“You need reminding in your turn that you are not paid to follow your inclination... Will you please go on with the story? I am curious to learn how it came about that Van Bleit boasted to you that the letters were out of our reach. What grounds have you for assuming such a statement to be true?”
“Grounds!” Lawless laughed again, with a savage sound in the mirth. His mind had reverted to the scene on the veld in the early morning when Van Bleit had sat with a revolver covering him, and a murderous finger crooked round the trigger. “I have had what I believed to be those letters in my hands—a dummy packet got up in order to trick me. I fell into the trap with an ease that astounds me when I think of it. I’ve been flogged like a Kaffir—by Van Bleit... bound by the wrists and lashed.” He touched his inflamed and injured eye. “I haven’t recovered the proper use of that yet,” he said. “I doubt that I ever shall. What little self-respect I had he has deprived me of... Perhaps that’s why I don’t care a damn when you openly question my honesty. That’s a full report of my doings, up to the present. I am now waiting until my decoy has got Van Bleit in tow—then I am going to face him again.”
He fell to pacing the floor once more with his hands clasped behind him, and his eyes filled with an expression of uncontrollable hate.
“When a man holds life cheaply—as I do,—when he’s nothing to look forward to, and very little to look back upon, he makes an ugly enemy... You know something—not much, but still something—of my past. As I’ve gone along Life’s High Road there has been a hand occasionally to rest in mine for a brief while; but at the first stumble it has been withdrawn,—not one has ever clasped mine more firmly to help me over the difficulties in the way... I’m not whining to you in self-excuse. I’ve knocked up against hard facts all my life... I’m hard myself, which may account for much. If it were not for a military training, I should probably hit you in the face when you accuse me of applying to my own use the money I have received from you. As it is, I ask you to withdraw that charge. It’s possibly the only creditable thing I have achieved in life, but I have managed to steer clear of fraud.”
He put a hand in his breast pocket, and, withdrawing a notebook, took from between its leaves a paper which he tossed upon the table.
“There’s the agreement you referred to a while since... You can tear it across; it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. I’ll stick to my part of the bargain. I’ll get the letters for you, if they’re to be got. But I want no other reward than the squaring of my account with Van Bleit. For the rest—the funds to go on with—”
The Colonel stopped him with a gesture, and, rising, crossed to a desk near the window. He unlocked a drawer, took from it a cheque-book, and drawing up a cheque in Lawless’ favour, and signing it, passed it to him with a pen to fill in the amount. Lawless supplied the figures.
“The usual sum,” he said... “And a month in arrears.”
Colonel Grey nodded. Then he re-locked the desk and rose.
“I have doubted you,” he said. “I admit it. But—”