enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor,
made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to ferment the ill
blood by perverting to his chief certain innocent frolics of the good-natured
foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he
claimed to have overheard him let fall. The master-at-arms never suspected the
veracity of these reports, more especially as to the epithets, for he well knew
how secretly unpopular may become a master-at-arms - at least, a master-at-arms
in those days, zealous in his function - and how the blue-jackets shoot at him
in private their raillery and wit; the nickname by which he goes among them
(Jemmy Legs) implying under the form of merriment their cherished disrespect and
dislike.
    In view of the greediness of hate for provocation, it hardly needed a
purveyor to feed Claggart's passion. An uncommon prudence is habitual with the
subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide. And in case of any merely
suspected injury, its secretiveness voluntarily cuts it off from enlightenment
or disillusion; and not unreluctantly, action is taken upon surmise as upon
certainty. And the retaliation is apt to be in monstrous disproportion to the
supposed offence; for when in anybody was revenge in its exactions aught else
but an inordinate usurer. But how with Claggart's conscience? For though
consciences are unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not excluding the
Scriptural devils who believe and tremble, has one. But Claggart's conscience
being but the lawyer to his will, made ogres of trifles, probably arguing that
the motive imputed to Billy in spilling the soup just when he did, together with
the epithets alleged, these, if nothing more, made a strong case against him;
nay, justified animosity into a sort of retributive righteousness. The Pharisee
is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid chambers underlying some natures like
Claggart's. And they can really form no conception of an unreciprocated malice.
Probably, the master-at-arms' clandestine persecution of Billy was started to
try the temper of the man; but it had not developed any quality in him that
enmity could make official use of, or ever pervert into even plausible
self-justification; so that the occurrence at the mess, petty if it were, was a
welcome one to that peculiar conscience assigned to be the private mentor of
Claggart; and for the rest, not improbably, it put him upon new experiments.
 

                                      XII

Not many days after the last incident narrated, something befell Billy Budd that
more gravelled him