‘You have practised at the Bar,’ parenthetically.
Conyngham shrugged his shoulders.
‘Unsuccessfully—anybody can do that.’
‘Which are you—a fool or a knave?’ asked Sir John.
And suddenly Conyngham pitied him. For no man is proof against the quick sense of pathos aroused by the sight of man, or dumb animal, baffled. At the end of his life Sir John had engaged upon the greatest quest of it—an unworthy quest, no doubt, but his heart was in it—and he was an old man, though be bore his years well enough.
‘Perhaps that is the mistake you have always made,’ said Conyngham gravely. ‘Perhaps men are not to be divided into two classes. There may be some who only make mistakes, Sir John.’
Unconsciously he had lapsed into the advocate, as those who have once played the part are apt to do. This was not his own cause, but Geoffrey Horner’s. And he served his friend so thoroughly that for the moment he really was the man whose part he had elected to play. Sir John Pleydell was no mean foe. Geoffrey Horner had succeeded in turning aside the public suspicion, and in the eternal march of events, of which the sound is louder as the world grows older and hollower, the murder of Alfred Pleydell had been forgotten by all save his father. Conyngham saw the danger, and never thought to avoid it. What had been undertaken half in jest would be carried out in deadly earnest.
‘Mistakes,’ said Sir John sceptically. In dealing with the seamy side of life men come to believe that it is all stitches.
‘Which they may pass the rest of their lives in regretting.’
Sir John looked sharply at his companion, with suspicion dawning in his eyes again. It was Conyngham’s tendency to overplay his part. Later, when he became a soldier, and found that path in life for which he was best fitted, his superior officers and the cooler tacticians complained that he was over-eager, and in battle outpaced the men he led.