The news was true. The rumour Wrigley and Jessop Reed had set afloat for their own nefarious ends had proved prophetic. Hoist with their own petard, they had yet to learn that they were ruined men.
Chapter Thirty Six.
The Days of Peril.
“Live, my own dearest, live,” murmured Dinah, as she knelt beside Clive’s couch, listening to his never-ending mutterings, as the fever ran its course, and mingled with the incessant babblings about the mine, his brother’s trickery and deceit, she heard him burst into torrents of reproaches against him who was slandering his character. Then would come appeals and declarations of his innocency, and Dinah’s tears fell softly as he rambled on about Lyddy.
“Shame on you, Janet!” he would cry. “How could you think it of me? That I came telling you of my love fresh from the embraces of that weak creature. Poor Lyddy! A cruel betrayal of a weak, easily flattered girl. I swear it was all false. To save himself. Yes: false as hell! But I pity you, dear. You are my sister now; and I pity you.”
He would calm down for a while, and then begin again, mingling his troubles in so confused a fashion, that Dinah would grow puzzled. But she could not tear herself away, and listened eagerly as the sick man rambled on, and laid bare the whole of his troubled life.
Then she would writhe in her agony, as from out of the tangle her own name would come, and he grew excited as he wandered on, going back to hearing her sobbing in the next room, the shots pattering on the window, and on and on to the surprise in the tunnelled pathway.
“All, all the same. So gentle and loving, but all so weak. Poor little sweet: so beautiful. Her words would ring like music, and yet she could throw herself into his arms. Forgive her? Yes, I must forgive her. So weak, so hard to trust.”