Vanbigh said nothing. He looked at once surprised, distrustful, troubled.
Gorham talked on impulsively. "This is the first genuine case of conscience I have seen for many a year! Believe a boy who couldn't endure to chouse me out of half a dollar burned my theatre! No, sir! I tell you I have lived so long by sham heroics and sham sentiment—and I am so sick of shams, and the world is generally such a big, shameless sham—that I'm mighty apt to know a genuine thing when I see it by the sheer force of contrast. That boy won't jump the town! A boy with all that conscience to carry couldn't run away! He is innocent. And this is a terrible charge. He is helpless and he ought to be befriended. I want you to give bail for him!"
The broker was not only dubious—he was becoming greatly embarrassed as well.
"Suppose," he suggested in a constrained voice, "it should be discovered somehow that I am not acting for myself in bailing him, but for you."
Gorham snapped his fingers. "I don't care! I don't intend to leave that little boy to languish in jail for months, for a year perhaps, till his trial comes off. I tell you the idea of doing this little good turn freshens me all over. I feel as if I had been on a big drunk and somehow got a gourd of cold water from a little spring under a hillside, where I used to stop to drink when I was a boy driving the cows from the pasture. I have been drunk,—on artificiality, and worldliness, and selfishness."
"But," remonstrated the broker. Then he paused.
"But what, man?" exclaimed Gorham impatiently.
The broker went red and was silent. Indeed, how could he find words to suggest seriously to a man of unblemished integrity that by this act of charity, as for mitigating circumstances men from sheer motives of humanity sometimes refuse to prosecute, he might compromise himself. He might be suspected of having connived at the burning of the theatre for the sake of the insurance money and then having secretly furnished bail for the captured accomplice for fear that the boy, if left in prison, would reveal and incriminate his principal.
"Oh, surely, surely,—no one could ever imagine such an absurdity!" thought Vanbigh, deeming this but a bit of over alert and captious caution.
Gorham was beginning to show unmistakable signs of anger, even offense. Yet he was only the more determined.