"And there is another matter for which I take some blame," Sir
Timothy went on, "the matter of Fairfax and Victor Bidlake. They
were neither of them young men for whose loss the world is any
the worse. Fairfax to some extent imposed upon me. He was
brought to The Walled House by a friend who should have known
better. He sought my confidence. The story he told was exactly
that of the mock drama upon the launch. Bidlake had taken his
wife. He had no wish to appeal to the Courts. He wished to
fight, a point of view with which I entirely sympathised. I
arranged a fight between the two. Bidlake funked it and never
turned up. My advice to Fairfax was, whenever he met Bidlake, to
give him the soundest thrashing he could. That night at Soto's I
caught sight of Fairfax some time before dinner. He was talking
to the woman who had been his wife, and he had evidently been
drinking. He drew me on one side. 'To-night,' he told me, 'I am
going to settle accounts with Bidlake.' 'Where?' I asked.
'Here,' he answered. He went out to the theatre, I upstairs to
dine. That was the extent of the knowledge I possessed which
enabled me to predict some unwonted happening that night.
Fairfax was a bedrugged and bedrunken decadent who had not the
courage afterwards to face what he had done.
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