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.