Note 171 — Chapter LXVIII

— My contention is that the conclusion is inevitable to the discerning mind that the sphinx-like nescience — the face set like a flint — with which Oldcorne met Littleton’s inquiry, displays indisputable evidence of a sub-consciousness on Oldcorne’s part, of what? Of a special, private, official knowledge (as distinct from a general, public, personal knowledge) of what had been intended to be the executed Gunpowder Plot, but which Oldcorne himself had thwarted, and so prevented everlastingly any one single human creature being able, even for the infinitesimal part of an instant, to contemplate “post factum” — after the fact — and in the concrete; which, indeed, judged “from the outside,” and as the bulk of mankind are entitled to judge it, was the only side or aspect of the baleful enterprise that was of practical and, therefore, to them, of paramount personal consequence. The conspirator John Grant expressed the state of the case exactly when he said in Westminster Hall, after being asked what he could say wherefore judgment of death should not be pronounced against him, “He was guilty of a conspiracy intended, but never effected.”