costume is always the easiest to contrive: but Cherry was by no means prepared to find the Rat-like poet the secret admirer of a daughter of the Serene Highness who owned the jewel.
'Such a monstrous interpolation,' quoth Geraldine.