“I don’t know. There’s many a man married—happily married, too—who doesn’t know what it means. Luckily for the common good, the kind of love I have in mind is a thing apart. It is both more and less than a passion; it is a mania in the sense that it blinds the eye to everything save the present happiness of its object. Can you grasp that?”
“Ye-yes, in a measure. But in your case there were so many things to be considered——”
“There was no time to consider them. In such a crisis one must act first and think afterward. At the critical moment I thought of but one thing—the misery of one woman if her brother should not have a chance to run for his life.”
Hobart nodded. “I can follow you that far. But afterward, when you found he wasn’t going to run for it?”
“That was another matter. I was bitter, at first; I had given him his chance, I thought, and he was contemptible enough to deny me mine. But I had time enough to think then; to see that the object to be attained remained the same; to see what a sorry sham I was and had been. It broke me, Ned; and while I was down I made a clean sweep of it. I hadn’t killed James Harding, as it happened, but under other conditions I might have killed him—should have killed him, I said. In which case the judge and jury couldn’t err greatly in hanging me.”
Hobart heard him through, but at the summing up he scoffed openly. “That is the baldest sophistry, George, and you know it,” he asserted.
Brant smiled. “Perhaps it is; but you must remember that I loved the woman. I meant never to speak of this to any one, Ned; none the less, I am glad you have made me speak of it to you.”
“Why?”
“Because if you can’t understand it, nobody else ever will. Shall we bury it and talk about something else?”
“It is dead and buried from this time on,” rejoined Hobart loyally. “But you are wrong when you say that I don’t understand. It is precisely because I do understand all you’ve admitted, and a lot more besides, that I am willing to give you all the rope you want. When a man makes seventeen different kinds of a knight-errant of himself in this cold-blooded age, he earns privileges that we ordinary mortals are bound to respect. This is my last word. Now, then, what are you going to do with yourself?”