“Perhaps you know best what their motives are. I see no use in canvassing them. You have heard, I suppose, the rumour that Mr. Cradock Nowell has left England?”
“I know very little about it. I have nothing to do with the case; or it might have been managed differently. But I heard that the civil authorities, being called upon to act, discovered, without much trouble, that he had sailed, under a false name, in a ship called the Taprobane, bound direct for Ceylon. And that, of course, told against him rather heavily.”
“Ah, he sailed for Ceylon, did he? A wonderful place for insects. I had an uncle who died there.”
“Yes, Ceylon, where the flying foxes are. Not so cunning, perhaps, as our foxes of the Forest. And yet the fox is a passionate animal. Violent, hot, and hasty. Were you aware of that fact?”
“Excuse me; my time is valuable. I will send for the gamekeeper, if you wish to have light thrown upon that question; or my son will be only too glad——”
“Ah, your son! Poor fellow!”
Those few short words, pronounced in a tone of real feeling, with no attempt at inquiry, quite overcame Bull Garnet. First extrinsic proof of that which he had so long foreseen with horror—the degradation of his son. He dropped his eyes, which had borne, till now, and returned the lawyerʼs gaze; and the sense of his own peril failed to keep the tears from moving. Up to this time Mr. Chope had doubted, and was even beginning to reject his shrewd and well–founded conclusion. Now he saw and knew everything. And even he was overcome. Passion is infectious; and lawyers are like the rest of us. Mr. Chope had loved his mother.
Bull Garnet gave one quick strange glance at the eyes of Simon Chope, which now were turned away from him, and then he looked at the ground, and said,
“Yes; I have wronged him bitterly.”
Simon Chope drew back from him mechanically, instinctively, as our skin starts from cold iron in the arctic regions. He could not think, much less could he speak, though his mind had been prepared for it. To human nature it is so abhorrent to take the life of another: to usurp the rights of God. To stand in the presence of one who has done it, touches our pulse with death. We feel that he might have done it to us, or that we might have done it to him; and our love of ourselves is at once accelerated and staggered. And then we feel that “life for life” is such low revenge; the vendetta of a drunkard. Very slowly we are beginning to see the baseness of it.