Teddy's mind had so far suspended operation as to his immediate plight that he went back to the morning, seven or eight months previously, when an errand from Mr. Brunt had brought him into the great ground-floor atrium, revealing the Basilica Julia or the Basilica Emilia of _Ancient Rome Restored_ right there in lower Broadway. Simplicity, immensity, the awesome beauty of mere form! The wide spaces, the mighty columns, the tempered white light of majestic Roman windows! The absence of striving for effect! The peace, the restfulness, the cheerfulness, when striving for effect are abandoned, dwarfing the magnitude of crowds and reducing their ebbings and flowing to mere vanity! Like Jennie with her emotions, like Pansy with her intuitions, Teddy had no words for these impressions; but the Scarborough tradition, nursed on _Ancient Rome Restored_, vibrated to their music.
"And here I am, trapped like a rat in a hole!"
So he came back to it. He wondered if he were awake. Was it possible that ten or fifteen minutes could have transformed him from a hard-working, home-loving boy into a fugitive who had no choice left but to shoot himself? As for facing the disgrace, he did not consider it. To stand before his mother charged with theft, even if it was on her behalf, was not to be thought of. He couldn't do it, and there was an end to it. Still less could he go through the other incidentals, handcuffs, a cell, the court, the sentence, Bitterwell, and the lifetime that would come after his release. He could put the pistol to his heart and, if necessary, he could burn in hell--if there was a hell; but he couldn't do the other thing.
And yet to put the pistol to his heart and burn in hell formed a lamentable choice on their side.
"I'm not a thief," he protested, inwardly. "I took the money--how could I help it, with dad sick and ma at the end of everything?--but _I'm not a thief_."
He was sure of that. It became a formula, not perhaps of comfort, but of justification. Had he been a thief, he told himself, he could have faced the music; but it was precisely because he had taken money while preserving his inner probity that he refused to be judged by the standards of men. Once more he couldn't express it in this way to himself; but it was the conclusion to which his instincts leaped. Only one tribunal could discern between the good and evil in his case; so he was resolved to go before it.