“Not? Good Lord! I remember now we had a beastly Swiss courier, a rascal who tapped our correspondence, and put us to no end of shifts. It must have been he.”
“Very likely. So you called for me at the house?”
“Yes. And the young lady—Miss Christmas did you say it was?—told me that you had taken to living down here like an anchorite, and offered to show me the way. What’s happened to you, Dick? You used to be such a free and open chap.”
I looked into his honest glowing face. The craving for comradeship, the craving to pour out my heart of sorrow and difficulty to a friend, tried, sympathetic and attached as I knew this one to be, rose suddenly in me with an irresistible force. I had dwelt so long, corroding, perishing, in my own fateful atmosphere. In confessing to this dear fellow, I knew that I should only be halving my own burden of secrecy, not imperilling it. I hardly gave a thought to its unfair imposition on shoulders so generous and so undeserving. He would not have wished that I should. In a quick impulse of passion, I told him everything—the whole story of my life with its shames and discoveries and humiliations—all the barrenness and impotence of the thing—since I had last parted with him. And when he had listened to me, silently, wonderingly, lovingly, at the end he only thanked me for my beautiful confidence in himself.
He was all immediately that I could have wished and expected him to be—all, and more—unfortunately a good deal more. His head was not built for plots and counter-plots. A sense of his magnified importance in the world, being chosen the trusted accessory of such a man and in such a secret, puffed him out magnificently. He was eager to be at once not only my confidant but my coadjutor—to work for me, spy for me, be my humble auxiliary and comrade in this work of righting a wrong and forcing retribution on the guilty.
“I’ll watch this Pugsley,” he said, to my astonishment. “I’ll bring him to his knees, and make him confess what he’s up to. If I ain’t got much cleverness myself, I’ve the means to buy up a whole Scotland Yard of it.”
“No, no,” I cried hurriedly. “That would never do, Johnny. I’m playing this off my own bat, you understand. The dodging of open scandal is to be our first consideration.”
I seemed to realise in a moment, the danger of the confidence to which I had committed myself. The thought of Johnny as amateur detective was impossible. It would be necessary, I foresaw, to divert his enthusiasm into some harmless channel.
He was greatly gratified, I could see, by my pluralsing of the personal adjective.
“Of course,” he said. “We’ll keep it all between ourselves, Dick.”