“It was then,” I went on hastily—“at least, generally. And Robin Hood didn’t rob the good rich people, only the bad ones; and most of his spoil he distributed among the poor, you know,” I finished triumphantly.
“It won’t do, Miss Christie; I must destroy your edifice of argument at a blow,” said he, shaking his head mournfully. “I happen to know something about this Lord Dalston whose house was broken into; and he is a very bad rich person indeed, much more so than the poor old abbots whom your favorite Robin Hood treated so roughly. He ill-treated his mother, stole and squandered his sisters’ fortunes, neglected his wife, and tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, knocked out in a passion the left eye of one of his own grooms, had embezzled money before he was twenty-one, and now owes heavy debts to half the big tradesmen in London. So that he is something like a thief. Now, if you were to find out that the man who had the chief hand—for, of course, there were dozens at work over it—in planning the robbery of this wicked rich man’s property was young, good-looking, well dressed, a large subscriber to charities, and in love with a pretty lady-like girl, you ought, if you were logical, to admire him as much as you do Robin Hood, and more than you do Jack Sheppard.”
“Oh, Mr. Rayner,” said I, joining in his laughter, “how absurd! But it is too bad of you to make fun of my logic. I can’t put it properly; but what I mean is this. In those days the laws were unjust, so that even good men were forced into defiance of them; but now that the laws are really, upon the whole, fair, it is only wicked people who disobey them.”
“Then you don’t like wicked people, Miss Christie?”
“Oh, Mr. Rayner, of course not!” said I, aghast at such a question, which he asked quite seriously.
“Ah, you must know some before you decide too hastily that you don’t like them!” said he.
“Know some wicked people, Mr. Rayner?” I gasped.
He nodded gravely; and then I saw that he was amusing himself with my horror-struck expression.
“You won’t like all of them, any more than you dislike all the good people you know. But you will find that those you do like beat the good people hollow.”
“Indeed I am sure I shouldn’t like them at all. I wouldn’t speak to a wicked person if I could help it.”