"Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. "Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself." She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his, and knitted her cold little hands in one another. "Please leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at him.
"It cannot be," said Saxham. "Miss Mildare, the Dop Doctor was only another nickname for the Town Drunkard. And now you know what you should have known before if I had not been a coward and a knave."
She turned her eyes softly upon him, and they could not rest, it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing.
"I was the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence. "Known in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every constable, and a standing butt for the clumsy jests that the most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench." His jarring laugh hurt her. "The Man in the Street, and the Woman of the Street, for that matter—pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth must be told—were my godfather and my godmother, and they gave me that name between them. You are trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that balk, and I will finish."
There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been used in the construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it and sat down, and the Doctor went on:
"I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came to be—what I have told you. But that I had lived a clean and honourable and temperate life up to thirty years of age—when my world caved in with me—I swear is the very truth!"
She said gently: "I can believe it, Dr. Saxham."
"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin, ruin!"
Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:
"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes of the Law—for I gained that much—did not clear me in the eyes of Society—that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and bloody Idol that civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and my self-respect...."