Especially he delighted in discovering, or
flattering himself he had discovered, the hollow full of dead
men's bones under the flowery lawn of seeming goodness. Nor as
yet had he, so far as he knew, or at least was prepared to allow,
ever failed. And this he called the study of human nature, and
quoted Pope. Truly, next to God, the proper study of mankind is
man; but how shall a man that knows only the evil in himself, nor
sees it hateful, read the thousandfold-compounded heart of his
neighbor? To rake over the contents of an ash-pit, is not to
study geology. There were motives in Redmain's own being, which
he was not merely incapable of understanding, but incapable of
seeing, incapable of suspecting.
The game had for him all the pleasure of keenest speculation; nor
that alone, for, in the supposed discovery of the evil of
another, he felt himself vaguely righteous.
One more point in his character I may not in fairness omit: he
had naturally a strong sense of justice; and, if he exercised it
but little in some of the relations of his life, he was none the
less keenly alive to his own claims on its score; for chiefly he
cried out for fair play on behalf of those who were wicked in
similar fashion to himself. But, in truth, no one dealt so hardly
with Redmain as his own conscience at such times when suffering
and fear had awaked it.
So much for a portrait-sketch of the man to whom Mortimer had
sold his daughter--such was the man whom Hesper, entirely aware
that none could compel her to marry against her will, had, partly
from fear of her father, partly from moral laziness, partly from
reverence for the Moloch of society, whose priestess was her
mother, vowed to love, honor, and obey! In justice to her, it
must be remembered, however, that she did not and could not know
of him what her father knew.
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