"Incredible! By Jove!" she heard Sir Charles' voice, awed and admiring. "I told you, Steele, when you were about to begin, that we people of the antipodes take a man for what he is, not for what he was. But I am glad to have had your confidence and--and--tell me, how did you happen to light on the law, for special study and preparation?"
"You forget that about half your superb library was law-books, Sir Charles. A most comprehensive collection!"
"So they were! But you must have had wonderful aptitude."
"The law--the ramifications it creates for the many, the attendant restraints for the individual--I confess interested me. You can imagine a personal reason or--an abstract one. From the lonely perspective of a tiny coral isle, a system, or systems,--codes of conduct, or morals, built up for the swarming millions, so to speak!--could not but possess fascination for one to whom those millions had become only as the far-away shadows of a dream. You will find a few of those books, minus fly-leaf and book-plate, it shames me to say!--still in my library, and--"
"Bless you; you're welcome to them," hastily. "No wonder that day in my library you spoke as you did about books. 'Gad! it's wonderful! But you say at first you could hardly read? Your life, then, as a boy--pardon me; it's not mere idle curiosity."
"As a boy!" John Steele repeated the words almost mechanically. "My parents died when I was a child; they came of good stock--New England." He uttered the last part of the sentence involuntarily; stopped. "I was bound out, was beaten. I fought, ran away. In lumber camps, the drunken riffraff cursed the new scrub boy; on the Mississippi, the sailors and stevedores kicked him because the mate kicked them. Everywhere it was the same; the boy learned only one thing, to fight. Fight, or be beaten! On the plains, in the mountains, before the fo'castle, it was the same. Fight, or--" he broke off. "It was not a boyhood; it was a contention."
"I believe you." Sir Charles' accents were half-musing. "And if you will pardon me, I'll stake a good deal that you fought straight." He paused. "But to go back to your isle, your magic isle, if you please. You were rescued, and then?"
"In a worldly sense, I prospered; in New Zealand, in Tasmania. Fate, as if to atone for having delayed her favors, now lavished them freely; work became easy; a mine or two that I was lucky enough to locate, yielded, and continues to yield, unexpected returns. Without especially desiring riches, I found myself more than well-to-do."
"And then having fairly, through your own efforts, won a place in the world, having conquered fortune, why did you return to England knowing the risk, that some one of these fellows like Gillett, the police agent, might--"
"Why," said John Steele, "because I wished to sift, to get to the very bottom of this crime for which I was convicted. For all real wrong-doing--resisting officers of the law--offenses against officialdom--I had paid the penalty, in full, I believe. But this other matter--that was different. It weighed on me through those years on the island and afterward. A jury had convicted me wrongfully; but I had to prove it; to satisfy myself, to find out beyond any shadow of a doubt, and--"