Part 4 (2/2)
Sam rose and stood for a moment staring gloomily down on the gravel.
”Why did you tell me, then?” he broke out. ”What need was there to tell?”
His father winced, for the first time. ”I see your point. Why didn't I, you ask, having played the game so far, play it out? Why couldn't I take my secret with me into the last darkness, and be judged for it--my own sole sin and complete? Well, but there's the blind child. By law the house and home estate would he his. I might have kept silence, to be sure, and let him be robbed; but somehow I couldn't. I've a conscience somewhere, I suppose.”
”Have you?” Sam flamed out, with sudden spirit. ”A nice sort of conscience it must be! I call it cowardice, this dragging me in to help you compensate the child. Conscience? If you had one, you wouldn't be s.h.i.+fting the responsibility on to mine.”
”You are mistaken,” said his father calmly. ”And by the way, I advise you not to take that tone with me. It may all be very proper under the circ.u.mstances; but there's the simple fact that I won't stand it.
You're mistaken,” he repeated. ”I mean to settle the compensation alone, without consulting you; though, by George! if 'tweren't for pitying the poor child, I'd like to leave it to you as a religious man, and watch you developing your reasons for giving him nothing.”
”And it was you,” muttered Sam, with a kind of stony wonder, ”who advised me just now to let my son run wild!”
”I did, and I do.” John Rosewarne stood up and gripped his staff.
”By the way, too,” he said, ”your mother was a good woman.”
”I don't want to hear anything about it.”
”I know; but I wanted to tell you. Good-bye.”
He turned abruptly and went his way down the hill. As he went, his lips moved. He was talking not to himself, but to an unseen companion--
”Mary! Mary!--that this should be the fruit of our sowing!”
CHAPTER IV.
ROSEWARNE'S PENANCE.
Beside the winding Avon above Warwick bridge there stretches a flat meadow, along the brink of which on a summer evening you may often count a score of anglers seated and watching their floats; decent citizens of Warwick, with a sprinkling of redcoats from the garrison. They say that two-thirds of the Trappist brotherhood are ex-soldiers; and perhaps if we knew the reason we might also know why angling has a peculiar fascination for the military.
Angling was but a pretext, however, with a young corporal of the 6th Regiment, who sat a few yards away on John Rosewarne's right, and smoked his pipe, and cast frequent furtive glances, now along the river path, now back and across the meadow where another path led from the town.
Each of these glances ended in a resentful stare at his too-near neighbour, who fished on unregarding.
”Is this a favourite corner of yours?” the corporal asked after a while, with meaning.
”I have fished on this exact spot for thirty-five years,” answered John Rosewarne, not lifting his eyes from the float.
The corporal whistled. ”Thirty-five years! It's queer, now, that I never set eyes on you before--and I come here pretty often.”
Rosewarne let a full minute go by before he answered again.
”There's nothing queer about it, Unless you've been stationed long in Warwick.”
”Best part of a year.”
”Quite so: I fish in Avon once a year only.”
”Belong to the town?”
”No; nor within two hundred miles of it.”
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