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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 207
by the lie of the tongue, and so you are fairly warned, and I have
no help for you. If I murder a man, and the policeman inquires,
"Pray, sir, did you cut this here gentleman's throat?" I must
bear false witness, you see, out of self-defence, though I may be
naturally a most reliable truth-telling man. And so with regard
to many crimes which gentlemen commit—it is painful to have
to say respecting gentlemen, but they become neither more nor
less than habitual liars, and have to go lying on through life to
you, to me, to the servants, to their wives, to their children, to
________ oh, awful name ! I bow and humble myself. May we kneel,
may we kneel, nor strive to speak our falsehoods before Thee !
And so, my dear sir, seeing that after committing any infraction
of the moral laws, you must tell lies in order to back yourself
out of your scrape, let me ask you, as a man of honour and a
gentleman, whether you had not better forego the crime, so as to
avoid the unavoidable, and unpleasant, and daily recurring necessity
of the subsequent perjury ? A poor young girl of the lower orders,
cajoled or ruined, more or less, is of course no great matter. The
little baggage is turned out of doors—worse luck for her !—or she
gets a place, or she marries one of her own class, who has not the
exquisite delicacy belonging to "gentle blood"—and there is an
end of her. But if you marry her privately and irregularly yourself,
and then throw her off, and then marry somebody else, you
are brought to book in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I am writing
of quite an old story, be pleased to remember. The first part of
the history I myself printed some twenty years ago ; and if you
fancy I allude to any more modern period, madam, you are entirely
out in your conjecture.
It must have been a most unpleasant duty for a man of fashion,
honour, and good family, to lie to a poor tipsy disreputable bankrupt
merchant's daughter, such as Caroline Gann; but George
Brand Firmin, Esquire, M.D., had no other choice, and when he
lied—as in severe cases, when he administered calomel—he thought
it best to give the drug freely. Thus he lied to Hunt, saying that
Mrs. Brandon was long since dead in Canada; and he lied to
Caroline, prescribing for her the very same pill, as it were, and
saying that Hunt was long since dead in Canada, too. And I can
fancy few more painful and humiliating positions for a man of rank
and fashion and reputation, than to have to demean himself so far as
to tell lies to a little low-bred person, who gets her bread as a nurse
of the sick, and has not the proper use of her h's.
" Oh yes, Hunt !" Firmin had said to the Little Sister, in one
of those sad little colloquies which sometimes took place between
him and his victim, his wife of old days. " A wild bad man Hunt