“Are you going to tell me,” Vaughan said, his face grown suddenly rigid, “that he has children?” His heart was beating furiously under his waistcoat, but, taken aback as he was, he maintained outward composure.
“That’s it,” Wetherell answered bluntly.
“Then——”
“He has a daughter.”
“It will have to be proved!” Vaughan said slowly and in the tone of a man who chose his words. And he rose to his feet. He felt, perhaps he was justified in feeling, that they had taken him at a disadvantage. That they had treated him unfairly in trapping him hither, one to three; in order that they might see, perhaps, how he took it! Not—his thoughts travelled rapidly over the facts known to him—that the thing could be true! The punishment for last night’s revolt fell too pat, too à propos, he’d not believe it! And besides, it could not be true. For Lady Vermuyden lived, and there could be no question of a concealed marriage, or a low-born family. “It will have to be proved!” he repeated firmly. “And is matter rather for my lawyers than for me.”
Sir Robert, too, had risen to his feet. But it was Wetherell who spoke.
“Perhaps so!” he said. “Perhaps so. Indeed I admit it, young sir! It will have to be proved. But——”
“It should have been told to them rather than to me!” Vaughan repeated, with a sparkling eye. And he turned as if he were determined to treat them as hostile and to have nothing farther to say to them.
But Wetherell stopped him. “Stay, young man,” he said, “and be ashamed of yourself! You forget yourself!” And before Vaughan, stung and angry, could retort upon him, “You forget,” he continued, “that this touches another as closely as it touches you—and more closely! You are a gentleman, sir, and Sir Robert’s kinsman. Have you no word then, for him!” pointing, with a gesture roughly eloquent, to his host. “You lose, but have you no word for him who gains! You lose, but is it nothing to him that he finds himself childless no longer, heirless no longer? That his house is no longer lonely, his hearth no longer empty! Man alive,” he added, dropping with honest indignation to a low note, “you lose, but what does he not gain? And have you no word, no generous thought for him? Bah!” throwing himself back in his seat. “Poor human nature.”
“Still it must be proved,” said Vaughan sullenly, though in his heart he acknowledged the truth of the reproach.