“It is such nonsense,” cried Jack, speaking of his brother, after we had plunged a bit into affairs. “Calling it derogatory, and all the rest of it! I could be just as much of a gentleman as Ashton’s bailiff as I am now. Everybody knows me. He gives a good salary, and there’s a pretty house; and I have also my own small income. Alice and I and the little ones should be as happy as the day’s long. If I give in to Herbert and don’t take it, I don’t see what I am to turn to.”
“But, Jack, why do you give up the sea?” I asked. And Jack told me what he had told others: he should never take command again until he was a free man.
“Don’t you think you are letting that past matter hold too great an influence over you?” I presently said. “You must be conscious of your own innocence—and yet you seem as sad and subdued as though you were guilty!”
“I am subdued because other people think me guilty!” he answered. “Changed? I am. It is that which has changed me; not the calamity itself.”
“Jack, were I you, I should stand up in the face and eyes of all the world, and say to them, ‘Before God, I did not kill Pym.’ People would believe you then. But you don’t do it.”
“I have my reasons for not doing it, Johnny Ludlow. God knows what they are; He knows all things. I dare say I may be set right with the world in time: though I don’t see how it is to be done.”
A smart young man, a new assistant, was behind the counter at Ben Rymer’s, and served me with the pills. Coming out, box in hand, we met Ben himself. I hardly knew him, he was so spruce. His very hair and whiskers were trimmed down to neatness and looked of a more reasonable colour; his red-brown beard was certainly handsome, and his clothes were well cut.
“Why, he has grown into a dandy, Jack,” I said, after we had stood a minute or two, talking with the surgeon.
“Yes,” said Jack, “he is going in for the proprieties of life now. Ben may make a gentleman yet—and a good man to boot.”
That same afternoon, it chanced that the Squire met Ben Rymer. Striding along in his powerful fashion, Ben came full tilt round the sharp corner that makes the turning to the Islip Road, and nearly ran over the pater. Ben had been to Oxlip Grange.