“I don’t want to make a scene or work on your feelings, but how will you like it when I’m strung up on the gallows?”
“You mean for Hoffendahl’s job? That’s what you were alluding to just now?” Muniment lay there in the same position, chewing a long blade of dry grass which he held to his lips with his free hand.
“I didn’t mean to speak of it; but after all why shouldn’t it come up? Naturally I’ve thought of it a good deal.”
“What good does that do?” Muniment returned. “I hoped you didn’t—I noticed you never spoke of it. You don’t like it. You’d rather chuck it up,” he added.
There was not in his voice the faintest note of irony or contempt, no sign whatever that he passed judgement on such an attitude. He spoke in a quiet, human, memorising manner, as if it had originally quite entered into his thought to allow for weak regrets. Nevertheless the complete reasonableness of his tone itself cast a chill on Hyacinth’s spirit; it was like the touch of a hand at once very firm and very soft, yet strangely cold. “I don’t want in the least to repudiate business, but did you suppose I liked it?” our hero asked with rather a forced laugh.
“My dear fellow, how could I tell? You like a lot of things I don’t. You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations—whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”
“If you object, for yourself, to change, and are so fond of still waters, why have you associated yourself with a revolutionary movement?” Hyacinth demanded with a little air of making rather a good point.
“Just for that reason!” Paul blandly said. “Isn’t our revolutionary movement as quiet as the grave? Who knows, who suspects anything like the full extent of it?”
“I see. You take only the quiet parts!”
In speaking these words Hyacinth had had no derisive intention, but a moment later he flushed with the sense that they had a sufficiently low sound. Paul, however, appeared to see no offence in them, and it was in the gentlest, most suggestive way, as if he had been thinking over what might comfort his little mate, that he replied: “There’s one thing you ought to remember—that it’s quite on the cards the beastly call may never be made.”