"You will come with me. You will not desert me. My confession is over. I shall speak of this matter no more to any man. It was only a temptation, and I absolutely did no wrong. You will not desert me. I am very feeble. I do not know what the matter is with me. I have no strength in my body. I never had much, but the little I had is gone. You will not desert me, Mr. Hanbury. I have only listened to the voice of the tempter. I have not gone the tempter's ways, and mind, I was not tempted by the love of lucre. If I had had a voice, and stature, and figure like yours I might have been able to win fame in the big and open world, as I was I could win it only in the world that is little and occult. Come with me. You promised to be my friend before you heard of my temptation. Are you less inclined to be my friend because I was tempted and resisted the tempter, than if I had never been tempted at all? Get in and come with me. See me under a roof anyway. The next roof that covers me will be the last one I shall lie under over ground."
"I own," said Hanbury, "I was a little staggered at first, but only at first. I am quite willing to go with you. Where shall I tell the man to drive?" Hanbury had assisted Leigh into the cab, and was standing on the flagway.
Leigh gave the address, and the two drove off.
The dwarf's confession had not benefitted his position in Hanbury's mind. The fact that this man had been in communication with a fence, with a view to the disposal of stolen gold, was enough to make the average man shrink from contact with the dwarf. But then Hanbury remembered that the secret had been divulged by the clock-maker in a moment of extreme excitement, and after what to him must have been an enormous calamity. To have been tempted is not to have fallen; but, the temptation resisted, to have risen to heights proportionate to the strength of the temptation, and the degree of self-denial in the resistance of it.
Yet, this was a strange companion, friend, for John Hanbury, the well-known public speaker, a man who had made up his mind to adopt the career of a progressive and reforming politician, the descendant of Stanislaus II. of Poland! Contact with a man who had absolutely entertained the notion of trading in stolen goods was a thing most people would shun. But, then, were most people right? This man had claimed his good offices, first, because Hanbury was in his power, and now Leigh claimed his good offices, because he was in great affliction and prostration. Certainly Hanbury would be more willing to fall in with Leigh's views now, when he was supplicating, than on Thursday, when he was threatening. Who could withhold sympathy from this deformed, marred, wheezing, halting, sickly-looking man, who had just seen the work of a lifetime swept away for ever?