"I know," she answered, "but do you mind my speaking of him?" They had
sat down on the broad lip of the fountain basin. He was looking at her
intently. "It is strange," she said, "but in spite of his doing this
terrible thing I can't feel that he himself is terrible--like Clara."
"And yet," he answered in a grave voice, "I would rather you did."
She turned a troubled face. "Ah, have you forgotten what you said the
first night I met you? You said it doesn't matter what a man is, even if
he's a thief, as long as he's a good one."
At this he laughed a little grudgingly. "Oh, I don't go back on that,
but I was looking through the great impartial eye of the universe.
Whereas a man may be good of his kind, he's only good in his kind. Tip
out a cat among canaries and see what happens. My dear girl, we were the
veriest birds in his paws! And notice that it isn't moral law--it's
instinct. We recognize by scent before we see the shape. You never knew
him. You never could. And you never trusted him."
"But," she interrupted eagerly, "I would have done anything for you when
I thought you were a thief."
"Anything?" he caught her up with laughter. "Oh, yes, anything to haul
me over the dead line on to your side. That was the very point you made.
That was where you would have dropped me--if I had stuck by my kind, as
you thought it, and not come over to yours."
She saw herself fairly caught. She heard her mental process stated to
perfection.
"But if you hadn't felt all along I was your kind, if you hadn't had an
idea that I was a stray from the original fold, you would never have
wanted to go in for me," he explained it.
Flora had her doubts about the truth of this. For a time she had been
certain of his belonging to the lawless other fold, and at times she
would have gone with him in spite of it, but this last knowledge she
withheld. She withheld it because she could make out now, that, for all
his seeming wildness, he had no lawless instincts in himself.
Generations of great doing and great mixing among men had created him, a
creature perfectly natural and therefore eccentric; but the same
generations had handed down from father to son the law-abiding instinct
of the rulers of the people. He could be careless of the law. He was
strong in it. In his own mind he and the law were one. His perception of
the relations of life was so complete that he had no further use for the
written law; and Farrell Wand's was so limited that he had never found
the use for it. Lawless both; but--the two extremes. They might seem to
meet--but between those two extremes, between a Chatworth and a Farrell
Wand--why, there was all the world's experience between!
She raised her eyes and smiled at him in thinking of it, but the smile
faltered and she drew away. They were about to be disturbed. Beyond the
rose branches far down the drive she saw a figure moving toward them at
a slow, uncertain pace, looking to and fro. "See, there's some one
coming."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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