"Could I have done more, David? That night when I saw him I had come in from the mills late, and the servants would not let him wait for me even in the hall. He told me how he had shot the constable. He feared he had killed him, but he did not know, not daring to turn back to find out. He had walked the whole way, travelling day and night. I wanted him to stay, but he said that in Mary he had taken from me everything I had ever had; he could take no more. He had come not to beg, but to give me Penelope; and when he came again it would not be as a brother who could be turned from my door by the servants; when he came again it would be as a father of whom Penelope could feel no shame. I could not move him. I did my best, David, but he laughed and slapped me on the back and called me his old grub; said that some day I should really see what was in him. Then he went away—God only knows where."
"To the West," said I. "To the East, to Tibet."
"Yes," said Rufus Blight. He was standing before me, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes intent on the ceiling.
"And you came to us for Penelope," I said. The last trace of my antipathy to this man, once to me so fat and pompous, was gone.
He looked at me with a faint smile of embarrassment. "And what an ungrateful brute I was!" he exclaimed. "David, did you remember the promises I made that day?"
"I used to remember them," I answered, "and to wonder."
"You had the right," he said. "But remember what I was—just a lonely grub. Till Penelope came to me I had nothing but the mills. Having her, I wanted her entirely." He held out his hand. "She was only that high, David, and I was getting gray. I never looked at her but there came into my mind another just that high who had a desk in school in front of mine, and sometimes I seemed to be looking again over the top of my spelling-book at the same bright hair and the same bobbing bit of ribbon. Can't you see what she meant to me, David? She hated me at first—she spoke always of her father and of you—and I was jealous."
"I understand," said I.
He had not spoken of the letters. There was no need of it. I knew that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the pettiness of his action. But for me his simple confession had absolved him.
"I wanted her entirely," he went on, throwing himself into a chair at my side. "I wanted something to live for beside the mills. In Penelope I found it. What the mills gave me was for her. Every hour I worked was happier because it was for her good. Sometimes I have to fight against a dread that Hendry will come back and take her from me, and yet when I think of him, tumbling around the world alone, I want him too—want him in that very chair you are sitting in. It would be so good just to hear him talk, and it wouldn't make any difference to us now if he did just talk." Rufus Blight brought a fist down on the arm of his chair. "David, I must find him!"