“Are you one of the right sort of people, Sergeant?”
“I won’t go so far as to say that, sir, but I will go so far as to say that, if I owned this property, I’d come to feast my eyes on it here more often than what Sir Calvin does.”
The Baron, without moving his head, took in the face of the speaker. He saw a glow, a subdued passion in it which interested him. What spirit of romance, to be sure, might lurk unsuspected under the hard official rind. Here was the last man in the world whom one would have credited with a sense of beauty, and he was wrought to emotion by a landscape!
“You talk,” said he, “of your profession not affording you many such moments as this. Now, to my mind, it seems the profession for a man romantically inclined.”
“Does it, indeed, sir?”
“Why, don’t you live in a perpetual atmosphere of romance? Think of the mysteries which are your daily food.”
“That’s it—my daily food, and lodging too. The men who pull on the ropes for a living don’t think much, or see much, of the fairy scene they’re setting. That’s all for the prosperous folks in front.”
“You’d rather be one of them?”
“Which would you rather, sir—be a police-officer, or the owner of an estate like this? If such things were properly distributed, as you say, there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all. You read the papers about a case like ours here, and you see only a romance: we, whose necessity puts us behind the scenes, see only, in nine cases out of ten, the dirty mishandling of Fate. Give a man his right position in the world, and he’ll commit no crimes. That’s my belief, and it’s founded on some experience.”
“I dare say you’re right. It’s comforting to know, in that case, that my valet has always fitted into his place like a stopper into a bottle.”