“Father, I like him very much. Very soon I should love him, if—if he loved me.”
“Now, Pell, you hear that!”
“Beyond all doubt I do,” said Octave, whose dryness never deserted him in the heaviest rain of tears; “and it is the very best thing for me I have heard in all my life.”
Bull Garnet looked from one to the other, with the rally of his life come hot, and a depth of joyful sadness. Yet must he go a little further, because he had always been a tyrant till people understood him.
“Do you want to know how much money, sir, I intend to leave her, when I die to–night or to–morrow morning?”
Cut–and–dry Pell was taken aback. A thoroughly upright and noble fellow, but of wholly different and less rugged road of thought. Meanwhile Pearl had slipped away; it was more than she could bear, and she was so sorry for Octavius. Then Pell up and spake bravely:
“Sir, I would be loth to think of you, my dear oneʼs father, as anything but a gentleman; a strange one, perhaps, but a true one. And so I trust you have only put such a question to me in irony.”
“Pell, there is good stuff in you. I know a man by this time. What would you think of finding your dear oneʼs father a murderer?”
Octavius Pell was not altogether used to this sort of thing. He turned away with some doubt whether Pearl would be a desirable mother of children (for he, after all, was a practical man), and hereditary insanity—— Then he turned back, remembering that all mankind are mad. Meanwhile Bull Garnet watched him, with extraordinary wrinkles, and a savage sort of pleasure. He felt himself outside the world, and looking at the stitches of it. But he would not say a word. He had always been a bully, and he meant to keep it up.
“Sir,” said Octave Pell, at last, “you are the very oddest man I ever saw in all my life.”