"My own guilt. I never knew what remorse meant before, but your Christian ethics have mastered me this time. I had no right to extract that promise from Val."
"No. Why did you? It seems so motiveless."
"Because it amused me to get a man into my power." Isabel felt him shuddering. "Is this what you call the sense of sin? I used to hear it described as a theological fiction. But it tears one's heart out. Bernard killed him: but who put the weapon into Bernard's hand?"
"Val did."
"I don't understand you."
"The original fault was Val's, and you and Major Clowes were entangled in the consequences of it. Let us two face the truth once and for all! Val can stand it—can't you, Val? . . . He broke his military oath. He deserved a sharp stinging punishment, and if you had reported him he would have had it; perhaps a worse one than you exacted, except for that last awful hour at Wanhope, and for that Major Clowes, not you, was responsible. Oh, I won't say he deserved precisely what he got! because judgment ought to be dispassionate, and in yours there was an element of cruelty for cruelty's sake; wasn't there? You half enjoyed it and half shivered under it . . ."
"More than half enjoyed it," said Hyde under his breath.
"But I do not believe that was your only motive. I think you were sorry for Val. Haven't I seen you watching him at Wanhope? with such a strange half-unwilling pity, as if you hated yourself for it. Oh Lawrence, it's for that I love you!" Lawrence shook his head. He had never been able to analyse the complex of feelings that had determined his attitude to Val. "Well, in any case it was not your fault only. A coward is an irresistible temptation to a bully."
"Do you call Val a coward? Nervous collapses were not so uncommon as you may have gathered from the Daily Mail."
"Did Major Clowes describe the scene truthfully?"