“Which, allow me to assert, Captain Treherne is not, and is never likely to be.”
Mr. Johnston shook his head incredulously. I became more and more convinced about the justness of my conjecture about his past life, which delicacy forbade me to enquire into, or to use as any argument against his harshness now. I began to feel seriously uneasy.
“Mr. Johnston,” I said, “would you for this accidental error—”
I paused, seeing at the door a young lady's face, Miss Theodora's.
“Papa, tea is waiting.”
“Let it wait then: shut the door. Well, sir?”
I repeated, would he, for one accidental error, condemn the young man entirely?
“He has condemned himself; he has taken the first step, and his downward course will be swift and sudden. There is no stopping it, sir,” and he struck his hand on the table. “If I had a son, and he liked wine, as a child does, perhaps; a pretty little boy, sitting at table and drinking healths at birthdays, or a schoolboy, proud to do what he sees his father doing,—I would take his glass from him, and fill it with poison, deadly poison—that he might kill himself at once, rather than grow up to be his friends' and his own damnation—a drunkard.”
I urged, after a minute's pause, that Treherne was neither a child nor a boy; that he had passed through the early perils of youth, and succumbed to none; that there was little fear he would ever become a drunkard.
“He may.”