"You can publish it broadcast in every newspaper in England," said Paul. "I'm making no bargains. Good God! I'm asking for nothing but the truth. What use I make of it is my affair. You can do—the three of you—what you like. Let the world know. It doesn't matter. It's I that matter—my life and my conscience and my soul that matter."
"Don't be too hard upon me," Silas besought him very humbly.
"Tell me about myself," said Paul.
Silas Finn wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and covered his eyes with his hand. "That can only mean telling you about myself," he said. "It's raking up a past which I had hoped, with God's help, to bury. But I have sinned to-night, and it is my punishment to tell you. And you have a right to know. My father was a porter in Covent Garden Market. My mother—I've already mentioned—"
"Yes—the Sicilian and the barrel organ—I remember," said Paul, with a shiver.
"I had a hard boyhood. But I rose a little above my class. I educated myself more or less. At last I became assistant in a fishmonger's shop. Our friend Simmons here and I were boys together. We fell in love with the same girl. I married her. Not long afterward she gave way to drink. I found that in all kinds of ways I had mistaken her character. I can't describe your own mother to you. She had a violent temper. So had I. My life was a hell upon earth. One day she goaded me beyond my endurance and I struck at her with a knife. I meant at the bloodred instant to kill her. But I didn't. I nearly killed her. I went to prison for three years. When I came out she had vanished, taking you with her. In prison I found the Grace of God and I vowed it should be my guide through life. As soon as I was free from police supervision I changed my name—I believe it's a good old Devonshire name; my father came from there—the prison taint hung about it. Then, when I found I could extend a miserable little business I had got together, I changed it again to suit my trade. That's about all."
There was a spell of dead silence. The shrunken man, stricken with a sense of his sin of oath-breaking, had Spoken without change of attitude, his hand over his eyes. Paul, too, sat motionless, and neither Jane nor Barney Bill spoke. Presently Silas Finn continued:
"For many years I tried to find my wife and son—but it was not God's will. I have lived with the stain of murder on my soul"—his voice sank—"and it has never been washed away. Perhaps it will be in God's good time.... And I had condemned my son to a horrible existence—for I knew my wife was not capable of bringing you up in the way of clean living. I was right. Simmons has since told me—and I was crushed beneath the burden of my sins."
After a pause he raised a drawn face and went on to tell of his meeting, the year before, with Barney Bill, of whom he had lost track when the prison doors had closed behind him. It had been in one of his Fish Palaces where Bill was eating. They recognized each other. Barney Bill told his tale: how he had run across Polly Kegworthy after a dozen years' wandering; how, for love of his old friend, he had taken Paul, child of astonishing promise, away from Bludston—
"Do you remember, sonny, when I left you alone that night and went to the other side of the brickfield? It was to think it out," said Bill. "To think out my duty as a man."