“Because I shot your son Clayton; and because I did it on purpose.”
“Viley! my boy Viley! Oh, I had forgotten. What a stupid thing of me! I thought he was dead somehow. Now, I will open the door for him, because his hands are full. And let him put his game on the table—never mind the papers—he always likes me to see it. Oh, Viley, how long you have been away! What a bag you must have made! Come in, my boy; come in.”
Bull Garnetʼs heart cleaved to his side, as the old man opened the door, and looked, with the leaping joy of a fatherʼs love, for his pet, his beloved, his treasured one. But nothing except cold air came in.
“The passage is empty. Perhaps he is waiting, because his boots are dirty. Tell him not to think twice about that. I am fidgety sometimes, I know; and I scolded him last Friday. But now he may come anyhow, if he will only come to me. I am so dull without him.”
“You will never see him more”—Bull Garnet whispered through a flood of tears, like grass waving out of water—”until it pleases God to take you home, where son and father go alike; sometimes one first, sometimes other, as His holy will is. He came to an unholy end. I tell you again—I shot him.”
“Excuse me; I donʼt quite understand. There was a grey hare, with a nick in her ear, who came to the breakfast–room window all through the hard weather last winter, and he promised me not to shoot her; and I am sure that he cannot have done it, because he is so soft–hearted, and that is why I love him so. Talk of Cradock—talk of Cradock! Perhaps he is cleverer than Viley—though I never will believe it—but is he half so soft and sweet? Will the pigeons sit on his shoulder so, and the dogs nuzzle under his coat–lap? Tell me that—tell me that—Bull Garnet.”
He leaned on the strong arm of his steward, and looked eagerly for his answer; then trembled with an exceeding great fear, to see that he was weeping. That such a man should weep! But Garnet forced himself to speak.
“You cannot listen to me now; I will come again, and talk to you. God knows the agony to me; and worst of all that it is for nothing. Yet all of it not a thousandth part of the anguish I have caused. Perhaps it is wisest so. Perhaps it is for my childrenʼs sake that I, who have killed your pet child, cannot make you know it. Yet it adds to my despair, that I have killed the father too.”
Scarcely knowing voice from silence, dazed himself, and blurred, and giddy—so strong is contagion of the mind—Bull Garnet went to the stables, saddled a horse without calling groom, and rode off at full gallop to Dr. Buller. By the time he got there his business habits and wonted fashion of thought had returned, and he put what he came for in lucid form, tersely, crisply, dryly, as if in the world there were no such thing as ill–regulated emotion—except on the part of other people.
“Not a bit of it,” said Dr. Buller; “his mind is as sound as yours or mine, and his constitution excellent. He has been troubled a good deal; but bless me—I know a man who lost his three children in a month, and could scarcely pay for their coffins, sir. And his wife only six weeks afterwards. That is what I call trouble, sir!”