“Think of me more leniently, if you can, James,” said John Carker, “when I tell you I have had—how could I help having, with my history, written here”—striking himself upon the breast—“my whole heart awakened by my observation of that boy, Walter Gay. I saw in him when he first came here, almost my other self.”
“Your other self!” repeated the Manager, disdainfully.
“Not as I am, but as I was when I first came here too; as sanguine, giddy, youthful, inexperienced; flushed with the same restless and adventurous fancies; and full of the same qualities, fraught with the same capacity of leading on to good or evil.”
“I hope not,” said his brother, with some hidden and sarcastic meaning in his tone.
“You strike me sharply; and your hand is steady, and your thrust is very deep,” returned the other, speaking (or so Walter thought) as if some cruel weapon actually stabbed him as he spoke. “I imagined all this when he was a boy. I believed it. It was a truth to me. I saw him lightly walking on the edge of an unseen gulf where so many others walk with equal gaiety, and from which—”
“The old excuse,” interrupted his brother, as he stirred the fire. “So many. Go on. Say, so many fall.”
“From which ONE traveller fell,” returned the other, “who set forward, on his way, a boy like him, and missed his footing more and more, and slipped a little and a little lower; and went on stumbling still, until he fell headlong and found himself below a shattered man. Think what I suffered, when I watched that boy.”
“You have only yourself to thank for it,” returned the brother.
“Only myself,” he assented with a sigh. “I don’t seek to divide the blame or shame.”
“You have divided the shame,” James Carker muttered through his teeth. And, through so many and such close teeth, he could mutter well.