'By Heaven!' he cried, stamping savagely with his foot. 'By Heaven!
Then I certainly _am_ a fool! _It is the staff of Phaebus in the hand
of Hermes!'_
I hastened to him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'have you discovered anything?'
'It is possible.'
'And has there really been foul play--murder--in any of these deaths?'
'Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.'
'Great God!' I exclaimed, 'could any son of man so convert himself into
a fiend, a beast of the wilderness....'
'You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,' he answered
somewhat petulantly. 'Illegal murder is always a mistake, but not
necessarily a crime. Remember Corday. But in cases where the murder of
one is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than the
murder of many? On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousand
Caesars--each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimest
self-suppression--he might well have taken rank as a saint in heaven.'
Failing for the moment to see the drift or the connection of the
argument, I contented myself with waiting events. For the rest of that
day and the next Zaleski seemed to have dismissed the matter of the
tragedies from his mind, and entered calmly on his former studies.
Pages:
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113