He leant forward. “I don’t wish to speak,” he said, addressing the Sergeant in a troubled voice. “Call on some one else, if you please.”
But “Impossible, sir!” White, surprised by his evident nervousness, answered. He had thought Vaughan anything but a shy person. “Impossible, sir!”
“Get up! Get up!” cried the Squire, his neighbour, laying a jocund hand on him and trying to lift him to his feet.
But Vaughan resisted; his throat was so dry that he could hardly frame his words. “I don’t wish to speak,” he muttered. “I don’t agree——”
“Say what you like, my dear sir!” the Sergeant rejoined blandly, but with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. He had had his doubts of Master Vaughan ever since he had caught him on his way to the Chancellor: now he thought that he had him pinned. He did not suppose that the young man would dare to revolt openly.
“Yes, sir, you must get up,” said White, who had no suspicion that his hesitation arose from any cause but shyness. “Anything will do.”
Vaughan rose—slowly, and with a beating heart. He rose perforce. For a moment he stood, deafened by his reception. For the smaller men saw in him one of the old family, the future landlord of two-thirds of them, the sometime owner of the very roof under which they were gathered. And he, while they greeted his rising and he stood waiting with an unhappy face for silence, wondered, even at this last moment, what he would say. And Heaven knows what he would have said—so hard was it to disappoint those cheering men, all looking at him with worship in their eyes—so painful was it to break old ties—if he had not caught behind him Mowatt’s whisper, “Eat his words! He’ll have to unsay——”
No more than that, a fragment, but enough; enough to show him that he had better, far better seem false to these men, to his blood, to the past, than be false to himself. He straightened his shoulders, and lifted his head.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and now his voice though low was steady, “I rise unwillingly—unwillingly, because I feel too late that I ought not to be here. That I have no right to be here. [No! No!] No right to be here, for this reason,” he continued, raising his hand for silence, “for this reason, that in much of what Sergeant Wathen has said, I cannot go with him.”
There, it was out! But no more than a stare of perplexity passed from the more intelligent faces about him to the duller faces lower down the table. They did not understand; it was only clear that he could not mean what he seemed to mean. But he was going on in a silence so complete that a pin falling to the floor might have been heard!