"Can none get into any kind of communication with him?"
Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
"I shall be very happy," he said, "to give him any message you like
to send."
Both men stared at him.
"Give him a message?" they cried simultaneously. "How will you give
him a message?"
Basil smiled in his slow way.
"If you really want to know how I shall give him your message," he
began, but Bingham cried:
"Of course, of course," with a sort of frenzy.
"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a foot
into the air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on
one leg.
His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the
fact that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
"You drive me to it," he said. "You drive me to betray my friend.
And I will, for his own sake, betray him."
The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of
distress as of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure.
"Anything painful, of course--" he began.
Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that
struck them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.
"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked at
James Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to
your miserable library, with his futile books and his confounded
umbrella, and never seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have
you never noticed, stuck casually behind his spectacles and above
his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might have burned
heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my
fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith.
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