And yet how childish the old man's whole mental image of the squire was after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his father's end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not know very much of the squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding indulgent theory of Meyrick's was ludicrously far from the mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover's later life.
Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which his companion's mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering narrative he was busy upon with a sigh.
'Ah well, I daresay it's hard, it's hard,' he said with patient acquiescence in his voice, 'to believe a man can't help himself. I daresay we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there was a man sick in mind—for all his book-learning they talk about—and sick in soul, that man is the squire.'
Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was a new dignity about the simple old man. The old-fashioned deference, which had never let him forget in speaking to Robert that he was speaking to a man of family, and which showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions which were a torment to his son, had given way to something still more deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles and the long straight hair—like the figure of a superannuated schoolmaster—assumed, as he turned again to his younger companion, something of authority, something almost of stateliness.
'Ah, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, laying his shrunk hand on the younger man's sleeve and speaking with emotion, 'you're very good to the poor. We're all proud of you—you and your good lady. But when you were coming, and I heard tell all about you, I thought of my poor squire, and I said to myself, "That young man'll be good to him. The squire will make friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife—and there'll be children born to him—and the squire will take an interest—and—and—maybe——'"
The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.
'And there was something in the way between you,' the speaker went on, sighing. 'I daresay you were quite right—quite right. I can't judge. Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now its missed—it's missed. Ah! it's no good talking; he has a heart—he has! Many's the kind thing he's done in old days for me and mine—I'll never forget them! But all these last few years—oh, I know, I know. You can't go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it's pitiful!'
It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath passing through the wintry lane and through the shaking voice of the old man. Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth, its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh, inexcusable.
'Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you! Don't imagine I will forget a word you have said to me.'
The rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile passed over Meyrick's ageing face, and they parted.