‘I wish you would not talk to me,’ she answered, averting her face and speaking low as if to cut the heart; ‘I don’t want to reproach you, and I can’t speak to you properly.’
‘If you would only hear me, my only friend and helper! But it was all that was wanting! I have forfeited even your toleration! I wonder why I was born!’
He was taking up his light to depart, but Albinia’s fear of her own temper made her suspect that she had spoken vindictively, and she said, ‘What can I do, Gilbert? Here is this poor child, whom I trusted to you, who can never again be ignorant of the sound of evil words, and only owes it to God’s mercy on his brave spirit that this has not been the beginning of destruction. I feel as if you had been trying to snatch away his soul!’
‘And will you, can you not credit,’ said Gilbert, nearly inaudibly, ‘that I did not act by my free will? I had no notion that any such thing could befall him, and would never have let them try to silence him, but to shield others.’
‘Others! Yes, Archie Tritton and Algernon Dusautoy! I know what your free-will is in their hands, and yet I thought you cared for your brother enough to guard him, if not yourself.’
‘If you knew the coercion,’ muttered Gilbert. ‘I protest, as I would to my dying day, that I had no intention of going near the stables when I set out, and would never have consented could I have helped it.’
‘And why could not you help it?’
Gilbert gasped. ‘Tritton brought me a message from Dusautoy, insisting on my meeting him there. It was too late to take Maurice home, and I could not send him with Archie. I expected only to exchange a few words at the door. It was Tritton who took Maurice away to the stables.’
‘I hear, but I do not see the compulsion, only the extraordinary weakness that leads you everywhere after those men.’
‘I must tell you, I suppose,’ groaned Gilbert; ‘I can bear anything but this. There’s a miserable money entanglement that lays me under a certain obligation to Dusautoy.’