“In what?”
“To bear what I fear is waiting you.”
“I told you I was equal to that. It is where we are unequal that we want help. You may have to give it me some day—who knows?”
I left her most unwillingly in the porch, just as Sarah (the white wolf) had her hand on the door, rejoicing in my heart, however, over her last words.
My reader will not be surprised, after all this, if, before I get very much further with my story, I have to confess that I loved Miss Oldcastle.
When young Tom and I entered the room, his grandfather rose and tottered to meet him. His father made one step towards him and then hesitated. Of all conditions of the human mind, that of being ashamed of himself must have been the strangest to Thomas Weir. The man had never in his life, I believe, done anything mean or dishonest, and therefore he had had less frequent opportunities than most people of being ashamed of himself. Hence his fall had been from another pinnacle—that of pride. When a man thinks it such a fine thing to have done right, he might almost as well have done wrong, for it shows he considers right something EXTRA, not absolutely essential to human existence, not the life of a man. I call it Thomas Weir’s fall; for surely to behave in an unfatherly manner to both daughter and son—the one sinful, and therefore needing the more tenderness—the other innocent, and therefore claiming justification—and to do so from pride, and hurt pride, was fall enough in one history, worse a great deal than many sins that go by harder names; for the world’s judgment of wrong does not exactly correspond with the reality. And now if he was humbled in the one instance, there would be room to hope he might become humble in the other. But I had soon to see that, for a time, his pride, driven from its entrenchment against his son, only retreated, with all its forces, into the other against his daughter.
Before a moment had passed, justice overcame so far that he held out his hand and said:—
“Come, Tom, let by-gones be by-gones.”
But I stepped between.
“Thomas Weir,” I said, “I have too great a regard for you—and you know I dare not flatter you—to let you off this way, or rather leave you to think you have done your duty when you have not done the half of it. You have done your son a wrong, a great wrong. How can you claim to be a gentleman—I say nothing of being a Christian, for therein you make no claim—how, I say, can you claim to act like a gentleman, if, having done a man wrong—his being your own son has nothing to do with the matter one way or other, except that it ought to make you see your duty more easily—having done him wrong, why don’t you beg his pardon, I say, like a man?”