“The strange part of the whole thing is that I didn’t do it.”
“I never for one fraction of a second supposed you did.”
“You stand pretty well alone there,” answered Thornhill with a pressure of the hand. “To cut a long story—and a very unpleasant one, for even now the taste comes back—short, the party to whom I had given my name, when I was young and foolish, and who, incidentally, gained far more by the transaction than I did, led me a most shocking life. No—it wasn’t owing to drink, it was sheer innate devilishness. This went on for years—by the bye you can still see some of its results in the way Edala has turned against me ever since. That process, however, had begun before, and not only with this child but with all of them. Well let’s get to the end of the abominable rotten episode, for the bare telling of it makes me sick.”
“Then don’t tell it, Inqoto. Why should you?” adjured Evelyn earnestly, and very uneasily as she remembered the doctor’s injunctions that the wounded man was not to be allowed to excite himself in the least degree. Yet, now, his face was flushed and he was moving restlessly in the bed.
“I’d better get it over. Fact is I haven’t mentioned the matter to anybody—since—since it happened. You are the first. One night—after raising a particularly shameful and scandalous scene—good Lord! it’s lucky the walls at Sipazi can’t talk—she rushed out of the house swearing that she was going to put an end to herself. Candidly I didn’t in the least care if she did, to such a pass had things come; however I thought I should probably be suspected of murder if such a thing happened. So I started to follow her, and didn’t overtake her all of a sudden either. When I did she had got among the rocks and crevices—never mind what part of the farm or even if on it at all. I tell you then, she was just like one possessed. I thought the devil must be standing there before me, but I tried to warn her that she was ramping dangerously near an ugly crevice that might be any depth. She answered she didn’t care. She was going to jump into it if only to get me hanged for her murder. Well hardly were the words uttered than she tripped on something and hurtled bang into the crack. I could do nothing, you know. I was fully twenty yards off. Horrible, isn’t it?”
The listener bent her head gravely.
“You were not to blame,” she said. “The thing was sheer accident.”
“So it was. I have had a great many years wherein to look back, and I have never been able to blame myself in the affair in any single particular. Well at the time my first feeling was one of intense relief—shocking again, wasn’t it? Then a horrid thought struck me. Our relations with each other were well known, were matter of common scandal. I began to feel the tightening of a noose, for who the devil was likely to believe my version? Just then I saw someone watching me.
“I must have been mad. I don’t know how it happened, but instead of treating any witness as a friendly and invaluable one, I at once assumed this one’s hostility. I decided that one of us must not leave the spot alive. I flung myself upon him and—didn’t we have a tussle! Well, he did exactly the same thing—stepped back into a crevice, and—stayed there. That man was Manamandhla.”
“Then he got out?”