In these days Paul Armstrong pondered much and often over the saying of the man who had been his master in the arts of fiction and the drama: ‘Men reserve their bitterest repentances for their best actions.’ If only he had played the man of the world towards Annette instead of playing the Quixote, how different a position he would have held towards the moral pack! To marry your mistress under no compulsion, but merely in the desire to relieve the last sufferings of a parting soul, to sacrifice a year or two of pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch if he had at last yielded to the claims of that domesticity which offered him involuntary shelter: the invitations of a home of love and confidence; an atmosphere in which no cloud hovered which could not be puffed away in a cloud of tobacco smoke, or shattered into nothing by the clear breath of a single friendly laugh. It was not quite an honest view of the case—no man surveying his own circumstances is ever entirely honest—but to himself the question was convincing, Who would not have hastened from that hell to find this heaven?
Ralston at least stood undauntedly by him, and inveighed with anger against what he proclaimed to be an unnatural law.
‘Do you know Constantinople?’ he asked one evening as the two sat together.
‘Yes,’ Paul answered; ‘I know it tourist fashion. I stayed a week there once.’
‘You remember the tribes of yellow dogs who make night hideous?’ Ralston questioned. ‘They hunt in packs, and eat any raffle of the streets which may be thrown to ‘em. I’ve seen ‘em wolfing cardboard boxes that have been swept out of the drapers’ shops in the early morning, the poor hungry devils! They’d fall across any intruder from another parish and crunch him hide and bones. But they never attack one another, and there’s no record of one yellow dog who tried to eat another yellow dog who belonged to the same gang. There’s a mighty difference between the canine and the human, eh? You’re one of our breed, Armstrong—yellow dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe—and your comrades haven’t the gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur. They get round you and worry you,’ he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one gesture of rage—‘they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful of lineage, and they’d gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for the same reward.’
‘As bad as that?’ asked Paul, with a dreary little laugh.
‘As bad as that, sir!’ Ralston declared wrathfully, though he too laughed a moment at his own vehemence.
But the fighting Ralston was on fire with his theme, and returned to it often.
‘You had a namesake once,’ he said, ‘who was an Apostle. He talked with a centurion, who told him, “With a great price I obtained this freedom.” With a great price! I wonder if it were like the price we pay for what we call the freedom of the press. I fought for that in my own day, fought and suffered, and paid in coin and heart’s blood, and I have asked myself since if I am glad or sorry that I won. Are we the better for having bred this vulture crowd?’
The hot heart of the advocate warmed the cold heart of the sufferer from time to time, but neither long nor often. The coals of anger will not burn freely on any honest hearth when the conscience of the owner compels him to turn down the damper every other minute.