So saying he left the room, and rapidly descended the stairs into the street.
No sooner had he gone than Gavrolles, who with assumed sang-froid had with difficulty concealed a savage ferocity, sprang wildly up, crossed the room, and took from a sideboard an oblong mahogany box, which he opened with a small key. Inside was a set of delicately finished duelling pistols, with cartridges to match.
And now, with eyes flashing, mouth foaming, all his body working in epileptiform rage, Gavrolles took up one of the weapons, and evoked an imaginary opponent in the air.
‘You would thrash me, you would profane me with a blow!’ he hissed aloud. ‘Ah, ruffian! bandit! devil! dog of an Englishman! if I had you before me—thus!—in my own country, I would put a bullet through your heart. Come again, with your bulldog face, and I shall be prepared!’
With these words the cosmic creature put the pistol back in its case, and proceeded to dress himself for his usual morning promenade.
Meanwhile Sutherland was pursuing his way along the streets, in a brown study—or shall we rather say a black one—as expressed in a face of the blackest gloom. So! His ideal heroine, the idol he had set up in his heart as a type of all-patient and suffering woman, was a guilty creature, one who, to entrap an honourable man, had represented herself as single, whereas she knew that her husband lived! It was scarcely credible, yet the tale, as he had said, seemed plausible enough, and the Frenchman seemed to have the courage of conviction.
A man less satisfied in his own mind of the superiority of the weaker sex over the stronger would doubtless have withdrawn from all interference in an affair so suspicious; but Sutherland, perhaps because he was a bachelor with very little practical experience of female baseness, took an optimistic view of womankind. He could scarcely conceive the idea of an utterly impure and wicked woman, though he had the strongest possible belief in the impurity and wickedness of men. He was thoroughly inexperienced, impartial, and ideal. Having decided in his own mind that women are the victims of a social conspiracy (a terrible social truth, although one which he lacked the worldly philosophy to formulate truly), he never hesitated for a moment to battle upon their side, with all the deep enthusiasm and moral pugnacity of his nature. So there is little occasion for wonder in the fact that the more he thought over the matter the deeper grew his conviction that Madeline was a martyr and Gavrolles an even blacker scoundrel than he had at first believed.