The tired voice seemed for the moment empty of emotion; and yet it wrung Keith’s heart as its frenzied reproaches had not. He uncovered his eyes. “Nor do I believe it now,” he said vehemently. “If it is true that they have got your secret from you, then I know that they must have . . . half killed you first.”
“No,” said Ardroy in the same dull tone, “they have not laid a finger on me here. . . . Yet I have told them what Major Guthrie nearly flogged me to get from me.”
If Keith had seen a visitant from the dead he could not have stared more wildly. “That’s impossible!” he stammered. “I don’t believe it—you don’t know what you are saying!”
Ewen’s lip twisted a little. “Why, by your own admission you said that I might drop a hint inadvertently!” The shaft went visibly deep. “Forgive me!” he exclaimed hastily. “It is true—I think I do not know what I am saying!”
“Oh, let it pass,” said Keith, recovering himself. “Only, in God’s name, tell me what happened!”
Ewen shut his eyes. “It is quite simple, after all. It seems that I still at times talk in my sleep, as I used when a boy. I was warned of it, not so very . . . not so very long ago.” He paused; Keith gave a stifled ejaculation, and had time to taste the immensity of his own relief. This then, was the explanation of what had been to him so inexplicable—or else so abhorrent. Under his breath he murmured, “Thank God!”
But Ewen, his eyes open now, and fixed on the other side of the room, was going on.
“When I was first brought here I was too ill and feverish to realise what they wanted of me. Afterwards, when I knew well enough (since they openly asked me for it so often, and it was what Major Guthrie had wanted too) and when I felt that the secret might slip from me in sleep, because it was so perpetually in my mind, I resolved never to allow myself to go to sleep except when I was alone. But I so seldom was alone. At first I thought, very foolishly, that this was from care for me; then I discovered the real reason, for I think they must have been hoping for this result from the first. Perhaps I talked when I was in Guthrie’s hands; I do not know. But, for all my endeavours,” he gave a dreary smile, “it seems that one must sleep some time or other. And the fifth night—two nights ago—I could hold out no longer, and being left by myself I went to sleep . . . and slept a long time, soundly. I had thought that I was safe, that I should wake if anyone came in.” Ewen stopped. “I ought to have cut my tongue out before I did it. . . . And I would have died for him—died for him!” His head went down on his knee again.
“Good God!” murmured Keith to himself. The methods that he feared might not have been used, but those which had been were pretty vile. And though their victim had neither given the information voluntarily—not, at least, in the true meaning of the word—nor had had it dragged out of him by violence, his distress was not less terrible. Yet surely——
“Ardroy,” he said quickly, and touched him on the shoulder, “are you not leaping too hastily to conclusions? No doubt you may have said something about your secret, since it was so much on your mind, but that in your sleep you can have given any precise information about it I cannot believe. Granted that you were told that you had—perhaps in hopes that you would really betray yourself—why did you believe it, and give yourself all this torment?”