Ricordo laughed quietly.
"Right, wrong. They are a part of the stock-in-trade of your moralists. Let a man go through what Leicester has gone, my friend, and even if he had a little respect for it before, it would all be crushed out of him. Why, man, Radford Leicester has lived the life of a slave in Morocco, and away out in the great desert he has herded with wild beasts in the shape of men. He has seen the religion of the Christian and the Mohammedan and the Hindoo tested; he knows what it means. Do you think, after going through what he has gone, that your tawdry rag-tags of morality will have any weight with him? No, no; to hate is as natural as to love; and if love is right, so is hate."
"But, I say, old man——"
"Yes, go on."
"To put it in plain words, what you mean is this. When you realised that—that she—had cast you off—your love turned to hatred; that you played a grim joke on the world by making every one believe you were dead; that for six years you have brooded over what you believe to be your wrongs, nursing revenge all the time, and that you have come back to—to have, well, your revenge on the woman whom you once loved. Is that it?"
"It sounds melodramatic, eh? Just like a bit taken out of one of the old Adelphi melodramas. We used to laugh at them, didn't we, when we heard the pit and the gallery hissing the villain and cheering the hero. But even in those days I sympathised with the villain."
"But you don't mean that?"
"Why not?"
"It would not be right."
"Right! And even according to your smug morality, is it right for her to thrust a man where she thrust Leicester, to make him suffer the torments which he has suffered, and then to allow her to go unpunished?"