“Who can tell, Lallie? I only hope not. You children, with your quick circulation, active limbs, and vigorous lungs, are always longing for frost and snow. But when they come, you get tired of them, within a week at the utmost. But in your selfish spring of life you forget all the miseries of the poor and old, or even young folk who are poor, and the children starving everywhere. And the price of all food is now most alarming.”
“I am sure I meant no harm,” said Alice; “one cannot always think of everything. Papa, do you know that you have lately taken to be very hard on me?”
“Well now, everybody says that of me,” Sir Roland answered thoughtfully; “I scarcely dreamed that my fault was that. But out of many mouths I am convicted. Struan Hales says it; and so does my mother. Hilary seemed to imply it also, at the time when he last was heard of. Mine own household, Trotman, Mrs. Pipkins, and that charitable Mrs. Merryjack, have combined to take the same view of me. There must be truth in it. I cannot make head against such a cloud of witnesses. And now Alice joins them. What more do I want? I must revise my opinion of myself, and confess that I am a hard-hearted man.”
This question Sir Roland debated with himself, in a manner which had long been growing upon him, in the gathering love of solitude. Being by nature a man with a most extraordinary love of justice, he found it hard (as such rare men do) to be perfectly sure about anything. He always desired to look at a subject from every imaginable outside view, receding (like a lark in the clouds) from groundling consideration, yet frankly open (like a woodcock roasting) to anything good put under him. Nobody knew him; but he did his best when he thought of that matter, to know himself.
Now, his daughter allowed him to follow out his meditation quietly; and then she said as they went down the hill, warily heeding each other’s steps—
“Papa, I beg you particularly to pay no attention whatever to your own opinion, or any other opinion in the world, except perhaps, at least, perhaps——”
“Perhaps that of Alice.”
“Quite so, papa. About my own affairs my opinion is of no value: but about yours, and the family in general, it is really—something.”
“Wisest of our race, and bravest, you are rushing into the water, darling—stop; you have forgotten what we came for. We came to see the Woeburn, and here it is!”
“Is this it? And yesterday I walked across this very place! Oh, what a strange black river!”