His simple creed, "the good faith of a gentleman," forbade him to injure what lay defenceless at his mercy.
Ah! revile that old faith as you will, it has lasted longer than any other cultus; and whilst altars have reeled, and idols been shattered, and priests changed their teachings, and peoples altered their gods, the old faith has lasted through all; and the simple instinct of the Greek eupatrid and of the Roman patrician still moves the heart of the English gentleman—the instinct of Noblesse oblige.
"The exception proves the rule," runs your proverb; but why, I wonder, is it that you always only believe in the rule, and are always utterly sceptical as to the existence of the exception?
The sun shone in over the roofs; the bird in its cage began a low tremulous song; the murmur of all the crowded streets came up upon the silence; and Nellie lay there dead;—the light upon her curly hair, and on her mouth the smile that had come there at his touch.
"Ah, my dear!" said Fanfreluche, as she ceased her story, with a half-soft and half-sardonic sadness, "she was but a little, ignorant, common player, who made but three pounds a week, and who talked the slang of the streets, and who thought shrimps and tea a meal for the gods, and who made up her own dresses with her own hands, out of tinsel and tarlatanes and trumperies, and who knew no better than to follow the blind, dumb instincts of good that, self-sown and uncultured, lived in her—God knows how!—as the harebells, with the dew on them, will live amidst the rank, coarse grass of graveyards. She was but a poor little player, who tried to be honest where all was corruption, who tried to walk straightly where all ways were crooked. So she died to-day in a garret, my dear."
If all men in whose hearts lives a dull, abiding grief, whose throbs death and death only ever will still, deserted for desert or ocean your world of fame and of fashion, how strangely that world would look! How much eloquence would be dumb in your senatorial chambers; how many a smile would be missing from your ball-rooms and hunting-fields; how many a frank laugh would die off for ever from your ear; how many a well-known face would vanish from your clubs, from your park, from your dinner-tables, from your race-stands!