She drew away from him a little. It was quite an involuntary action, but he felt it like a knife in the flesh. In sick desperation he floundered on, suddenly losing touch with all the small amenities of speech and manner he had so painfully imposed upon himself. Moreover, he realized the fact with pangs that were almost murderous. There were notes from the Blackhampton gutter beginning to strike through his voice.
"You don't know what my life has been," he said. "You don't know where I started from."
Again she made that involuntary movement, almost as if she felt that the mere tone was defiling her.
"You must let me tell you ... let me tell you all, if you don't mind. It'll help you understand."
"I would rather you didn't." Again the Pridmores and the Colthursts were speaking.
He looked at her with a wildness that made her shiver. An intense pity for this man had suddenly begun to do battle with the Colthursts and the Pridmores. There was something in those eyes, as there always had been, that was almost beyond her power to meet.
"I never had a chance," he said, holding her in thrall with the voice she no longer recognized as his. "I've been handicapped out of the race. I'm going to tell you, Mary. It's not that I want your pity ... I ask more than that. It's more than pity will bring a sailorman like me into port."
A kind of defiance of himself and of her had entered his tone. His words seemed to open a vein in her heart. She had a great compassion for this man, but with all her strength of soul, with all her independence, she knew and felt that voice had already told her that the facts of his life were going to prove more than she could bear.
In a dogged way, with many of the tricks of speech and manner of former phases of his life, which he had sloughed as a snake its skin, and had now reassumed in the stress of overmastering agony, he told her all. He spared her nothing, not even his comparatively recent knowledge that his father had been driven to commit a murder, which in Henry Harper's view accounted for the price the son had had to pay. Nothing was spared her of Auntie, of the police, of the night on the railway, of Mr. Thompson and the Old Man, of the Margaret Carey and the Island of San Pedro, of Ginger and Blackhampton, of the first meeting with Klondyke, of the first meeting with Edward Ambrose, and, finally, an account of his fall into the clutches of Cora Dobbs and how he made the horrible discovery concerning her on the night of their own first memorable meeting at the dinner party in Bury Street.
Some insane demon seemed to urge him on. In spite of the look of horror in her eyes, he told her everything. Somehow he felt it was the only reparation he could make to her for being as he was.