Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [301]
‘No, but it is rich, don’t you think so,’ Erasmus said, ‘considering that your little colony took its rise from murder and theft?’ He had wished to maintain a tone of levity, but with Paris’s first words a rigidness had settled over his features and his lips tightened as he spoke.
‘Murder and theft?’ Paris looked at his cousin with something like wonder. ‘You have just stolen these people from their homes and murdered three of them in the course of it. Their blood is on your head, no matter who fired the shots. Two of them had nothing whatever to do with Thurso’s death – in fact they were some of the stolen goods that you came all this way to recover.’
The folly of this took some of the tension from Erasmus’s face. ‘Your stay in this wilderness has unsettled your brain,’ he said. ‘You must be mad to make such comparisons. Thurso was set in authority over you. He was engaged in a lawful trade. These people are fugitives on the one hand and chattels on the other. I have proceeded at every step with total legality. I have a warrant from the Governor of Florida.’
‘Useful thing, a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one. I suppose the Governor himself was armed with one when he took Florida for the Crown?’
‘That is a treasonable speech,’ Erasmus said. ‘I have noted it.’
‘I can only be hanged once,’ Paris said. ‘I do not think we will get far along these lines, Erasmus. But I assure you I had no principles worthy the name. It was Delblanc who was our theorist.’ His head felt heavy and there was a pain gathering behind his eyes. What had Delblanc believed? It was an effort now to think about it. Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good …
‘I did not really share these views,’ he said, under the momentary impression that he had explained to Erasmus what they were. ‘But I knew people are held together by having the sense of a common destiny. And of course I had certain hopes.’
‘What hopes were those?’ The tone was sneering, yet there was an ardour in the question that Erasmus could not conceal. He had been outraged by his cousin’s manner. Flushed out from his bolt-hole, wounded and helpless, with his crimes brought home to him, Paris showed no trace of contrition; he spoke as if engaged in some vague and desultory debate. It was monstrous. And yet Erasmus was held, and in some way fascinated, by what the other was saying; he was conscious of effort, of needing continually to make a wider embrace of hatred and contempt to encompass these movements of his cousin’s mind, to let nothing escape.
And Paris too felt driven, perhaps to disarm or somehow outflank this enmity which he felt as a pressure almost physical and which he could not altogether understand. ‘I knew we had done them harm beyond reckoning,’ he said. ‘It was impossible to pretend otherwise. It was impossible not to see that we had taken everything from them and only for the sake of profit – that sacred hunger, as Delblanc once called it, which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes. You see, I began my career as ship’s surgeon in ignorance and carelessness. Because my life was in ruins I thought it was unimportant what I did, what I assisted in – I thought it could only degrade myself. This was an offence to reason as well as feeling. We have a duty to be vigilant …’
He fell silent again. The burden of explanation seemed too heavy. Had it not been for pain of body and weariness of spirit he might have seen that it was useless in any case. He had sufficient store of irony and under other circumstances might have realized that he was not the ideal man to offer illumination of any kind. His genius was for error. He had blundered once through confusion between obstinate pride and the disinterested promulgation of truth; and