“But pluck isn’t everything,” I said seriously, “that is what you boys call pluck. To be good is always the very hardest and bravest thing.”
I expected that my trite copy-book sentiment would elicit scorn. One had to learn the art of putting things to our boys. But instead of being scornful Rob became reflective.
“Perhaps that’s true. I rather think it is,” he said. “But sometimes it isn’t so easy for a fellow to say what is goodness. And things put you into such a fix that you can’t get out—unless you have brains and pluck, like Dave.”
This was somewhat enigmatical; if it signified anything it was that there had been some boyish “scrape” out of which Dave had extricated one or both of them. Rob certainly seemed to have no sense whatever of Dave’s moral lapse.
“Nothing—nothing could possibly place any one in such a position that it would be necessary for such wrong-doing as Dave’s,” I said severely. “Although Dave is my brother, and I am quite as fond of him as if he were my own brother, yet I can’t help saying, Rob, that I think it is very dangerous for you to make a hero of him.”
He started up from the couch, his face flushed and his blue eyes blazing. He looked like the portrait of his beautiful young mother who had died when he was a baby. There was something fine and lofty in his expression; it was almost the look of an accusing angel.
“You—you don’t——” he began and faltered, it was, or I fancied that it was, as Uncle Horace’s heavy steps sounded in the room below.
“Girls are such fools!” he growled, as he fell back upon his pillows. “As much—as much as fifty of you wouldn’t be worth Dave’s little finger!” The footstep had ceased to reach our ears now and his voice arose high-keyed and shrill.
I bent over him, obeying a sudden impulse.
“Rob, if you know that Dave didn’t go to the races and—and lose his money, if there was any strange mistake, of course it would be your duty to tell—you would want to tell to clear Dave at any cost to yourself.”