“Now I understand,” observed our hero. “Old Gallipot wanted to come the artful dodge and be rid of his partner without the trouble or risk of putting her out of the way. Very natural, and, all things considered, a wise course, perhaps; but he was floored, it seems, just in the nick of time.”
“Oh, I haven’t the slightest doubt about the end. If he couldn’t be shut of her by fair means he would have done it by foul. She would have been poisoned like his first wife. He was a cold-blooded, cruel scoundrel.”
“Upon my word, the story you’ve been telling sounds more like a romance than an actual reality.”
“Perhaps it does; it seems almost like a romance. When I think of the time when I first met with Hester, and what I have passed through since then—what I am and what I might have been, and how gentle and beautiful she was, I feel a heavy weight fall upon me—I feel that I want a heart not made out of human flesh, but out of the nether millstone.”
There was a mournful cadence in the gipsy’s voice as he gave utterance to these words, which made them additionally expressive, as the sounds fell upon the ears of Charles Peace the burglar.
Then on the bronzed and wrinkled cheeks of Bill Rawton two tears chased their way. They were the first he had shed for many a year. The hard man’s heart was softened. The remembrance of his early days—the dawn and noontide of love—seemed to him then like the oasis in the sterile and arid desert, and he leant forward and buried his face in his hands.
To say that Charles Peace was moved by the display of feeling in one from whom he would have least expected to find any genuine sentiment, would be, perhaps, saying too much. But he was surprised; more so, perhaps, than he had been in the whole course of his life.
He might well be so, for many reasons. He never for a moment gave his companion credit for so much chivalrous and disinterested feeling as he had displayed in his endeavours to shelter and shield Mrs. Bourne, and perhaps the reader will find it difficult to believe that a man of such essentially coarse a type as Rawton was capable of being moved by the higher instincts of our nature.
In answer to this we have but to declare that the gipsy’s character is sketched from life; the leading incidents in his career are but records of actual occurrences; his devotion to Mrs. Bourne was the one bright spot on his character, which nothing could dim or diminish. Throughout his life he invariably spoke of her with respect and admiration, not unmixed by a latent but enduring love.
Instances of this kind are by no means so rare as people are led to believe, although, perhaps, they are not outwardly manifested, as in the case of Rawton. The human character is diverseful, and it would not be a pleasing thought, nor indeed would it be correct, to suppose the most callous do not possess “one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.”