"Yes—" said Craven, calmly—"Now it is your turn."
The door was no sooner shut than Wharton strode forward and caught her hand.
"They have told you everything? Ah!—"
His eye fell upon the evening paper. Letting her go, he felt for a chair and dropped into it. Throwing himself back, his hands behind his head, he drew a long breath and his eyes closed. For the first time in his life or hers she saw him weak and spent like other men. Even his nerve had been worn down by the excitement of these five fighting hours. The eyes were lined and hollow—the brow contracted; the young roundness of the cheek was lost in the general pallor and patchiness of the skin; the lower part of the face seemed to have sharpened and lengthened,—and over the whole had passed a breath of something aging and withering the traces of which sent a shiver through Marcella. She sat down near him, still in her nurse's cloak, one trembling hand upon her lap.
"Will you tell me what made you do this?" she asked, not being able to think of anything else to say.
He opened his eyes with a start.
In that instant's quiet the scene he had just lived through had been rushing before him again—the long table in the panelled committee-room, the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable—Molloy, small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the midst of tumult—and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out Denny's letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.
"Spies, yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the enemy—"Aye; an' yo're aboot reet! I and my friends—we have been trackin' and spyin' for weeks past. We knew those men, those starvin' women and bairns, were bein' sold, but we couldn't prove it. Now we've come at the how and the why of it! And we'll make it harder for men like you to sell 'em again! Yo call it infamy?—well, we call it detection."
Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which followed on the director of "The People's Banking Association," the injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year—and finally the last dramatic cry:
"But it's noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has nobbut played his party and the workin' man a dirty trick or two—an' yo mun have a gentleman! Noa—the workin' man isn't fit himself to speak wi' his own enemies i' th' gate—yo mun have a gentleman!—an' Mester Wharton, he says he'll tak' the post, an' dea his best for yo—an', remember, yo mun have a gentleman! Soa now—Yes! or No!—wull yo?—or woan't yo?"