“Ah,” said Farquhar, “now I understand why you understood.”
He altered his pose slightly, relaxing as though freed from some slight, omnipresent constraint; the nature which confronted Lucian was different in gross and in detail from the mask of excellence which he had hitherto kept on. Vices were there, and virtues unsuspected: coarse, barbaric, potent qualities, dominated by a will-power mightier than they. Race-characteristics, hitherto overlaid, suddenly started out; and Lucian, recurring quickly to the last fresh lie which Farquhar had told him, exclaimed, “Why, man, you’re a Russian yourself!”
“Half-breed. My mother was Russian. My father was Scotch, but a naturalized Russian subject. The worse for him; he died in the mines. Confound him: a pretty ancestry he’s given me, and a pretty job I’ve had to keep the story out of the papers. I’ve done it, though.”
“But what’s it for?” asked Lucian, whose mind was flying to the story of Jekyll and Hyde.
“Respectability; that’s the god of England. Do you think I could confess myself the son of a couple of dirty Russian nihilists and keep my position? Not much. It’s the only crevice in my armour. Scores of men have tried to get on by shamming virtuous, but I’ve gone one better than they; I am virtuous. You can’t pick a hole in my character, because there’s none to pick. I speak the truth, I do my duty, I’m honest and honourable down to the end of the whole fool’s catalogue, I even go out of my way to be chivalrously charitable, as when I picked you up, or made a fool of myself over that confounded copper. That’s all the political muck-worms find when they come burrowing about me. Yes, honesty’s the best policy; it pays.”
“H’m! well, my most honourable friend, you’d find yourself in Queer Street if I related how you’d read my letter.”
“Not in the least. I was glancing at it to find your address.”
“You took a mighty long time over your glance.”
“The paper was so much rubbed that I could hardly see where it began or ended.”
“There was the monogram for a sign-post.”