It was Scruton's raven croak; he had tottered to his feet.
"Sure," said Toye, "if you've anything you want to say as an interested party."
"Only this—he's told the truth!"
"Well, can he prove it?"
"I don't know," said Scruton. "But I can!"
"You?" Blanche chimed in there.
"Yes, I'd like that drink first, if you don't mind, Cazalet." It was Blanche who got it for him, in an instant. "Thank you! I'd say more if my blessing was worth having—but here's something that is. Listen to this, you American gentleman: I was the man who wrote to him in Naples. Leave it at that a minute; it was my second letter to him; the first was to Australia, in answer to one from him. It was the full history of my downfall. I got a warder to smuggle it out. That letter was my one chance."
"I know it by heart," said Cazalet. "It was that and nothing else that made me leave before the shearing."
"To meet me when I came out!" Scruton explained in a hoarse whisper. "To—to keep me from going straight to that man, as I'd told him I should in my first letter! But you can't hit these things off to the day or the week; he'd told me where to write to him on his voyage, and I wrote to Naples, but that letter did not get smuggled out. My warder friend had got the sack. I had to put what I'd got to say so that you could read it two ways. So I told you, Cazalet, I was going straight up the river for a row—and you can pronounce that two ways. And I said I hoped I shouldn't break a scull—but there's another way of spelling that, and it was the other way I meant!" He chuckled grimly. "I wanted you to lie low and let me lie low if that happened. I wanted just one man in the world to know I'd done it. But that's how we came to miss each other, for you timed it to a tick, if you hadn't misread me about the river."
He drank again, stood straighter, and found a fuller voice.