“You have certainly committed a grave fault here, my friend,” he said, “and one that is seldom forgiven in Leaplow—perhaps I might say never, during the occultation of the great moral postulate, as happens to be the case at present.”
“Tell me my sins at once, brigadier,” cried Noah, with the look of a martyr, “and put me out of pain.”
“You have forgotten to display a motive for your stand during the late hot discussion; and, as a matter of course, the community ascribes the worst that monikin ingenuity can devise. Such an oversight would ruin even a God-like!”
“But, my dear Mr. Downright,” I kindly interposed, “our colleague, in this instance, is supposed to have acted on principle.”
The brigadier looked up, turning his nose into the air, like a pup that has not yet opened its eyes, and then intimated that he could not see the quality I had named, it being obscured by the passage of the orb of Pecuniary Interest before its disc. I now began to comprehend the case, which really was much more grave than, at first, I could have believed possible. Noah himself seemed staggered; for, I believe, he had fallen on the simple and natural expedient of inquiring what he himself would have thought of the conduct of a colleague who had given a vote on a subject so weighty, without exposing a motive.
“Had the captain owned but a foot square of earth, at the end of the causeway,” observed the brigadier, mournfully, “the matter might be cleared up; but as things are, it is beyond dispute, a most unfortunate occurrence.”
“But Sir John voted with me, and he is no more a free-holder in Leaplow, than I am myself.”
“True; but Sir John voted with the bulk of his political friends.”
“All the Horizontals were not in the majority; for at least twenty went, on this occasion, with the minority.”
“Undeniable—yet every monikin of them had a visible motive. This owned a lot by the wayside; that had houses on the island, and another was the heir of a great proprietor at the same point of the road. Each and all had their distinct and positive interests at stake, and not one of them was guilty of so great a weakness as to leave his cause to be defended by the extravagant pretension of mere principle!”