Foe had recovered under the brandy and lay over on his side, facing us, panting a little from the dose—of which Jimmy had been liberal.
"Have it out, Roddy," he gasped, "here and now. I'm strong enough to get it over, and—and he can't tell you any worse than you both know, of my free telling—and I don't want to trouble either of you again. Let him have it out," implored Foe, between his sharp intakes of breath.
"I am glad you excepted me," burst out Farrell. "You'll trouble me again fast enough: or, rather, I'll trouble you—to the end of your dirty life. Are you shamming sick, there, you Foe?"
"You know that he is not," said Jimmy, holding back my arm. "Tell your story, and clear."
"My story?" echoed Farrell in a bewildered way. "What's my story more than what you know, it seems? What's my story more than that, after sharing hell for days in an open boat, and solitude on that awful island, this man left me—choosing when I was sick and sorry: left me to hell and solitude together—left me to it, cold-blooded, when I was too weak to crawl—left me, in his cursed grudge, when he could have saved two as easy as one? Has he told you that, gentlemen?"
"He told me quite faithfully," said I. "We—Mr. Collingwood and I— both know it."
"Ay," Farrell retorted, "but neither you nor your Mr. Collingwood, when you say that, understands a bit what it means…" He broke off, searching for some words to convey the remembered agony to our brains that had no capacity (he felt) even to imagine it.
"No," came a dull voice from the couch—startling us, dull though it was. "Only you and I, Farrell, understand what it means. Tell them just the facts, as I told the facts, and no more. Tell them, and me, how you escaped."
"By the same ship as you did, if you wish to know—the I'll Away schooner, Captain Jefferson Hales. And I'll tell you something even more surprising.—Your ill-luck started the very hour you left me and Rover to die like two dogs together. When you stepped aboard the I'll Away, you stepped aboard as a lost missionary. You had your own bad reasons for not wanting to tell too much: and Hales had his own very good reasons for not putting too many questions. To start with, he didn't like missionaries as a class, or their conversation: and I gather that his crew likewise didn't take much truck in them; neither in the species nor in you as a specimen: least of all in you as a specimen. I'm sorry for it, too, in a way: because, at first, I pictured them asking you to put up a prayer, and pictured your face and feelings as you knelt down to oblige. Well, that was one of the pretty fancies that ought to come true but don't manage to, in this world. As for the next, there's no saying. You passed yourself for a missionary, and if Satan has humour enough to accept you on that ticket, a pretty figure you'll make, putting up false prayers in hell.… Anyhow, you didn't make friends on board that schooner—eh?"
"I did not," Foe answered listlessly.