Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write; he dissembled
his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at the best was plastered
over (when not at work) with the parochialism of the suburbs. So far the
contrast is complete; and even in their similarities there is an evident
difference. Each led a double life; but while Brodie was most himself
among his own kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-scraping
in Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways
of Blackheath. Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's
respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a cloak
of villainy.
Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more innocent Brodie
designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would have gained notoriety
by the raising of wrecks and the patronage of Mr. Plimsoll. And since
both preserved a certain courage to the end, since both died on the
scaffold as becomes a man, the contrast is once more characteristic.
Brodie's cynicism is a fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each
end was natural after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to
the Scot the finer sense of fitness. Nor did any step in their career
explain more clearly the difference in their temperament than their
definitions of the gallows. For Peace it is 'a short cut to Heaven';
for Brodie it is 'a leap in the dark.' Again the Scot has the advantage.
Again you reflect that, if Peace is the most accomplished Classic among
the housebreakers, the Deacon is the merriest companion who ever climbed
the gallows by the shoulders of the incomparable Macheath.
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