... Again the courage of despair came to
him, and he struck out further.
"I must tell you of that too, sir," he said. "Mistress Marjorie and I--"
He stopped, overwhelmed with shame. His father turned full round and
stared at him.
"Go on, sir."
Robin seized his glass and emptied it.
"Well, sir. Mistress Marjorie and I love one another. We are but boy and
girl, sir; we know that--"
Then his father laughed. It was laughter that was at once hearty and
bitter; and, with it, came the closing of the open door in the boy's
heart. As there came out, after it, sentence after sentence of scorn and
contempt, the bolts, so to say, were shot and the key turned. It might
all have been otherwise if the elder man had been kind, or if he had
been sad or disappointed, or even if he had been merely angry; but the
soreness and misery in the old man's heart--misery at his own acts and
words, and at the outrage he was doing to his own conscience--turned his
judgment bitter, and with that bitterness his son's heart shut tight
against him.
"But boy and girl!" sneered the man. "A couple of blind puppies, I would
say rather--you with your falcons and mare and your other toys, and the
down on your chin, and your conscience; and she with her white face and
her mother and her linen-parlour and her beads"--(his charity prevailed
so far as to hinder him from more outspoken contempt)--"And you two
babes have been prattling of conscience and prayers together--I make no
doubt, and thinking yourselves Cecilies and Laurences and all the holy
martyrs--and all this without a by-your-leave, I dare wager, from parent
or father, and thinking yourselves man and wife; and you fondling her,
and she too modest to be fondled, and--"
The plain truth struck him with sudden splendour, at least sufficiently
strong to furnish him with a question.
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