Charlotte smilingly laid a finger upon her lips, glancing in the direction of the Commissioner. “I think it’s loot,” she said.
“And I know this is,” the Judge remarked, standing in front of the desk. “I remember hearing Collingwood say he was in the Chinese affair in 1900. Why wasn’t it my fate to be there too? It’s all very well to talk about our superior civilization, but there is something in the mere thought of looting treasures like these to make the mouth water.”
“Martin did not loot these. Mr. Kingsnorth did. He gave them to me for a wedding present.”
“Lucky dog! either to loot or to give.”
“I am ashamed to confess,” Charlotte admitted, twitching a tablecloth into better place as a servant laid it, “that I am getting dreadfully mixed upon matters of right and wrong. When I came out here, my principles were simple as day. There wasn’t any doubt how I regarded looters and people who would accept looted goods. I should as soon have accepted a stolen ham. And here am I, the possessor of various pieces of looted furniture, brazenly rejoicing in them, and all the more because they were looted. I am degenerating hour by hour.” She shook her head plaintively as she put a massive brass candlestick of old Chinese design into its place.
Judge Barton, leaning against the open casement, his two hands braced behind on the sill, stood a picture of smiling content as he studied her. His natural magnetism fairly radiated from him in his benignant mood. His wealth of grizzling hair, his large-featured, intellectual face, and one or two lines that bespoke the brute strength and will of the man, made him look like some roughly but powerfully sketched figure. His clothes were always fashionably cut and he wore them well, but the sense of the well formed muscular-body beneath them always dominated their lines. As he stood beaming upon her, it would have taken a stronger-minded woman than Mrs. Collingwood to weigh impartially the balanced charms of the powerful intellect and of the powerful animal in the man. She relaxed her old suspicious guard, which had revived for an instant when he followed her into the house, so clearly bent upon a tête-à-tête. Without the faintest suggestion of sentimental intimacy, they were encased in an atmosphere of congenial interest. An onlooker would have pronounced them a pair of reunited chums.
“I am dying to say something,” said the Judge in response to her lament over her decaying morals, “but I don’t dare.”
“Why?”
“You know why very well. ‘I’m skeered o’ you.’” He threw a fine negro accent into the negro phrase.
“Is it something so impertinent?”