By this time the shadows came over the room, and the trees outside were rustling, and you could see them against the amber sunset, like a childʼs scrawling on his horn–book. Volunteers throughout the household longed to give their evidence. Their self–respect for a week would be hostile, if it were not accepted. But Sir Cradock kept the door fastened, till Mrs. OʼGaghan slipped out, and put all the wenches down the steps backwards. Mrs. Toaster alone she durst not touch; but Mrs. Toaster will never forgive her, and never believe the case tried on its merits, because she was not summoned to depose to the loan of the scales.
Ha, so it is in our country, and among the niggers also. When wealth, position, title, even bastardom from princes, even the notoriety which a first–rate murderer stabs for—when any of these are in question, how we crowd into the witness–box, how we feel the reek of the court an aureola on our temples. But let any poor fellow, noble unknown, an upright man now on the bend with trouble, let him go in to face his creditors, after the uphill fight of years, let him gaze around with work–worn eyes—which of his friends will be there to back him, who will give him testimony?
After all, what matters it except in the score against us? We are bitter with the world, we make a fuss, and feel it fester, we explode in small misanthropy, only because we have not in our heart–sore the true balm of humanity. No longer let our watchword be, “Every man for himself, and God for us all”, but “Every man for God, and so for himself and all”. So may we do away with all illicit process, and return to the primal axiom that “the greater contains the less”.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The rays of the level sun were nestling in the brown bosom of the beech–clump, and the fugitive light went undulating through the grey–arched portico, like a reedy river; when Cradock and Clayton Nowell met in the old hall of their childhood. With its deep embrasures, and fluted piers, high–corniced mantel of oak relieved with alabaster figures, and the stern array of pike, and steel–cap, battle–axe, and arquebus, which kept the stag–heads over against them nodding in perpetual fear, this old hall was so impressed upon their earliest memories, that they looked upon it, in some sort, as the entrance to their lives.
As the twins drew near from opposite doors, each hung back for a moment: knowing all that had passed that day, how would his brother receive him? But in that moment each perceived how the otherʼs heart was; Cradock cried, “Hurrah, all right”! and Claytonʼs arms were round his neck. Clayton sobbed hysterically—for he had always been woman–hearted—while Cradock coaxed him with his hand, as if he were ten years the elder. It was as though the days of childhood had returned once more, the days when the world came not between them, but they were the world to each other.
“Crad, I wonʼt have a bit of it. Did you think I would be such a robber, Crad? And I donʼt believe one syllable of their humbugging nursery stories. Why, every fellow knows that you must be the eldest brother”.
“Viley, my boy, I am so glad that it has turned out so. You know that I have always longed to fight my way in the world, and I am fitter for it than you are. And you are more the fellow for a baronet, and a big house, and all that sort of thing; and in the holidays I shall come every year to shoot with you, and to break your dogs, and all that; for you havenʼt got the least idea, Viley, of breaking a dog”.