"That poker business--they said I cheated; it was a lie--an infernal lie."
"They've admitted it themselves to-night."
"They hadn't admitted it then, and I never thought I should have a chance of making them do it, until I saw that dear man Dodwell doing his best to murder Draycott as he lay there on the floor. Well, then, it was a wild-cat idea, but it was an idea. I thought that if I could get hold of Draycott, and he wasn't quite dead, and I could bring him back to life, he might feel some--some sort of gratitude. It was Draycott who supported Dodwell; I don't think they would ever have believed him if it hadn't been for Draycott. I fancy there wasn't a man in the regiment who hadn't a sort of feeling that Dodwell was a liar; it was Draycott's endorsement of his lie that did it."
She could see, when he paused, how the muscles of his face were working, and how his fingers twitched as he clenched and unclenched his hands.
"When I started to think afterwards, when hell was all about me, at first it was all a blur, I couldn't think how it could have happened--all of it; it was so--so impossible that they could have thought such a thing of me. Then, by degrees, I began to put trifles together, and to get some sort of a vague idea how--how it had all come about."
He pressed his hands to his temples; she fancied it must have become a trick with him; he had done it once or twice before, even when they were in the cab.
"I'd had a row with Dodwell about some money which he said I owed him; as you know, I owed pretty nearly everybody money, but I was quite sure I didn't owe him any. The way in which he made out that I did, did credit to something besides his financial genius. I had a suspicion that Draycott had had a row with him of the same kind. He had told me that he would be even with me for the position which I had taken up; and I began to see, afterwards, when I--I was looking for crusts in the gutter, that that lie he had told was his way of getting even, and I began to wonder if Draycott had backed it because Dodwell had got him under his thumb."
He gave a great sigh, which was the most eloquent thing he had done yet; there was something about the matter-of-fact way in which he did it which showed that, at any rate, that was an habitual trick of his. The abomination of desolation which, it suggested, was in his very soul, moved the girl with a sudden pain which seemed to go right through her.
"When, as I've said, I saw Dodwell hammering Draycott, the wild-cat idea came to me that, if I did Draycott a good turn, he might be disposed to do me another; Dodwell would have killed him if it hadn't been for me, so he did owe me something, if he was to owe me nothing more. If he would only own to me, between ourselves, that he hadn't seen me do what he said he had, that would be some satisfaction. I didn't like to feel that there was any possibility that he really believed that I was--that kind of thing; if he would admit to me, in private, that he had spoken in haste, that he might have been in error, I should have been a happier man. The reality surpassed all my expectations."
A wintry smile passed over his face; he stood up straighter; but he continued to speak in the halftones of the man from whose life all the salt has gone.