“Not the hypocrite, my lady, but Mr Scott here. He is only round a single corner. And one thing is—he believes in a God.”
“How do you make that out?”
“He means this Mr Tyrrel for a fine fellow, and on the whole approves of him—does he not, my lady?”
“Certainly.”
“Of course all that duelling is wrong. But then Mr Scott only half disapproves of it.—And it is almost a pity it is wrong,” remarked Malcolm with a laugh; “it is such an easy way of settling some difficult things. Yet I hate it. It’s so cowardly. I may be a better shot than the other, and know it all the time. He may know it too, and have twice my courage. And I may think him in the wrong, when he knows himself in the right.—There is one man I have felt as if I should like to kill. When I was a boy I killed the cats that ate my pigeons.”
A look of horror almost distorted Lady Clementina’s countenance.
“I don’t know what to say next, my lady,” he went on, with a smile, “because I have no way of telling whether you looked shocked for the cats I killed, or the pigeons they killed, or the man I would rather see killed than have him devour more of my—white doves,” he concluded sadly, with a little shake of the head.—“But, please God,” he resumed, “I shall manage to keep them from him, and let him live to be as old as Methuselah if he can, even if he should grow in cunning and wickedness all the time. I wonder how he will feel when he comes to see what a sneaking cat he is. But this is not what we set out for.—Mr Tyrrel, then, the author’s hero, joins the Moravians at last.”
“What are they?” questioned Clementina.
“Simple, good, practical Christians, I believe,” answered Malcolm.
“But he only does it when disappointed in love.”