“And why not, sir?” demanded the Jew haughtily.
The officer was silent, disconcerted by the question, which he did not attempt to answer.
“Poor Mrs. Gerald!” he said, looking at F. Chevreuse.
Mrs. Gerald's fondness for her son was almost a proverb in Crichton.
“Mrs. Gerald's troubles are over,” said the priest briefly.
Mr. Schöninger went to the window, and stood there looking out, his back to his companions. To his hidden tumult of passions, his [pg 486] fierce, half-formed resolutions, his swelling pride, his burning anger and impatience, this news came with as sudden a check as if he had seen the cold form of the dead woman brought into the cell and laid at his feet.
He had been thinking of the world of men, of the bigoted crowd which had condemned him unheard, of the judge who had pronounced sentence, and the jury who had found him guilty—of all the cold outside world which has to be conquered by strength, or to be submitted to; and now rose up before him another world of pitying women, whose tenderness reversed the decisions pronounced by the intellects of men, or swept over them with an imperious charity; who were ever at the side of the sufferer, even when they knew him to be the sinner, and whose silent hearts felt the rebound of every blow that was struck. He saw the priest's mother, a sacrifice to the interests of her son; the criminal's wife, as he had seen her that night in his cell, with the only half-veiled splendor of her silks and jewels mocking the pallid misery of her face; and now this last victim, more pitiful than all! A sighing wind seemed to sweep around him, far-reaching and full of mingled voices, the infinite wail of innocent and suffering hearts. How gross and demoniac in comparison were the bitter, warring voices of hate and pride and revenge! To his startled mental vision it was almost as though there appeared before him hideous and brutal forms cowering away from faces full of a pure and piercing sorrow.
He perceived that he had been taking low ground, and, with a firm will, caught himself back, setting his foot on the temptation that had been making him a companion for demons. Wronged he had been in a way that he could not help; but he could at least prevent their lowering him in mind. They should not induce him to yield to passion or to meanness.
He turned proudly toward his two companions, who still waited for him to speak. “If the arrest of Lawrence Gerald is not necessary for my release, then I hope he may escape,” he said. “It is bad enough to be shut up in this way when one has a clear conscience; but with such a conscience as he must have, imprisonment could lead only to madness or suicide.”
“Or to penitence,” added F. Chevreuse with emphasis.