“Crack it, then, and let’s have the kernel!” said Lord Roxham. He was growing out of patience with the dictatorial tone of this vulgar man.
“Just so!” chimed in Mr. Charlton, airing a snowy hand and signet gem, and falling back in his chair with the air of a man wearied with hard thinking.
“It’s too preposterous to answer,” was Plover’s evasive taunt; “it’s mere casuistry.”
“A very compact bit of casuistry, at any rate,” said Sir Simon, with friendly pride in Raymond’s manifest superiority over his assembled guests; “it strikes me it would take more than our combined wits to answer it.”
“Egad! I’d eat my head before I’d answer it!” confessed Ponsonby Anwyll, who shared the baronet’s personal complacency in the count’s superior brain. But Raymond had lapsed into his previous silent mood, and sat absently toying with a plate of bonbons before him, and apparently deaf to the clashing of tongues that he had provoked. There was something very touching in his look, in the air of gentle dejection that pervaded him, and which contrasted strikingly with the transient warmth he had displayed while speaking. Sir Simon noticed it, and it smote him to the heart. For the first time this evening he bethought him how his own cheerfulness must strike Raymond, and how he must be puzzled to account for it. He promised himself the pleasure of explaining it to his satisfaction before they parted to-night; but meanwhile it gave him a pang to think of the iron that was in his friend’s soul, though it was part of his pleasant expectation that he would be able to draw it out and pour some healing balm on the wound to-morrow. He would show him why he had borne so patiently with the vulgar pedagogue who had permitted himself to fail, at least by insinuation, in respect to M. de la Bourbonais. The pedagogue meanwhile seemed bent on making himself disagreeable to the inoffensive foreigner.
“It is a pity X—— was not able to secure Count de la Bourbonais as counsel,” he began again. “In the hands of so skilful a casuist his backsliding might have come out quite in a heroic light. It would have been traced to his poverty, which engendered his gratitude, and so on until we had a verdict that would have been virtually a glorification of impecuniosity. It is a pity we have missed the treat.”
“Poverty is no doubt responsible for many backslidings,” said Raymond, bridling imperceptibly. He felt the sting of the remark as addressed to him by the rich man, or he fancied he did. “The world would no doubt be better as well as happier if riches were more equally divided; but there are worse things in the world than poverty, for all that.”
“There is the excess of riches, which is infinitely worse—a more unmitigated source of evil, taking it all in all,” said Mr. Langrove.
“Well said for a professional, my dear sir,” laughed Mr. Plover; “but you won’t find many outsiders to agree with you, I suspect.”
“If by outsiders you mean Turks, Jews, and Hottentots, I daresay you are right,” said the vicar good-temperedly.