"In regard to the attack upon the carriage--to which I know you allude--I am not about to inquire," replied Beauchamp, "but I will ask you only one other question, and I promise you, upon my honour, not to use any thing you tell me against the person. Was his name Moreton?"
"I won't tell you a lie, Sir," answered Gimlet. "It was, though how you have found it out I can't guess, for he has been away from this part of the country for many a year."
"It matters not," answered Beauchamp, "how I found it out; I know he has been absent many a year. Can you tell me how long he has returned?"
"That I can't say, I'm sure, Sir," replied the man; "but I did hear that he and the lady have been lodging at Buxton's inn for a day or two, but not more. It's a great pity to see how he has gone on, and to sell that fine old place that has been theirs for so many hundred years! I should think, that if one had any thing worth having that had been one's father's, one's grandfather's, and one's great grandfather's, for such a long while, it would keep one straight. It's mostly when a man has nothing to pride himself upon that he goes wrong."
"Not always," answered Beauchamp, "unbridled passion, my good friend, youth, inexperience, sometimes accident, lead a man to commit a false step, and that is very difficult to retrieve in his life."
"Aye, aye, I know that, I know that, Sir," answered Gimlet, "but I hope not impossible;" and he looked up in Beauchamp's face, with an expression of doubt and inquiry.
"By no means impossible," replied the gentleman, "and the man who has the courage and strength of mind to retrieve a false step, gives a better assurance to society for his future conduct than perhaps a man who has never committed one can do."
Gimlet looked down and meditated for one minute or two, and, though he did not distinctly express the subject of his contemplation, his reverie ended with the words, "Well I will try." The next moment he added, "I don't think, however, that this Captain Moreton will ever make much of it; for he has been going on now a long while in the same way, from a boy to a lad, and from a lad to a man. He broke his father's heart, they say, after having ruined him to pay his debts; but the worst of it all is, he was always trying to make others as bad as himself. He did me no good; for when I was a boy and used to go out and carry his game-bag, he put me up to all manner of things, and that was the beginning of my liking to what people call poaching. Then, too, he had a great hand in ruining this young Harry Wittingham. He taught him to gamble and drink, and a great deal more, when he was a mere child, I may say."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Beauchamp, "then the young man is to be pitied more than blamed."
"I don't know, Sir, I don't know," answered the gamekeeper; "he's a bad-hearted fellow. He set fire to my cottage, that's clear enough, and he knew the boy was in it too; but this business of firing in at the window I can't make out at all; I should have thought it had been an accident if he had not afterwards taken a shot at Captain Hayward."