“I never realised before,” he said steadily, almost with insolence, “that the blackmailer could be blackmailed.”
“Nevertheless,” said Westerham, “such is the case.”
“It is with every confidence,” the baronet continued, “that I make you my present offer. You have divined my secret just as I have divined yours; it would, however, be just as well for both if I explained every motive of my action.”
He paused and looked for a moment almost shyly out of the port-hole, which swung up and down between sea and sky.
“Where I have been,” he said, “women are few and far between. I never cared for any of them—until—until—I saw this picture.”
He tapped his breast lightly.
“Do you think,” he continued, his voice rising louder again, “that I should ever have set out for England if I had not been drawn back by this?”
He tapped his breast again. Then his eyes grew wider and his nostrils distended.
“I suppose,” he cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice, “that I am a poet. But I am a poet of the open air. Do you think that I care a glass of barbed-wire whisky for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world? I began life, as they call it, in England, when I was young. What do you think I care for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie land, the tall, blue grass, the open sky, the joy of the weary body that has ridden hard after cattle all the day!”
He laughed shortly.