Brought face to face with the situation as it affected his fortune and misfortune, Hunter must have had a very bad half an hour. I am sure he had not dreamed of such a contretemps, and he must have been startled and amazed by the cold calculation and the raw fury of passion he had to deal with. I do not think he relished his task. His was the sort of conscience that would dislike such a course, not because it was dishonorable or immoral in itself, but because its details offended his fastidiousness. I think he would have extricated himself honorably if he could. It just happened that he couldn't.
Give a sufficient shock to a man's pocket-nerve and you electrify his brain-cells, which automatically receive orders to work overtime. Hunter's brain worked then because it had to, self-preservation being the first law of nature. And this service for Inglesby not only spelt safety; it meant the golden key to the heights, the power to gratify those fine tastes which only a rich and able man can afford. Inglesby had promised that, and he had just had a fair example of what Inglesby's support meant.
One must try to consider the case from Mr. Hunter's point of view. To refuse Inglesby meant disaster. And who was Laurence, who was Mary Virginia, that he should quixotically wreck his prospects for them? Why should he lose Inglesby's goodwill or gain Inglesby's enmity for them or anybody else? Forced to choose, Hunter made the only choice possible to him.
Voe victis!
CHAPTER XVII[ToC]
"—SAID THE SPIDER TO THE FLY—"
Now I am only an old priest and no businessman, so of course I do not know just how Hunter was set like a hound upon the track of those circumstances that, properly manipulated, helped him toward a solution of his problem—the getting of a girl apparently as unreachable as Mary Virginia Eustis.