“Do you remember Cecil Aviolet as a child?”
“Yes, very well indeed.”
“That it should have come to this!” said the old man.
His tone was one of amazement, rather than grief.
“A common thief.”
“No!” said Lucian.
“Yes, that’s all he was. A thief. How can you say he was anything else? That cup was valued at thirty pounds, and he tried to steal the honour and glory of it, too. The Aviolets tried to make out that he was mad, didn’t they? But he wasn’t. I know that very well. He’s a thief and a rogue.”
The doctor was silenced before the sheer weight of the old man’s implacable conviction. Nothing would shake him. Where the Aviolets had seen stark, incomprehensible insanity, where the law had seen wilful depravity, where he himself saw a hundred thousand subtleties of pathology, Uncle Alfred saw the crude fact of a theft.
He would never see anything else.
“It’s my duty to forgive as I hope to be forgiven,” he presently said, very earnestly and loudly. “And I will forgive. I will not let the sun go down upon my wrath. But it’s very hard: Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”