"For that."
"Fool, fool that I was not to think of the idiot's conscientiousness," he muttered, "then all might have been arranged even yet; but now he knows all, and I am undone."
"But how did you manage to escape?" I asked, still in a dazed kind of way.
"I will tell you," he replied, with a bitter, mocking laugh, "for nothing can be altered now. You thought you knew more than anyone about our coast, but I had found a place of which you knew nothing. There is a crevice and a broad ledge beneath that place where we wrestled, and finding that you were stronger than I, I determined to do by cunning what I could not do by brute force. So dragging you to this place I slipped from you, fell down upon this ledge, and allowed you to think you had murdered me!"
He spoke with all the bitterness and cruelty of which any one could be capable, and as I thought of what I had suffered, of the hell in which I had lived through long months, I realised something of the old feeling which I had entertained for him on that awful night.
"And after all, I have served you out," he went on. "I have enjoyed Trewinion's wealth for eleven years, and I have made the most of it. You may claim possession if you will; but precious little you will have. I have mortgaged it up to every farthing it is worth, and if you hadn't come soon you would have found another family here. Even now you will have a difficulty in keeping the house above your head," and he laughed mockingly.
As he said this, it struck me that he was trying to make me angry, and as I saw the wickedness and meanness of his heart, I felt a great bitterness rising within me. Then I remembered what I felt at Smyrna—how I had prayed that God would help me to love, and in a second the bitterness was gone, and all harsh feelings were turned to pity. I saw the veil torn aside, and I knew that, much as I had suffered, he had suffered more; that deep as I had been in hell, he had been in a hell yet deeper. I did not remember the deceit, the fraud, the treachery he had practised towards me, I only thought of the possible Wilfred, the Wilfred as he might have been, and as God intended he should be.
"And what do you intend to do?" said my mother, for such I shall continue to call her.
"Do, mother," I said. "I shall do nothing."
"Do! What can he do?" laughed Wilfred. "His hands are tied. I am glad on the whole that he has come, for the place is accursed. It has never given me anything but misery. I have been in a constant fever. And Roger will suffer more, I am glad to say. As for you, mother, serve you right if you never have another day's happiness."