Charles' anger and hot indignation had burned itself out. Of it there was nothing left but ashes, grey feathery ashes, not smouldering even any longer. It was impossible to be angry with anything so abject as the man who sat inertly there. It was impossible to feel anything but regret that he sat convicted of such pitiful fraud and falsity. He saw only the wreck of a year's friendship, the stricken corpse of his own gratitude and loyalty. Here was the man who had first believed in and befriended him, and it was not in his nature to forget that. It had so long been to him an ever-present consciousness that it had become a permanent inmate of his mind, present to him in idle hours, but present most of all when he was at work, and thus wrought into the web of his life and his passion. In the extinction of his anger, this reasserted itself again, tarnished it might be, and stained, but existent. And with that awoke pity, sheer pity for the man who had made and marred it.
He waited till Frank had closed the door.
"It's wretched," he said, "absolutely wretched."
Even to Craddock in the shame of his detection, and in his miserable apprehension of what must yet follow, the ring of sincerity was apparent; it reached down to him in the inferno he had made for himself. And the pity was without patronage; it did not hurt.
"Thank you for that," he said. "Now tell me what you want done. Or perhaps you have done what you wanted already ..."
He broke off short and Charles waited. He guessed how terribly difficult any kind of speech must be.
"There is just one thing I should like to tell you," said Craddock at length. "I—I lied about you to Philip Wroughton, but my object was not to injure you. I didn't want to injure you. But I guessed that you were in love with Joyce. I guessed also that she—that she liked you. You stood in my way perhaps. My object was to reach her. That is all."
There was no justification attempted: it was a mere statement of fact. He paused a moment.
"But I was not sorry," he said, "even when I found that I had not advanced my own suit."
"I didn't seem to matter, I suppose," said Charles in a sudden flash.