"The savage is at least sincere," replied his companion. "The want of sincerity is the great and crowning vice of all this portion of the globe. Cruel the wild hunters may be, but are they more cruel than the people here? Which is the worst torment, a few hours' agony at the stake, singing the war-song, all ended by a blow of a hatchet, or long years of mental torture, when every scorn and contumely, every bitter injustice, every cruel bereavement that man can inflict or suffer, is piled upon your head, till the load becomes intolerable. Then, too, it is done in a smooth and smiling guise. The civilized fiend looks softly upon you while he wounds you to the heart--makes a pretext of law, and justice, and equity--would have you fancy him a soft good man, while there is no act of malevolence and iniquity that he does not practise. The savage is true, at all events. The man who fractured my skull with a blow of his tomahawk, made no pretence of friendship or of right. He did it boldly, as an act customary with his people, and would have led me to the stake and danced with joy to see me suffering, had I not been rescued. He was sincere at least: but how would the Englishman have served me? He would have wrung my heart with pangs insupportable, and all the time have talked of his great grief to afflict me, of the necessity of the case, of justice being on his side, and of a thousand other vain and idle pretexts, but aggravating the act by mocking me with a show of generosity."
"I fear my excellent friend that you have at some time suffered sadly from man's baseness," said Osborn; "but yet I think you are wrong to let the memory thereof affect you thus. I, too, have suffered, and perhaps shall have to suffer more; but yet I would not part with the best blessings God has given to man, as you have done, for any other good."
"What have I parted with that I could keep?" asked the other, sharply: "what blessings? I know of none!"
"Trust--confidence," replied his young companion. "I know you will say that they have been taken from you; that you have not thrown them away, that you have been robbed of them. But have you not parted with them too easily? Have you not yielded at once, without a struggle to retain what I still call the best blessings of God? There are many villains in the world--I know it but too well; there are many knaves. There are still more cold and selfish egotists, who, without committing actual crimes or injuring others, do good to none; but there are also many true and upright hearts, many just, noble, and generous men; and were it a delusion to think so, I would try to retain it still."
"And suffer for it in the hour of need, in the moment of the deepest confidence," answered Warde. "If you must have confidence, place it in the humble and the low, in the rudest and least civilized--ay, in the very outcasts of society--rather than in the polished and the courtly, the great and high. I would rather trust my life, or my purse, to the honour of the common robber, and to his generosity, than to the very gentlemanly man of fashion and high station. Now, if, as you say, you have not come down hither for old associations, you must be sent to hunt down honester men than those who sent you--men who break boldly through an unjust and barbarous system, which denies to our land the goods of another, and who, knowing that the very knaves who devised that system, did it but to enrich themselves, stop with a strong hand a part of the plunder on the way--or, rather, insist at the peril of their lives, on man's inherent right to trade with his neighbours, and frustrate the roguish devices of those who would forbid to our land the use of that produced by another."
Osborn smiled at his companion's defence of smuggling, but replied, "I can conceive a thousand reasons, my good friend, why the trade in certain things should be totally prohibited, and a high duty for the interests of the state be placed on others. But I am not going to argue with you on all our institutions; merely this I will say, that when we entrust to certain men the power of making laws, we are bound to obey those laws when they are made; and it were but candid and just to suppose that those who had made them, after long deliberation, did so for the general good of the whole."
"For their own villanous ends," answered Warde--"for their own selfish interests. The good of the whole!--what is it in the eyes of any of these law-givers but the good of a party?"
"But do you not think," asked the young officer, "that we ourselves, who are not law-givers, judge their actions but too often under the influence of the very motives we attribute to them? Has party no share in our own bosoms? Has selfishness--have views of our own interests, in opposition either to the interests of others or the general weal, no part in the judgment that we form? Each man carps at that which suits him not, and strives to change it, without the slightest care whether, in so doing, he be not bringing ruin on the heads of thousands. But as to what you said just now of my being sent hither to hunt down the smuggler, such is not the case. I am sent to lend my aid to the civil power when called upon to do so--but nothing more; and we all know that the civil power has proved quite ineffective in stopping a system, which began by violation of a fiscal law, and has gone on to outrages the most brutal, and the most daring. I shall not step beyond the line of my duty, my good friend; and I will admit that many of these very misguided men themselves, who are carrying on an illegal traffic in this daring manner, fancy themselves justified by such arguments as you have just now used--nay, more, I do believe that there are some men amongst them of high and noble feelings, who never dream that they are dishonest in breaking a law that they dislike. But if we break one law thus, why should we keep any?--why not add robbery and murder if it suits us?
"Ay, there are high minded and noble men amongst them," answered Warde, not seeming to heed the latter part of what his companion said, "and there stands one of them. He has evil in him doubtless; for he is a man and an Englishman; but I have found none here who has less, and many who have more. Yet were that man taken in pursuing his occupation, they would imprison, exile, perhaps hang him, while a multitude of knaves in gilded coats, would be suffered to go on committing every sin, and almost every crime, unpunished--a good man, an excellent man, and yet a smuggler."
The young officer knew it was in vain to reason with him, for in the frequent intercourse they had held together, he had perceived that, with many generous and noble feelings, with a pure heart, and almost ascetic severity of life, there was a certain perversity in the course of Mr. Warde's thoughts, which rendered it impossible to turn them from the direction which they naturally took. It seemed as if by long habit they had channelled for themselves so deep a bed, that they could never be diverted thence; and consequently, without replying at first, he merely turned his eyes in the direction which the other pointed out, trying to catch sight of the person of whom he spoke. They were now on the low sandy shore which runs along between the town of Hythe and the beautiful little watering place of Sandgate. But it must be recollected, that at the time I speak of, the latter place displayed no ornamental villas, no gardens full of flowers, almost touching on the sea, and consisted merely of a few fishermen's, or rather smuggler's, huts, with one little public house, and a low-browed shop, filled with all the necessities that the inhabitants might require. Thus nothing like the mass of buildings which the watering place now can boast, lay between them and the Folkestone cliffs; and the whole line of the coast, except at one point, where the roof of a house intercepted the view, was open before Osborn's eyes; yet neither upon the shore itself, nor upon the green upland, which was broken by rocks and bushes, and covered by thick dry grass, could he perceive anything resembling a human form. A minute after, however, he thought he saw something move against the rugged background, and the next moment, the head and shoulders of a man rising over the edge of the hill caught his eyes, and as his companion walked forward in silence, he inquired,