Dorothy's lips quivered, but she said nothing. It seemed that she was content to accept his judgment without comment as superior to her own. For the wisest woman is she who suspects that men are wiser.
“It is quite clear,” said Cornish, “that the Malgamite scheme is a fraud. It is worse than that; it is a murderous fraud. For Von Holzen's new system of making malgamite is not new at all, but an old system revived, which was set aside many years ago as too deadly. If it is not this identical system, it is a variation of it. They are producing the stuff for almost nothing at the cost of men's lives. In plain English, it is murder, and it must be stopped at any cost. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“I must stop it whatever it may cost me.”
“Yes,” she answered again.
“I am going to the works to-night to have it out with Von Holzen and your brother. It is impossible to say how matters really stand—how much your brother knows, I mean—for Von Holzen is clever. He is a cold, calculating man, who rules all who come near him. Your brother has only to do with the money part of it. They are making a great fortune. I am told that financially it is splendidly managed. I am a duffer at such things, but I understand better now how it has all been done, and I see how clever it is. They produce the stuff for almost nothing, they sell it at a great price, and they have a monopoly. And the world thinks it is a charity. It is not; it is murder.”
He spoke quietly, tapping the ground with his stick, and emphasizing his words with a deeper thrust into the sand. The habit of touching life lightly had become second nature with him, and even now he did not seem quite serious. He was, at all events, free from that deadly earnestness which blinds the eye to all save one side of a question. The very soil that he tapped could have risen up to speak in favour of such as he; for William the Silent, it is said, loved a jest, and never seemed to be quite serious during the long years of the greatest struggle the modern world has seen.
“It seems probable,” went on Cornish, “that your brother has been gradually drawn into it; that he did not know when he first joined Von Holzen what the thing really was—the system of manufacture, I mean. As for the financial side of it, I am afraid he must have known of that all along; but the older one gets the less desirous one is of judging one's neighbour. In financial matters so much seems to depend, in the formation of a judgment, whether one is a loser or a gainer by the transaction. There is a great fortune in malgamite, and a fortune is a temptation to be avoided. Others besides your brother have been tempted. I should probably have succumbed myself if it had not been—for you.”
She smiled again in a sort of derision; as if she could have told him more about himself than he could tell her. He saw the smile, and it brought a flash of light to his eyes. Deeper than fear of damnation, higher than the creeds, stronger than any motive in a man's life, is the absolute confidence placed in him by a woman.
“I went into the thing thoughtlessly,” he continued, “because it was the fashion at the time to be concerned in some large charity. And I am not sorry. It was the luckiest move I ever made. And now the thing will have to be gone through with, and there will be trouble.”