"I don't know," she said, under her breath, and rested her head against the back of the chair, as though suddenly tired.
"Well, I know. You'll come out smirched, and you know it," said Mortimer, gazing intently at her. "Look here, Leila: I didn't come here to threaten you. I'm no black-mailer; I'm no criminal. I'm simply a decent sort of a man, who is pretty badly scared over what he's done in a moment of temptation. You know I had no thought of anything except to borrow enough on my I. O. U.'s to make a killing at Burbank's. I had to show them something big, so I filled in that cheque, not meaning to use it; and before I knew it I'd indorsed it, and was plunging against it. Then they stacked everything on me--by God, they did! and if I had not been in the condition I was in I'd have stopped payment. But it was too late when I realised what I was against. Leila, you know I'm not a bad man at heart. Can't you help a fellow?"
His manner, completely changed, had become the resentful and fretful appeal of the victim of plot and circumstance. All the savage brutality had been eliminated; the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were gone. It was really the man himself now, normally scared and repentant; the frightened, overfed pensioner on his wife's bounty; not the human beast maddened by fear and dissipation, half stunned, half panic-stricken, driven by sheer terror into a rôle which even he shrank from--had shrunk from all these years. For, leech and parasite that he was, Mortimer, however much the dirty acquisition of money might tempt him in theory, had not yet brought himself to the point of attempting the practice, even when in sorest straits and bitterest need. He didn't want to do it; he wished to get along without it, partly because of native inertia and an aversion to the mental nimbleness that he would be required to show as a law-breaker, partly because the word "black-mail" stood for what he did not dare suggest that he had come to, even to himself. His distaste was genuine; there were certain things which he didn't want to commit, and extortion was one of them. He could, at a pinch, lie to his wife, or try to scare her into giving him money; he could, when necessary, "borrow" from such men as Plank; but he had never cheated at cards, and he had never attempted to black-mail anybody except his wife--which, of course, was purely a family matter, and concerned nobody else.