After receiving rebuffs, and often what he regarded as insults, for hours, the young man's hope began to fail him utterly. His face grew pale and haggard, not only from fatigue, but from that which tells disastrously almost as soon upon the body as upon the mind--discouragement. He saw that he had not yet fully realized the consequences of his folly. The deep and seemingly implacable resentment of society was a continued surprise. He was not conscious of being a monster of wickedness, and it seemed to him that after his bitter experience he would rather starve than again touch what was not his own.
But the trouble is, the world does not give us much credit for what we think, feel, and imagine, even if aware of our thoughts. It is what we do that forms public opinion; and it was both natural and just that the public should have a very decided opinion of one who had recently shown himself capable of gambling, drunkenness, and practical theft.
And yet the probabilities were that if some kind, just man had bestowed upon Haldane both employment and trust, with a chance to rise, his bitter lesson would have made him scrupulously careful to shun his peculiar temptations from that time forward. But the world usually regards one who has committed a crime as a criminal, and treats him as such. It cannot, if it would, nicely calculate the hidden moral state and future chances. It acts on sound generalities, regardless of the exceptions; and thus it often happens that men and women who at first can scarcely understand the world's adverse opinion, are disheartened by it, and at last come to merit the worst that can be said or thought.
As, at the time of his first arrest, Haldane had found his eyes drawn by a strange, cruel fascination to every scornful or curious face upon the street, so now he began to feel a morbid desire to know just what people were saying and thinking of him. He purchased both that day's papers and those of the previous day, and, finding a little out-of-the-way restaurant kept by a foreigner, he "supped full with"--what were to him emphatically--"horrors"; the dinner and supper combined, which he had ordered, growing cold, in the meantime, and as uninviting as the place in which it was served.
His eyes dwelt longest upon those sentences which were the most unmercifully severe, and they seemed to burn their way into his very soul. Was he in truth such a miscreant as the "Courier" described? Mrs. Arnot had not shrunk from him as from contamination; but she was different from all other people that he had known; and he now remembered, also, that even she always referred to his act in a grave, troubled way, as if both its character and consequences were serious indeed.