"It seems that I cannot understand it now, sir."
"Not understand it?" repeated the justice, with a touch of his old heat. "It is plain enough to be understood. When my father died, he left this place, the Red Court Farm, to my elder brother, your uncle Richard--whom you never knew. A short while afterwards, Richard met with an accident in France, and I went over with my wife, to whom I was just married. We found him also with a wife, which surprised me, for he had never said anything of it; she was a pretty little Frenchwoman; and their child, a boy, was a year old. Richard, poor fellow, was dying, and of course I thought my chance of inheriting the Red Court was gone--that he would naturally leave it to his little son. But he took an opportunity of telling me that he had left it to me; the only proviso attached to it being that I should bring up the boy, as my son. He talked with me further: things that I cannot go into now: and I promised. That is how the Red Court came to me."
"But why should he have done this, sir?" interrupted Isaac, who liked justice better than wrong. "The little boy had a right to it."
"No," said Mr. Thornycroft, quietly. "Richard had not married his mother."
Isaac saw now. There was a pause.
"He said if time could come over again he would have married her, or else not have taken her. He was dying, you see, Isaac, and right and wrong array themselves in very distinct colours then. Anyway, it was too late now, whatever his repentance; and he prayed me and my wife to take the boy and not let it be known for the child's own sake that he was not ours. We both promised; at a moment like that one could not foresee inconveniences that might arise later, and it almost seemed as if we owed the compliance, in gratitude for the bequeathal of the Red Court Farm. He died, and we brought the boy with us to London--he who has been looked upon as your brother Richard. When people here used to say that he was more like his uncle Richard than his father Harry, my wife would glance at me with a smile."
"And his mother?"
"She died in France shortly afterwards. She had parted with the boy readily, glad to find he would have so good a home. Had she lived, the probabilities are that the secret could not have been kept."
"Did you intend to keep it always, father?"
"Until my death. Every year as they went on, gave less chance of our disclosing it. When you were all little, my wife and I had many a serious consultation; for the future seemed to be open so some difficulty; but we loved the boy, and neither of us had courage to say, He is not ours; he has no legitimate inheritance. Besides, as your mother would say to me, there was always our promise. It must have been disclosed at my death, at least to Richard, to explain why you, and not he, came into the Red Court."