“I won’t deceive you, father,” said Walter. “From his point of view I suppose he’s right enough--but that is not my point of view.”
“Mr. Walter,” old Crockford said, beginning one of his speeches. The old man in his patched coat of an indescribable color, the color of the woods and hedgerows, with his red handkerchief in a wisp round his neck, the lock of thin gray hair smoothed over his bald crown, his hat in his old knotted rugged hands, all knuckles and protrusions, came into Sir Edward’s mind, as the companion figure leaning on the mantel-piece had done, like a picture all full of meaning; but he stopped the old man’s slow discourse with a wave of his hand, and turned to his son, impatiently. He had not voice enough in his bewilderment to say, “Go on”--he said it with his hand.
“Well, sir?” said the lad, “I don’t know what I have to say; there are things one man doesn’t tell another, even if it’s his father. There’s nothing in me that is dishonorable, if that is what you mean. If there were, it is _her_ eye I should shrink from first of all.”
Her eye! The father stood confounded, not able to believe his ears. He made one more attempt at a question, not with words, but with a half-stupefied look, again silencing Crockford with his hand.
“I tell you, father,” cried Walter, with irritation, “there are things one man doesn’t tell another, not even if--” He was pleased, poor boy, with that phrase; but the examination, the discovery was intolerable to him. He gave a wave of his hand toward Crockford, as if saying, “Question him--hear him--hear the worst of me!” with a sort of contemptuous indignation; then shot between the two other men like an arrow, and was gone.
“Things one man doesn’t tell to another, even if it’s his father.” One man to another! was it laughable, was it tragical? Sir Edward, in the confusion of his soul, could not tell. He looked at Crockford, but not for information; was it for sympathy? though the old stone-breaker was at one extremity of the world and he at the other. He felt himself shaking his head in a sort of intercommunion with old Crockford, and then stopped himself with a kind of angry dismay.
“If you’ve anything to say on this subject, let me have it at once,” he said.
