BRODIE. Sore hearing, does he say? My hand’s wet. But it’s victory.
Shall it be go? or stay? [I should show them all I can, or they may pry
closer than they ought.] Shall I have it out and be done with it? To
see Mary at once [to carry bastion after bastion at the charge]—there
were the true safety after all! Hurry—hurry’s the road to silence now.
Let them once get tattling in their parlours, and it’s death to me. For
I’m in a cruel corner now. I’m down, and I shall get my kicking soon and
soon enough. I began it in the lust of life, in a hey-day of mystery and
adventure. I felt it great to be a bolder, craftier rogue than the
drowsy citizen that called himself my fellow-man. [It was meat and drink
to know him in the hollow of my hand, hoarding that I and mine might
squander, pinching that we might wax fat.] It was in the laughter of my
heart that I tip-toed into his greasy privacy. I forced the strong-box
at his ear while he sprawled beside his wife. He was my butt, my ape, my
jumping-jack. And now . . . O fool, fool! [Duped by such knaves as are
a shame to knavery, crime’s rabble, hell’s tatterdemalions!] Shorn to
the quick! Rooked to my vitals! And I must thieve for my daily bread
like any crawling blackguard in the gutter. And my sister . . . my kind,
innocent sister! She will come smiling to me with her poor little
love-story, and I must break her heart. Broken hearts, broken lives! . . .
I should have died before.