“Yes, but not the principal one. The principal one was Paul Muniment. Why wasn’t any communication made me through Paul Muniment?” And this now struck him as a question that would reverberate the more one thought of it.
“My dear Robinson, you want to know too many things. Depend on it there are always good reasons. I should have preferred—yes—it had been Muniment. But if they didn’t send to him——!” With which Schinkel’s lucidity dropped and lost itself in a thick cloud of smoke.
“Well, if they didn’t send to him——?” Hyacinth persisted.
“You’re a great friend of his—how can I tell you?”
At this Hyacinth looked up at him askance and caught an ambiguous, an evasive roll in his companion’s small, mild eye. “If it’s anything against him my being his friend makes me just the man to hear it. I can defend him.”
“Well, it’s a possibility they’re not satisfied.”
“How do you mean it—not satisfied?”
“How shall I say it?—that they don’t trust him.”
“Don’t trust him? And yet they trust me!”
“Ah my boy, depend upon it there are reasons,” Schinkel replied; and in a moment he added: “They know everything—everything. They’re like the great God of the believers: they’re searchers of hearts; and not only of hearts, but of all a man’s life—his days, his nights, his spoken, his unspoken words. Oh they go deep and they go straight!”