Behind them rode the trooper with a mingled air of inflexible determination and successful daring. The Captain marched in front with his manacled hands almost disguised by his careless walk, remarking calmly on the appearance of the town, which he criticised freely, also the leading inhabitants. By his side, burning with rage and mortification, walked Ernest, feeling very like a galley slave, and wondering whether there was any possibility, in this strange land, of being sentenced mistakenly to a term of imprisonment. Thus feeling for the first time a keen sensation of distrust for his own obstinate predilections, coupled with an awakening respect for the opinion of others, the time passed in varieties of mental torture, till they arrived at the lock-up, a strong wooden building, into a small room of which they were unceremoniously bundled, while a heavy bolt closed behind them.
‘I really am extremely sorry, sir,’ quoth the Captain, after they were left to themselves, ‘to have brought you into this highly unpleasant position. But circumstances, my lifelong enemies, were too strong for me; and for you, too,’ he added reflectively.
Mr. Neuchamp was not a vain man, though proud; above everything he was a philosophical experimentalist. Under any given position he could soon have ceased to struggle and rage, and have commenced to analyse, theorise, and deduce.
‘I ought to be so justly enraged with you,’ he replied, ‘that any apologies would only arouse contempt. You have deceived me, it appears, with a view to rob me of my money, and you have been instrumental in causing, for the first time in my life, the loss of my liberty. But I will confine myself for the present to asking, in all seriousness, why you, a man of culture and mental endowments, having enjoyed the advantages of travel and refined society, should voluntarily have lowered yourself to your present surroundings by a course of vulgar and short-sighted criminality?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you the real naked truth, as far as I know it when I see it,’ said the Captain, cutting off a solid piece of negrohead tobacco and putting it into his mouth. ’I have had an immense quantity of what the world calls advantages, there’s no denying, and yet they would have been all well exchanged for one simple bit of luck, which I did not happen to possess—that of being born honest! That, I distinctly state and affirm, I was not. Whatever the reason is, I was always an infernal rogue from the time I could write myself man, and long before. Whether the faculty of passionate and sensuous enjoyment was intensified in my idiosyncracy, while at the same time my reasoning powers were feeble and my conscientiousness absolutely nil—I can’t say. The fact, unde derivata, remained (and a fait générateur, as the French say, it was), when I wanted anything it always occurred to me with restless force, that the shortest, most natural, and obvious way to possession was to steal, take, and unlawfully carry away the same. I should have made a famous king; in him annexation is a virtue of the highest order. As a general, could I have overleaped the earlier grades, I should have gone amid shouting thousands to an honoured grave, for I am cool and cheerful in danger, and a demon when my slow blood is fairly up. But as the son of an eminent clergyman, as a mere unit in refined society, my sphere was wretchedly circumscribed. Society became my foe, my fatal foe. Young man, if you hurl yourself upon society, she laughs at the superincumbent hostile weight. If she merely reclines upon you, moral asphyxia results. I have, mind, cast away home, friends, love, honour, position. If I hadn’t such an infernally good constitution, death would have long ago squared the account. I am sorry when I think of it. But present troubles once over—“Libem, libem!”’
Here he broke forth into the great drinking song, which he trolled out until the massive timbers of the building echoed.
‘And your intention, as far as I was concerned?’ asked Ernest, unable to refrain a certain toleration for the ‘larcenous epicurean.’
‘Well, I couldn’t resist trying to appropriate your hundred pounds. You threw it at a fellow’s head, as it were. It was partly your own fault.’
‘My own fault,’ echoed Ernest, in astonishment, ‘and why, may I ask?’
‘When people are very very imprudent, they, as the Methodists phrase it, “put temptation in the way” of other folks, not afflicted, let us say, with severe morals. Now why don’t you ride a decent horse when you’re travelling, like a gentleman?’