“The story has to do, in the first place,” said he, “with three men, John Billiter, Eustace Huckaby, and myself.”
“Huckaby?” cried Clementina, startled. “What has he to do with you?”
“The biggest blackguard of us all,” said Vandermeer.
Clementina lay back in her chair, her attention caught at once.
“Go on,” she said.
Whereupon Vandermeer began, and with remorseless veracity—for here truth was far more effective than fiction—told the story of the relations of the three with Quixtus, in the days of their comparative prosperity, when he himself was on the staff of a newspaper, Billiter in possession of the fag-end of his fortune, and Huckaby a tutor at Cambridge. He told how, one by one, they sank; how Quixtus held out the helping hand. He told of the weekly dinners, the overcoat pockets.
“Not a soul on earth but you three knew anything about it?” asked Clementina, in a quavering voice.
“As far as I know, not a soul.”
He told of the drunken dinner; of Quixtus’s anger; of the cessation of the intercourse; of the extraordinary evening when Quixtus had invited them to be his ministers of evil; of his madness; of his fixed idea to work wickedness; of his own suggestion as regards Tommy.
“You infamous devil!” said Clementina, between her set teeth. In her wildest conjectures, she had never imagined so grotesque and so pitiable a history. She sat absorbed, pale-cheeked, holding the extinct stump of cigarette between her fingers.