‘I wonder, Ernest,’ said Ronald, looking up as Herbert shut the door gently behind him, ‘how you and I ever came to have such a brother as Herbert!’
‘I think it’s easy enough to understand, Ronald, on plain hereditary principles.’
Ronald sighed. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said; ‘it’s poor mother’s strain—the Whitaker strain—coming out in him.’
‘I often fancy, Ronald, I can see the same two strains in varying intensity, running through all three of us alike. In Herbert the Whitaker strain is uppermost, and the Le Breton comparatively in abeyance; in me, they’re both more or less blended; in you, the Le Breton strain comes out almost unadulterated. Yet even Herbert has more of a Le Breton in him than one might imagine, for he’s with us intellectually; it’s the emotional side only that’s wanting to him. Even when members of a family are externally very much unlike one another in the mere surface features of their characters, I believe you can generally see the family likeness underlying it for all that.’
‘Only you must know how to analyse the character to see it,’ said Edie. ‘I don’t think it ever struck me before that there was anything in common between you and Herbert, Ernest, and yet now you point it out I believe there really is something after all. I’m sorry you told me, for I can’t bear to think that you’re like Herbert.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ronald put in hastily; ‘it isn’t Ernest who has something in him like Herbert; it’s Herbert who has something in him like Ernest. There’s a great deal of difference between the one thing and the other. Besides, he hasn’t got enough of it, Edie, and Ernest has.’
CHAPTER XXVII. — RONALD COMES OF AGE.
‘Strange,’ Ronald Le Breton thought to himself, as he walked along the Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo, some weeks later—the day of Herr Max’s trial,—‘I had a sort of impulse to come down here alone this afternoon: I felt as if there was an unseen Hand somehow impelling me. Depend upon it, one doesn’t have instincts of that sort utterly for nothing. The Finger that guides us guides us always aright for its own wise and unfathomable purposes. What a blessing and a comfort it is to feel that one’s steps are continually directed from above, and that even an afternoon stroll through the great dreary town is appointed to us for some fit and sufficient reason! Look at that poor girl over there now, at the edge of the Embankment! I wonder what on earth she can have come here for. Why...how pale and excited she looks. What’s she going so near the edge for? Gracious heavens! it can’t be...yes...it is... no, no, but still it must be...that’s what the Finger was guiding me here for this afternoon. There’s no denying it. The poor creature’s tempted to destroy herself. My instinct tells me so at once, and it never tells me wrong. Oh, Inscrutable Wisdom, help me, help me: give me light to act rightly! I must go up this very moment and speak to her!’