who was just as straight, as splendid and as upright as he. I swear
she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose that was,
really, why I liked him so much--so infinitely much. Come to think
of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of
thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here,
I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers
that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their
police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land.
And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a
child crying in the street. He would wrestle with dictionaries, in
that unfamiliar tongue. . . . Well, he could not bear to see a child
cry. Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her
the comfort of his physical attractions. But, although I liked him
so intensely, I was rather apt to take these things for granted. They
made me feel comfortable with him, good towards him; they
made me trust him. But I guess I thought it was part of the
character of any English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his
head that the head waiter at the Excelsior had been crying--the
fellow with the grey face and grey whiskers. And then he spent the
best part of a week, in correspondence and up at the British
consul's, in getting the fellow's wife to come back from London
and bring back his girl baby. She had bolted with a Swiss scullion.
If she had not come inside the week he would have gone to
London himself to fetch her. He was like that. Edward
Ashburnham was like that, and I thought it was only the duty of his
rank and station. Perhaps that was all that it was--but I pray God to
make me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I
daresay that I should never have seen it, however much the feeling
might have been over me. She had for him such enthusiasm that,
although even now I do not understand the technicalities of