Oh he saw it now all lucidly—if not rather luridly—and thereby the more tragically. “He described me in his nasty rage as consistently—well, heroic!”
“His rage”—she pieced it sympathetically out—“at your destroying his cherished credit with Bender?”
Lord Theign was more and more possessed of this view of the manner of it. “I had come between him and some profit that he doesn’t confess to, but that made him viciously and vindictively serve me up there, as he caught the chance, to the Prince—and the People!”
She cast about, in her intimate interest, as for some closer conception of it. “By saying that you had remarked here that you offered the People the picture—?”
“As a sacrifice—yes!—to morbid, though respectable scruples.” To which he sharply added, as if struck with her easy grasp of the scene: “But I hope you’ve nothing to call a memory for any such extravagance?”
Lady Sandgate waited—then boldly took her line. “None whatever! You had reacted against Bender—but you hadn’t gone so far as that!”
He had it now all vividly before him. “I had reacted—like a gentleman; but it didn’t thereby follow that I acted—or spoke—like a demagogue; and my mind’s a complete blank on the subject of my having done so.”
“So that there only flushes through your conscience,” she suggested, “the fact that he has forced your hand?”
Fevered with the sore sense of it his lordship wiped his brow. “He has played me, for spite, his damned impertinent trick!”
She found but after a minute—for it wasn’t easy—the right word, or the least wrong, for the situation. “Well, even if he did so diabolically commit you, you still don’t want—do you?—to back out?”