“Well, I will say no more on the point. It is not for me to contradict you. For, whatever may have been our relative positions ten years ago, your life since then has made you a better man than I, and I bow to you as to my superior.”
It was very gracefully said, with a warmth and sincerity of tone which made it no empty compliment from the handsome, much-revered vicar to the hermit-parson of ruinous St. Cuthbert’s. The latter received it with a restive, deprecatory, impatient wave of the hand; but yet a keen observer, who had looked from the one face to the other at that moment, would almost have been inclined to say that the elder, whether or not he quite meant what he said, had spoken the truth, and that the worn features and keen grey eyes of the younger man revealed higher capacities for good than the bland, benevolent, and good-humored countenance of his brother. Ten years ago, before the tragic event which had been the turning point of Vernon’s life, the reverse of this would have been true. Passionate, reckless, and hot tempered, he would have looked, beside his open-faced brother, like the evil angel beside the good. But a decade of unruffled prosperity on the one hand, and the same period of austere self-sacrifice on the other, had told their tale; and the man over whom there hung the shadow of a fearful crime now threatened, by long humility and devotion, to oust from the first place in the esteem of the rough mining population the irreproachable and kindly Vicar of Rishton himself.
Meredith had spoken the last words in a decisive tone, as if he considered the discussion at an end. But from the expression of his brother’s face, it was clear that he had yet something to say—something of more import than anything that had yet passed between them.
“You have tried me long enough to trust my discretion a little, Meredith; but I don’t know how you will take what I am going to tell you.” He hurried on in an agitated voice, without looking his brother in the face. “I have never been a misogynist; perhaps I shall not always be a bachelor. Mind, I only say perhaps.”
There was a long pause. They tramped up the hill side by side without exchanging so much as a look, until the pretty gables of the Vicarage were in sight, peeping out behind the massive evergreens and the yet bare lilac branches of the vicar’s garden. Then Meredith spoke, in the most subdued and gentlest of voices—
“You are the best, indeed, the only possible judge of your own conduct, Vernon; but I fear that, to a nature like yours, the thought of having caused suffering to a woman you love will some day be very bitter.”
His voice seemed to fade away on the last words, as it did at the pathetic points of his sermons. His eloquence again took effect on the sensitive Vernon.
“My wife—if, indeed, I ever had a wife—should never know the truth,” said he, in a low and husky voice.
“Oh, but she will!” said Meredith, with energy. “Do not deceive yourself on that point; you cannot deceive me. No one can prevent your marrying; I, for one, shall never utter another word against such a step; but, if you do take it, your ten years’ silence, as far as the feelings of others are concerned, will have been in vain.”
There was another pause—a short one, this time. Then Vernon spoke, in a harsh and broken voice—