‘I suppose the general feeling was in his favour?’ I said.

’I don’t think it was, anywhere; but in his own county it was certainly unanimously against him.  There is no use in asking why; but so it was, and I think it would have been easier for him with his unaided strength to uproot the Peak than to change the convictions of the Derbyshire gentlemen.  They were all against him.  Of course there were predisposing causes.  Your uncle published a very bitter attack upon them, describing himself as the victim of a political conspiracy:  and I recollect he mentioned that from the hour of the shocking catastrophe in his house, he had forsworn the turf and all pursuits and amusements connected with it.  People sneered, and said he might as well go as wait to be kicked out.’

‘Were there law-suits about all this?’ I asked.

’Everybody expected that there would, for there were very savage things printed on both sides, and I think, too, that the persons who thought worst of him expected that evidence would yet turn up to convict Silas of the crime they chose to impute; and so years have glided away, and many of the people who remembered the tragedy of Bartram-Haugh, and took the strongest part in the denunciation, and ostracism that followed, are dead, and no new light had been thrown upon the occurrence, and your uncle Silas remains an outcast.  At first he was quite wild with rage, and would have fought the whole county, man by man, if they would have met him.  But he had since changed his habits and, as he says, his aspirations altogether.’

‘He has become religious.’

’The only occupation remaining to him.  He owes money; he is poor; he is isolated; and he says, sick and religious.  Your poor father, who was very decided and inflexible, never helped him beyond the limit he had prescribed, after Silas’s mesalliance.  He wanted to get him into Parliament, and would have paid his expenses, and made him an allowance; but either Silas had grown lazy, or he understood his position better than poor Austin, or he distrusted his powers, or possibly he really is in ill-health; but he objected his religious scruples.  Your poor papa thought self-assertion possible, where an injured man has right to rely upon, but he had been very long out of the world, and the theory won’t do.  Nothing is harder than to get a person who has once been effectually slurred, received again.  Silas, I think, was right.  I don’t think it was practicable.

‘Dear child, how late it is!’ exclaimed Lady Knollys suddenly, looking at the Louis Quatorze clock, that crowned the mantelpiece.

It was near one o’clock.  The storm had a little subsided, and I took a less agitated and more confident view of Uncle Silas than I had at an earlier hour of that evening.

‘And what do you think of him?’ I asked.

Lady Knollys drummed on the table with her finger points as she looked into the fire.