“If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other men?”
“You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!”
Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of misconstruction.
“You are a brute to me!” went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman's. “You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor's prison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!”
“Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie.
The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself—partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.
There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never own a reality.
“Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say,” he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in the boy's eyes. “Don't be down about this; you will pull through, never fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind—tell him all. No half measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You will not come back without it.”
Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother's, the red color darker on his face.
“Do as I say,” said Cecil, very gently still. “Tell him, if you like, that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; he will be sure to pity you then.”