‘But——’ he began.
‘No more, no more,’ said Meadowes, and he rose from his seat, and stretched out his hands in a sudden agonised way. ‘Don’t you know me yet, Prior? I can’t be true. Sooner or later I turn upon every man that leans on me. Man, I know myself—cruelly well; this is but the old story. You’ve served my turn, I need you no more, so I leave you. Yes, sink or swim for me. . . . You should have known better than to trust me.’
‘I’ve done your dirty work these twenty years,’ said Prior, with unblushing veracity, ‘and now you forget it all.’
‘Yes, I mean to forget.’
‘But I am indeed hard pressed for money.’
‘Well, find it elsewhere.’
‘Is this final?’
‘Quite.’
Prior moved towards the door, but he paused for a moment on the threshold and looked back. ‘They call you Judas in the Clubs,’ said he, ‘and they are right—no man ever yet trusted you but he was betrayed.’ He walked out, slamming the door behind him, and Meadowes listened to hear his footsteps die away along the passage.
‘A bad man,’ he meditated, ‘but not as bad as myself, though the world takes him to be worse. He’ll end on the gallows—the world will blame him; but the blame will lie with me—I who made him what he is—and I shall sleep with my fathers in the chapel like a Christian.’