Wantele nodded. That was certainly a good way in which to describe Lingard's mental attitude.
"But I have not quite made up my mind as to the best course," said Richard Maule. "I shall think the matter over for a day or two. But I fear--and I don't mind telling you, Dick, that the thought isn't exactly a pleasant one to me--that it must be what I said just now."
He beckoned to the other to come nearer, and Wantele did so, his pale face full of pain and anger.
"I want you to understand," his cousin added, in a low voice, "that when I've said that I've said all. The business won't affect me as it would most men. I never gave a thought to the world's opinion in old days, and why should I do so now?"
He spoke hesitatingly, awkwardly. It was disagreeable to him to be thus lying to his cousin--to be filling the heart of the man who loved him with a flood of indignant pity and pain. But the tragi-comedy had to be played out.
"I shall really feel very much more comfortable when it's all over," he said. "I don't fancy even lawyers waste as much time as they used to do over this kind of thing. And this case is so simple, so straightforward. I shall be sorry for the Kayes. But they must have known it. I fancy everybody in this neighbourhood knew it. People will pity Athena; they will agree that she had every excuse----"
He leant back in his chair. There was nothing more to say.
"Shall I call Carver?" asked Wantele solicitously.
"No. Not now. But I should be obliged if you will tell him that I shall want him in an hour. I shall try and read for a while by the fire."
Richard Maule waited till he heard the sounds of his cousin's quick footsteps die away. Then he rose feebly and walked over to the recess which had been fitted up as a medicine cupboard in the days of his childhood, when drugs were more the fashion than they are now.
In a wide-necked, glass-stoppered bottle were the crystals of chloral which he had long used in preference to the more usual liquid form. He knew to a nicety the dose which he himself could take with safety, the dose which sometimes failed to induce sleep.
He now measured out in his hand some three times his usual dose.
Had Dick Wantele's answer been different, Richard Maule would have administered to himself the crystals he now held in his hand. But Dick's decision--what the man of average morality would have regarded as his noble and unselfish decision--had signed another human being's death-warrant.