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Updated: September 8, 2025
By night the streets of Mangadone were a sight that many legitimate trippers had turned out to witness. The trams were crowded and the native shops flared with light, for the night is cool and the day hot and stifling; therefore, by night a large proportion of the inhabitants of Mangadone take their pleasure out of doors.
Wilder had something to say to Hartley, and Coryndon handed himself over like a coat or an umbrella to Mrs. Wilder, who, he knew, was placing a low valuation upon him, and was already a little impatient at his lack of vitality. She was calling him a bore, behind her fine, hard eyes, and having exhausted Mangadone in a few sentences, wondered what sort of bore he really was.
The distances turned into shadowy blue, and from blue to purple, until only a few flecks of golden light across the pearl-silver told that it was gone eternally; that its hour was spent, for good or ill, and that Mangadone had come one evening nearer to the end of measureless Time; but the Rev. Francis Heath did not regard its going.
After that, poverty and ruin drove him slowly from his house outside Mangadone to the shelter of the shop in Paradise Street, and from there, at length, to the burrow in the Colonnade. The bitterness of his own fall was great enough in itself to harden the heart of any man, but it was doubled by the story of the years that followed.
"In one shop only in Mangadone," he said; "nay, in one shop only in the whole world may such silk be found. Thus, in his craft, hath mine enemy overreached himself." "Thou art certain of this?" "As I am that the sun will rise." Coryndon looked again at the silk, and sat silently thinking. "The piece is cut off roughly," he said, after a moment of reflection.
It was a long, hot walk to the bungalow where Joicey lived, over the Banking House itself, and the vast compound was arid and bare from three days of scorching drought. Coryndon's feet sounded gritting on the red, hard drive that led to the cool of the porch. No one called at such an hour; it was unheard of in Mangadone, where the day from two to five was sacred from interruption.
Joicey did not set the glass back on to the table, he held it between him and the light, and eyed it, or, rather, it should be said that he watched his own hand, and when he saw that it was quite steady he set down the wine untasted. "Paradise Street? I never go down there. I wasn't in Mangadone that night," his face was dead white with a sick, leprous whiteness.
Coryndon loved moving waters, and he remembered that somewhere, miles away from Mangadone, he had played along a river bank, little better than the small native children who played there now, and he saw the green jungle-clearing, the red road, and the roof of his father's bungalow, and he fancied he could hear the cry of the paddy-birds, and the voices of the water-men who came and went through the long, eventless days.
A long silence followed upon his words, and Joicey mopped his face with his handkerchief, breathing hard through his nose, his hands shaking as though he was caught by an ague fit. "I'm in a corner," he said at last; "you've got the whip-hand of me, Coryndon, but when I said I was not in Mangadone that night, I was speaking the truth." "You were splitting a hair," suggested Coryndon.
Heath relapsed into silence for some little time, and when he spoke again it was with the manner of a man who gives all his facts accurately. He omitted no detail and he set the story of Rydal before Coryndon, plainly and clearly. Rydal had been a clerk in the Mangadone Bank, and had been in the place for some years before he went home and returned with a wife.
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