“I fear,” said Paul, “it must have been very inconvenient for you coming here. I am sorry, very sorry, you have taken so much trouble. I should have gone to you, but my mind has been in a whirl; the whole thing looks to me like a dream.”
“It is a dream that has given some of your friends a great deal of trouble. Take care, my good fellow, another time how you fall into dreams like this. It is best to take a little more trouble at the beginning to know your own mind,” he said slowly, tugging at his pocket. “But after all you came to yourself before there was any harm done, Markham. If it had happened in the middle of the ocean, or when we had got to our destination, it would have been still more awkward. As it was, it has been possible to recover your property,” said Spears, at last producing a packet out of its receptacle with a certain glow of suppressed disdain in his countenance. He got out a little bag of money as he spoke, and laid it on the table, then produced his pocket-book, which he opened, and took something out.
“What does this mean, Spears?”
“It means what is very simple, Paul—mere A B C work, as you should know. It is the amount of your subscriptions—what you have contributed in one way or another. I won’t trouble you with the items,” he said; “they are all on a piece of paper with the bank notes. And now here is the whole affair over,” said Spears with the motion of snapping his fingers, “and no harm done. Few young men are able to say as much of their vagaries. Perhaps if you had involved yourself with a higher class, with people more like yourself, it might not have been equally easy to get away.”
“But this is impossible! this cannot be!” cried Paul. “I intended nothing of the kind. Spears, you humble me to the dust. You must not—it is not possible that I can accept this. I intended—I made sure——”
“You meant to leave us yourself, but to let your money go as alms to the revolutionaries?” cried Spears, with a thrill of agitation in his voice which seemed to make the room ring. “Yes, I suppose you might have fallen among people who would have permitted it. (The strange thing was that most of the members of the society had been of this opinion, and that it was all that Spears could do to rescue the money which the others thought lawfully forfeited.) But we are not of that kind. We don’t want filthy money with the man away, or even with his heart away.”
The orator held his head high; there was a certain scorn about his gestures, about his mouth. He tried to show by a careless smile and air that what he was doing was of no importance, an easy and certain step of which there could be no doubt; but the thrill of excited feeling in him could not be got out of his voice. And Paul, perhaps, had even more excuse for excitement.
“I will not take a farthing of the money,” he said.
“Then you will carry it back yourself, my lad. I have washed my hands of it. If you think I will permit a penny of yours to go into our treasury apart from yourself and your sympathy and your help! I would have taken all that and welcome. I have told you already—to little use—what you were to me, Paul Markham. The Bible is right after all about idols, though many is the word I’ve spoken against it. I made an idol of you, and lo! my image is broken into a thousand pieces. It is like giving the thing a kick the more,” he said, with a sudden burst of harsh laughter, “to think when it was all over and ended that I would take the money! It shows how much you knew me.”
“Then it is a mere matter of personal offence and disappointment, Spears?”