"Motives! I don't care anything about motives. The point is to do the right thing. I'm a good boy to come and visit them; you're a good boy to come and cure them. They are not a very grateful lot, I'm sorry to say, but we have nothing to do with that; we're put here to look after them, and what we feel about it, or what they feel about it, is not the question."
He had come into Caius' room, stamping the snow off his big boots. He was a spare, elderly man, with gray hair and bright eyes. His horse and sleigh stood without the door, and the horse jingled its bells continually.
Here was a friend! Caius decided at once to question this man concerning Madame Le Maître, and—that other lady in whose existence he believed.
"The main thing that you want on these islands is nerve," said the clergyman. "It would be no good at all now"—argumentatively—"for the Bishop to send a man here who hadn't nerve. You never know where you'll meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice. Chubby and I nearly went under this morning and never were seen again. Some of these fellows had been cutting a hole, and—well, we just saw it in time. It would have been the end of us, I can tell you; but then, you see, if you are being a good boy and doing what you're told, that does not matter so much."
It appeared that Chubby was the clergyman's pony. In a short time Caius had heard of various other adventures which she and her master had shared together. He was interested to know if any of them would throw any light upon the remarkable conduct of O'Shea and his friends; but they did not.
"The men about here," he said—"I can't make anything out of them—are they lawless?"
"You see"—in explanatory tone—"if you take a man and expose him to the sea and the wind for half his life, you'll find that he is pretty much asleep the other half. He may walk about with his eyes open, but his brain's pretty much asleep; he's just equal to lounging and smoking. There are just two things these men can do—fish, and gather the stuff from wrecks. They'll make from eight dollars a day at the fishing, and from sixteen to twenty when a wreck's in. They can afford to be idle the rest of the time, and they are gloriously idle."
"Do they ever gather in bands to rob wrecked ships, or for other unlawful purposes?"
"Oh no, not in the least! Oh no, nothing of the kind! They'll steal from a wreck, of course, if they get the chance; but on the sly, not by violence. Their worst sin is independence and self-righteousness. You can't teach the children anything in the schools, for instance, for the parents won't have them punished; they are quite sure that their children never do anything wrong. That comes of living so far out of the world, and getting their living so easily. I can tell you, Utopia has a bad effect on character."
Caius let the matter go for that time; he had the prospect of seeing the clergyman often.