“Make a noise, if nothing else,” opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and absorbing card game. “Noise, noise, my friend,” he went on forcibly; “confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more than the governor does. But with the governor there's something else besides. He can't stand them at all.”
He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to the root of the matter.
“I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me. Brandy—pah!”
He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of that—that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing between the thief and the retribution.
“That's so, old buck.” Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. “I don't think this trick will work.”
“But that's silly,” whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating idiosyncrasy.
“Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman.” Ricardo without anger administered a moody rebuke. “Even I can't understand the governor thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don't think I care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.”
Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our passions, can appear at a supreme moment.
“It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no—”
“The petticoat's the trouble,” Ricardo struck in.