The young man drew a long breath. “I’m glad and thankful to hear it, I’m sure. There was all sorts of notions going through my mind, like, at one time, though I expect you’d think it was all moonshine and madness on my part.”
“I don’t suppose I should think it anything of the sort. What were the notions?”
“I thought perhaps there’d be some way I might offer myself to serve the sentence instead of him,” said Felix, with such simplicity that Lucian scarcely saw the strange appearance that he made as protagonist of Sydney Carton. “It’s a situation that I’ve read of, and I thought there might be something in it—that it might be worked. It would have been nothing to me, doctor, to serve three months’ imprisonment for Mr. Cecil, if I could have done it for her. I daresay you’d laugh, if I told you the number of times I’ve planned out similar situations, as you might say, ever since I was quite a lad. The saving her from a runaway horse, or carrying her out of the building when it caught fire, or giving my life to save Mr. Cecil’s and never letting her know.
“Sometimes, though, I’ve planned out the situation so that she did know, just before the end, and was with me at the last, like.
“It’s all been nonsense, I daresay, but if the opportunity had ever really come, I’d have taken it, doctor.”
“I know you would.”
“It seems funny, in a way, that when you’d always planned dying for someone, or—or being persecuted on their account, or imprisoned, like in a revolution, you shouldn’t ever really do anything better than call cabs for them or take their letters to the post. But I let myself fancy those things, doctor, although I know it was silly like, because the way I’ve argued it is this: that if the thought’s always there, some day the opportunity may come, unexpected like, and then it’ll be a sort of second nature to act promptly, if you take my meaning.”
Felix looked wistfully at the doctor, his hair erect and his bony frame seeming to collapse upon itself from very weakness. His proportions, more especially by comparison with those of Rose Aviolet herself, added indeed an element of the grotesque to his outlined programme of action.
But Lucian felt no inclination to smile. “You’re a good fellow, Felix,” he said. “The picturesque opportunities don’t often come along in real life, as you say, but it’s the other things that really count.”
“Thank you, doctor,” said Felix, blinking his pale eyelashes rapidly. “I should never have said all this, I don’t suppose, only that I’m wrought-up like. Don’t mention it to any one else, please!”