“Well, it was a kindly deed, well meant and well done, and we are Mr. Brant’s poor debtors,” said the judge, taking up one of the papers again. “I shall go down by and by and thank him for it.”
Dorothy went at that, and when the library door closed behind her the judge put the paper down, ostensibly to polish his eyeglasses, but really because the problem of his old age had grown great enough to banish interest in everything else. He had always prided himself on being a good judge of human nature, and so he was when the point of view was the judge’s bench in a courtroom. But it is a wise father who knows his own son; and Judge Langford was just beginning to suspect that his experience with human nature, and his courtroom studies therein, had counted for little in the training of his son. More than this, he was coming to understand that there is a time when a father’s lost opportunities may not be regained; that the saving of William Langford, if salvage there were to be, must be at other and alien hands.
That conclusion set him upon the search for his own substitute, and most naturally he thought of Brant. There was that about Colonel Bowran’s assistant which made him easily a beau ideal for a younger man whose tastes were not wholly vitiated. He was a man of the world—a much wider world than his present position with the colonel bespoke, the judge decided; and he was of the masterful type out of which boys are most likely to fashion their heroes. If the thing might only come about without suggestion; if— But there were too many “if’s” in the way, and the judge fell to polishing his eyeglasses again, letting the summing up of the matter slip into spoken words: “I wish he might be able to tell me what to do with the boy. It is far enough beyond me.”
The door had opened noiselessly, and the mother of the problem crossed the threshold in good time to overhear the summing up.
“What is beyond you?” she asked, knowing well enough what the answer would be.
“The one thing that is always beyond me, Martha—what we are to do with William.”
The mother had not yet been to breakfast, but she sat down and prepared to argue her son’s case.
“Doesn’t it sometimes occur to you that possibly you may try to do too much?”
“No,” said the judge firmly, knowing by sorrowful experience whereunto the argument would lead. “By some means—I don’t pretend to know how—the boy always manages to whitewash himself with you. But I am coming to know him better. We may as well face the fact first as last, Martha. He is thoroughly, utterly, recklessly bad. God forgive me that I should have it to say of the son for whom I am responsible!”
But Mrs. Langford protested indignantly, as was her maternal privilege.