Sir Cradock Nowell began the combat, because he felt that it must be waged; and perhaps he knew in that beginning that he had the weaker cause.
“Cradock, I am doing nothing which is not my simple duty. When I see those I love in the deepest distress, can I help siding with them”?
“Upon that principle, or want of it, you might espouse, as a duty, the cause of any murderer”.
The old man shuddered, and his voice shook, as he whispered that last word. As yet he had not worked himself up, nor been worked up by others, to the black belief which made the living lost beyond the dead.
“I am sure I donʼt know what I might do”, said John Rosedew, simply, “but what I am doing now is right; and in your heart you know it. Come, Cradock, as an old man now, and one whom God has visited, forgive your poor, your noble son, who never will forgive himself”.
But for one word in that speech, John Rosedew would perhaps have won his cause, and reconciled son and father.
“My noble son indeed, John! A very noble thing he has done. Shall I never hear the last of his nobility? And who ever called my Clayton noble? You have been unfair throughout, John Rosedew, most unfair and blind to the merits of my more loving, more simple–hearted, more truly noble boy, I tell you”.
Mr. Rosedew, at such a time, could not of course contest the point, could not tell the bereaved old man that it was he himself who had been unfair.
“And when”, asked Sir Cradock, getting warmer, “when did you know my poor boy Violet stick up for political opinions of his own at the age of twenty, want to drain tenants’ cottages, and pretend to be better and wiser than his father”?