The sight of his brother’s gaunt figure, every line of which he knew and loved so well, turned his conscience to adamant. Sinking into the depths of his soul, as a diver might sink into an ice-cold sea, he felt that there was literally nothing he would not do, if his dear Daddy James could be restored to sanity and happiness.
Gladys? He would walk over the bodies of a hundred Gladyses, if that way, and that alone, led to his brother’s restoration!
“What then?” he repeated, turning a bleak but resolute face upon Mr. Taxater.
The theologian continued: “Why, it remains for you, or for someone deputed by you, to reveal to our unsuspecting American exactly how his betrothed has betrayed him. I have no doubt that in the disturbance this will cause him we shall have no difficulty in securing his aid in this other matter. It would be a natural, an inevitable revenge for him to take. Himself a victim of these Romers, what more appropriate, what more suitable, than that he should help us in liberating their other victims? If he is as wealthy as you say, it would be a mere bagatelle for him to set our good Quincunx upon his feet forever, and Lacrima with him! It is the kind of thing it would naturally occur to him to do. It would be a revenge; but a noble revenge. He would leave Nevilton then, feeling that he had left his mark; that he had made himself felt. Americans like to make themselves felt.”
Luke’s countenance, in spite of his interior acquiescence, stiffened into a haggard mask of dismay.
“But this is beyond anything one has ever heard of!” he protested, trying in vain to assume an air of levity. “It is beyond everything. Actually to convey, to the very man one’s girl is going to marry, the news of her seduction! Actually to ‘coin her for drachmas,’ as it says somewhere! It’s a monstrous thing, an incredible thing!”
“Not a bit more monstrous than your original sin in seducing the girl,” said Mr. Taxater.
“That is the usual trick,” he went on sternly, “of you English people! You snatch at your little pleasures, without any scruple, and feel yourselves quite honourable. And then, directly it becomes a question of paying for them, by any form of public confession, you become fastidiously scrupulous.”