“What I have to say,” he said brokenly, “is so dreadful—it is so dreadful—I have lived a quiet life.”
I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger and more tragic than my own.
I said gently: “Pray go on.”
Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
“I'm so sorry,” he said meekly; “I wouldn't have come—but for—your friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.”
“Major Brown!” I said, with some interest.
“Yes,” said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl about. “He told me you helped him in a great difficulty—and my difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death.”
I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. “Will it take long, Mr Shorter?” I asked. “I have to go out to dinner almost at once.”
He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.
“I have no right, Mr Swinburne—I have no right at all,” he said. “If you have to go out to dinner, you have of course—a perfect right—of course a perfect right. But when you come back—a man will be dead.”