“I would pity him,” said the cosmopolitan, a little bluntly, perhaps.
“But don’t you think,” rejoined the other, still maintaining his passionless air, “don’t you think, that for a man to pity where nature is pitiless, is a little presuming?”
“Let casuists decide the casuistry, but the compassion the heart decides for itself. But, sir,” deepening in seriousness, “as I now for the first realize, you but a moment since introduced the word irresponsible in a way I am not used to. Now, sir, though, out of a tolerant spirit, as I hope, I try my best never to be frightened at any speculation, so long as it is pursued in honesty, yet, for once, I must acknowledge that you do really, in the point cited, cause me uneasiness; because a proper view of the universe, that view which is suited to breed a proper confidence, teaches, if I err not, that since all things are justly presided over, not very many living agents but must be some way accountable.”
“Is a rattle-snake accountable?” asked the stranger with such a preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of his pellucid blue eye, that he seemed more a metaphysical merman than a feeling man; “is a rattle-snake accountable?”
“If I will not affirm that it is,” returned the other, with the caution of no inexperienced thinker, “neither will I deny it. But if we suppose it so, I need not say that such accountability is neither to you, nor me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior.”
He was proceeding, when the stranger would have interrupted him; but as reading his argument in his eye, the cosmopolitan, without waiting for it to be put into words, at once spoke to it: “You object to my supposition, for but such it is, that the rattle-snake’s accountability is not by nature manifest; but might not much the same thing be urged against man’s? A reductio ad absurdum, proving the objection vain. But if now,” he continued, “you consider what capacity for mischief there is in a rattle-snake (observe, I do not charge it with being mischievous, I but say it has the capacity), could you well avoid admitting that that would be no symmetrical view of the universe which should maintain that, while to man it is forbidden to kill, without judicial cause, his fellow, yet the rattle-snake has an implied permit of unaccountability to murder any creature it takes capricious umbrage at—man included?—But,” with a wearied air, “this is no genial talk; at least it is not so to me. Zeal at unawares embarked me in it. I regret it. Pray, sit down, and take some of this wine.”
“Your suggestions are new to me,” said the other, with a kind of condescending appreciativeness, as of one who, out of devotion to knowledge, disdains not to appropriate the least crumb of it, even from a pauper’s board; “and, as I am a very Athenian in hailing a new thought, I cannot consent to let it drop so abruptly. Now, the rattle-snake——”
“Nothing more about rattle-snakes, I beseech,” in distress; “I must positively decline to reenter upon that subject. Sit down, sir, I beg, and take some of this wine.”
“To invite me to sit down with you is hospitable,” collectedly acquiescing now in the change of topics; “and hospitality being fabled to be of oriental origin, and forming, as it does, the subject of a pleasing Arabian romance, as well as being a very romantic thing in itself—hence I always hear the expressions of hospitality with pleasure. But, as for the wine, my regard for that beverage is so extreme, and I am so fearful of letting it sate me, that I keep my love for it in the lasting condition of an untried abstraction. Briefly, I quaff immense draughts of wine from the page of Hafiz, but wine from a cup I seldom as much as sip.”
The cosmopolitan turned a mild glance upon the speaker, who, now occupying the chair opposite him, sat there purely and coldly radiant as a prism. It seemed as if one could almost hear him vitreously chime and ring. That moment a waiter passed, whom, arresting with a sign, the cosmopolitan bid go bring a goblet of ice-water. “Ice it well, waiter,” said he; “and now,” turning to the stranger, “will you, if you please, give me your reason for the warning words you first addressed to me?”