‘You won’t tell Dudley?’
‘Of course not. But why not? You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘No; but–‘
‘Well, I won’t tell him, anyway. But I’m glad you told me about him. Dudley was so eloquent about burglars that he almost had me going. I wonder where he rushed off to?’
Dudley Pickering had rushed off to his bedroom, and was examining a revolver there. He examined it carefully, keenly. Preparedness was Dudley Pickering’s slogan. He looked rather like a stout sheriff in a film drama.
16
In the interesting land of India, where snakes abound and scorpions are common objects of the wayside, a native who has had the misfortune to be bitten by one of the latter pursues an admirably common-sense plan. He does not stop to lament, nor does he hang about analysing his emotions. He runs and runs and runs, and keeps on running until he has worked the poison out of his system. Not until then does he attempt introspection.
Lord Dawlish, though ignorant of this fact, pursued almost identically the same policy. He did not run on leaving Lady Wetherby’s house, but he took a very long and very rapid walk, than which in times of stress there are few things of greater medicinal value to the human mind. To increase the similarity, he was conscious of a curious sense of being poisoned. He felt stifled–in want of air.
Bill was a simple young man, and he had a simple code of ethics. Above all things he prized and admired and demanded from his friends the quality of straightness. It was his one demand. He had never actually had a criminal friend, but he was quite capable of intimacy with even a criminal, provided only that there was something spacious about his brand of crime and that it did not involve anything mean or underhand. It was the fact that Mr Breitstein whom Claire had wished him to insinuate into his club, though acquitted of actual crime, had been proved guilty of meanness and treachery, that had so prejudiced Bill against him. The worst accusation that he could bring against a man was that he was not square, that he had not played the game.
Claire had not been square. It was that, more than the shock of surprise of Lady Wetherby’s news, that had sent him striding along the State Road at the rate of five miles an hour, staring before him with unseeing eyes. A sudden recollection of their last interview brought a dull flush to Bill’s face and accelerated his speed. He felt physically ill.
It was not immediately that he had arrived at even this sketchy outline of his feelings. For perhaps a mile he walked as the scorpion-stung natives run–blindly, wildly, with nothing in his mind but a desire to walk faster and faster, to walk as no man had ever walked before. And then–one does not wish to be unduly realistic, but the fact is too important to be ignored–he began to perspire. And hard upon that unrefined but wonder-working flow came a certain healing of spirit. Dimly at first but every moment more clearly, he found it possible to think.
In a man of Bill’s temperament there are so many qualities wounded by a blow such as he had received, that it is hardly surprising that his emotions, when he began to examine them, were mixed. Now one, now another, of his wounds presented itself to his notice. And then individual wounds would become difficult to distinguish in the mass of injuries. Spiritually, he was in the position of a man who has been hit simultaneously in a number of sensitive spots by a variety of hard and hurtful things. He was as little able, during the early stages of his meditations, to say where he was hurt most as a man who had been stabbed in the back, bitten in the ankle, hit in the eye, smitten with a blackjack, and kicked on the shin in the same moment of time. All that such a man would be able to say with certainty would be that unpleasant things had happened to him; and that was all that Bill was able to say.