The Dales had never been wealthy, but their standards had been high, and Wulfrey had never done anything to lower them. He could not sell his honour even for this woman's life.
He pitied her profoundly. He understood her better probably than any other. He knew how terribly she had suffered, and could comprehend, quite clearly, just how she had fallen into this horrible pit. But cast his honour to the dogs for her, he could not.
Then how?
And, pondering heavily all possibilities, he saw the only feasible way out.
It meant almost certain ruin to himself and his prospects, but, if it came, it would be clean ruin and he would feel no smirch.
It involved a false statement of fact, it is true, but of a very different cast and calibre from the other, and one that he himself felt to be no stain upon his honour.
As a matter of pure ethics a lie is a lie, and of course indefensible. I simply tell you what this man did and felt himself untarnished in the doing.
And the very first thing he did was to go straight home to the little dispensary which opened off his consulting-room, and alter the positions of some of the bottles on the shelves; and from one of them he withdrew a measured dose which he tossed out of the window into the garden.
Then he sat down at his desk and quietly wrote out a certificate of the death of Pasley Carew, of Croome Hall, Gentleman, through the administration of a dose of strychnine in mistake for distilled water, in a sleeping-draught compounded by Dr Wulfrey Dale. And he thought, as he wrote the word, of the awful pandemonium Pasley Carew, Gentleman, had created in his own household these last seven days.
He enclosed this in a covering letter to Dr Tamplin, the coroner, in which he explained more fully how the mistake had occurred. The bottles containing the strychnine and the distilled water stood side by side on his shelf. He had come in tired from a long country round. Had remembered the draught to be sent up to the Hall. As to the rest, he could not tell how he came to make such a mistake. But there it was, and he only was to blame. He could only express his profound regret and accept the consequences.