“It is consequence, not punishment. We must not confuse the two. Take the case of crime. Body and mind and soul are all connected together, so that the face proclaims the mind and the mind presents the soul. The criminal is a diseased man. Body and mind and soul are all connected together. He lives in an evil atmosphere. Thought, action, impulse, are all evil. He is wrapped in a miasma, like a low-lying meadow on an autumn morning. The children may inherit the disease of crime just as they may inherit consumption or gout. That is to say, they are born with a tendency to crime, as they may be born with a tendency to consumption or gout. It is not punishment, I repeat. It is consequence. In such children there is an open door to evil of some kind or other.”
“Since all men have weaknesses or faults, there must be always such an open door to all children.”
“I suppose so. But the son of a man reputed blameless, whose weaknesses or faults are presumably light or venial, is less drawn towards the open door than the son of the habitual criminal. The son of the criminal naturally makes for the open door, which is the easy way. It is the consequence. As for our own troubles, perhaps, if we knew, they, too, may be the consequence—not the punishment. But we do not know—we cannot find the crime, or the criminal.”
CHAPTER XV
“BARLOW BROTHERS”
“The theory of consequence”—Leonard was arranging his thoughts on paper for better clearness—“while it answers most of the difficulties connected with hereditary trouble, breaks down, it must be confessed, in some cases. Given, for instance, a case in which a boy is carefully educated, has no bad examples before him, shows no signs of vice, and is ignorant of the family misfortunes. If that boy becomes a spendthrift and a prodigal, or worse, when there has never before been such a thing in the family, how can we connect the case with the faults or vices of a grandfather altogether unlike his own, and unknown to him? I should be inclined rather to ascribe the case to some influences of the past, not to be discovered, due to some maternal ancestry. A man, for instance, may be so completely unlike any other member of the family that we must search for the cause of his early life in the line of his mother or his grandmother.”
He was just then thinking of his uncle—the returned Colonial, in whom, except for his commanding stature and his still handsome face, there was nothing to remind the world of the paternal side. Whenever he thought of this cheerful person, with whom life seemed a pleasant play, certain doubts crossed his mind, and ran like cold water down his back. He had come home rich—that was something. He might have come home as poor as when he started. Rich or poor, he would have been the same—as buoyant, as loud, as unpresentable.
In fact, at this very moment, when these reflections were forming a part of Leonard’s great essay on the after-effects of evil—an essay which created only last month so great a stir that people talked of little else for a whole evening—the rich Australian was on his way to confess the fact that things were not exactly as he had chosen to present them.
He did confess the truth, or as much of the truth as he could afford to express, but in an easy and irresponsible manner, as if nothing mattered much. He was a philosopher, to whom nothing did matter. He came in, he shook hands and laughed buoyantly; he chose a cigar from Leonard’s box, he rang the bell for whisky and a few bottles of soda; when the whisky and the soda had arrived and were within reach, he took a chair, and laughed again.
“My boy,” he said, “I’m in a tight place again.”
“In what way?”