“Yes,” said MacIan.

The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh.

“Oh, you want a nurse to look after you,” he said.  “You must pay L10.”

Evan MacIan plunged his hands into his loose grey garment and drew out a queer looking leather purse.  It contained exactly twelve sovereigns.  He paid down the ten, coin by coin, in silence, and equally silently returned the remaining two to the receptacle.  Then he said, “May I say a word, your worship?”

Cumberland Vane seemed half hypnotized with the silence and automatic movements of the stranger; he made a movement with his head which might have been either “yes” or “no”.  “I only wished to say, your worship,” said MacIan, putting back the purse in his trouser pocket, “that smashing that shop window was, I confess, a useless and rather irregular business.  It may be excused, however, as a mere preliminary to further proceedings, a sort of preface.  Wherever and whenever I meet that man,” and he pointed to the editor of The Atheist, “whether it be outside this door in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in some distant country, wherever and whenever I meet that man, I will fight him.  Do not be afraid.  I will not rush at him like a bully, or bear him down with any brute superiority.  I will fight him like a gentleman; I will fight him as our fathers fought.  He shall choose how, sword or pistol, horse or foot.  But if he refuses, I will write his cowardice on every wall in the world.  If he had said of my mother what he said of the Mother of God, there is not a club of clean men in Europe that would deny my right to call him out.  If he had said it of my wife, you English would yourselves have pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the market place.  Your worship, I have no mother; I have no wife.  I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends.  To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity.  If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything?  I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend, I should still be there.  I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country, I should still exist.  But if what that devil dreams were true, I should not be—­I should burst like a bubble and be gone.  I could not live in that imbecile universe.  Shall I not fight for my own existence?”

The magistrate recovered his voice and his presence of mind.  The first part of the speech, the bombastic and brutally practical challenge, stunned him with surprise; but the rest of Evan’s remarks, branching off as they did into theoretic phrases, gave his vague and very English mind (full of memories of the hedging and compromise in English public speaking) an indistinct sensation of relief, as if the man, though mad, were not so dangerous as he had thought.  He went into a sort of weary laughter.