“Mr. Morley, in making any statement to me, you will be at least as safe as if you made it to Dr. Hume. I tell you that I believe your master’s hands are clean. To prove it, we shall have to establish the truth. If you have anything to say which will go to make the darkness light, say it, like a man, before it’s too late.”
“You won’t use it to do him a disservice? And you won’t say that I talked about him in a way I didn’t ought to have done?”
“I will do neither of these things.”
“Well, sir, I like your looks; you look like the kind of gentleman one can trust, and I flatter myself I’m a pretty good judge of faces; and—and the way you handled Dr. Hume was”—he coughed behind his hand—“queer. I’ll make a clean breast of it.”
The old gentleman’s hesitation had its amusing side; I was conscious that something very unusual had happened to throw him, to such a degree, off his mental balance.
“That’s right, Mr. Morley; we shall soon arrive at an understanding if we are frank with one another. Sit down.”
He sat down on the edge of a chair. His hat he placed beside him on the floor, crown uppermost.
“Well, sir”—with his gloved fingers he stroked his chin, still regarding me with an air of dubitation—“I’m afraid that Mr. Edwin was not all that he ought to have been.”
“I am afraid that something similar could be said of all of us.”
“It was in money matters chiefly, though there were other things as well; but in money matters he was most irregular—quite unlike Mr. Philip. Mr. Philip has let him have thousands and thousands of pounds; what he did with it was a mystery. They quarrelled dreadfully.”