The minister ceased. Outside the rain had come on in broad single drops, laying the dust on the road. Ralph could hear it pattering on the broad leaves of the plane-tree outside the window. He did not like to hear it. It sounded like a woman's tears.
But he could not understand how all this bore on his case. He was silenced and awed, but it was with the sight of a soul of a man of years and approved sanctity in deep apparent waters of sorrow.
The minister lifted his head and listened. In the ancient woodwork of the manse, somewhere in the crumbling wainscoting, the little boring creature called a death-watch ticked like the ticking of an old verge watch. Mr. Welsh broke off with a sudden causeless auger very appalling in one so sage and sober in demeanour.
"There's that beast again!" he said; "often have I thought it was ticking in my head. I have heard it ever since the night she died--"
"I wonder at a man like you," said Ralph, "with your wisdom and Christian standing, caring for a worm--"
"You're a very young man, and when you are older maybe you'll wonder at a deal fewer things," answered the minister with a kind of excited truculence very foreign to his habit, "for I myself am a worm and no man," he added dreamily. "And often I tried to kill the beast. Ye see thae marks--" he broke off again--"I bored for it till the boards are a honeycomb, but the thing aye ticks on."
"But, Mr. Welsh," said Ralph eagerly, with some sympathy in his voice, "why should you trouble yourself about this story now--or I, for the matter of that? I can understand that Winsome Charteris has somehow to do with it, and that the knowledge has come to you in the course of your duty; but even if, at any future time, Winsome Charteris were aught to me or I to her--the which I have at present only too little hope of--her forbears, be they whomsoever they might, were no more to me than Julius Caesar. I have seen her and looked into her eyes. What needs she of ancestors that is kin to the angels?"
Something like pity came into the minister's stern eyes as he listened to the lad. Once he had spoken just such wild, heart- eager words.
"I will answer you in a sentence," he said. "I that speak with you am the cause. I am he that has preached law and the gospel--for twenty years covering my sin with the Pharisee's strictness of observance. I am he that was false friend but never false lover-- that married without kirk or blessing. I am the man that clasped a dead woman's hand whom I never owned as wife, and watched afar off the babe that I never dared to call mine own. I am the father of Winifred Oharteris, coward before man, castaway before God. Of my sin two know besides my Maker--the father that begot you, whose false friend I was in the days that were, and Walter Skirving, the father of the first Winifred whose eyes this hand closed under the Peacock tree at Crossthwaite."