“Ay!” muttered the baronet: “all who would save them perish on the Cross!”
And so he sat nursing the devil.
By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to gaze at Ripton. That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny slept a dead sleep. A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him look absurdly piteous. The baronet remembered how often he had compared his boy with this one: his own bright boy! And where was the difference between them?
“Mere outward gilding!” said his familiar.
“Yes,” he responded, “I daresay this one never positively plotted to deceive his father: he followed his appetites unchecked, and is internally the sounder of the two.”
Ripton, with his sunken chin and snoring nose under the light of the lamp, stood for human nature, honest, however abject.
“Miss Random, I fear very much, is a necessary establishment!” whispered the monitor.
“Does the evil in us demand its natural food, or it corrupts the whole?” ejaculated Sir Austin. “And is no angel of avail till that is drawn off? And is that our conflict—to see whether we can escape the contagion of its embrace, and come uncorrupted out of that?”
“The world is wise in its way,” said the voice.
“Though it look on itself through Port wine?” he suggested, remembering his lawyer Thompson.