"I"m glad you use the right word," I retorted. "I do demand one or two things, and I"m sure that you"ll see that it is best to comply with them. In the first place, I demand your silence as to myself."
"And if I refuse?" He had seated himself by this time in his usual chair, and he sat looking at me, with the heavy stick he carried laid across his knees. "What then?"
I had made up my mind what to say, and I said it at once, though with no real intention of ever putting my threat into execution; I merely wanted to frighten him.
"Then I shall kill you," I said quietly. "That is no idle threat, as you may perhaps understand. You"re a cleverer man than I am, because I was never blessed with much brains; and you will see for yourself that, hunted wretch as I am, it does not matter very much what becomes of me.
Nevertheless, I have the natural desire to live, and I only ask to be let alone. The Norton Hyde you knew is buried in the prison to which you sent him; let him rest there. A certain other man, who bears a resemblance to him, finds it necessary to pay you a visit----"
"To break into my house, you mean!" he exclaimed violently. "Your own action is the best answer that can be given to any such suggestion as you make in regard to secrecy. What safety is there for me while you are at large in the world? I"m an old and feeble man; you come here with threats on your lips to begin with."
"I threaten you only because I know what you intend to do," I replied.
"I overheard you last night, promising the woman that I should be hunted down; even making arrangements with her as to how best to set about that hunting down. Consequently I have to protect myself."
He looked at me sourly for a moment or two, as though making up his mind how best to work round me. "So you"ve been in the house all night, have you?" he said. "I shouldn"t have slept quite so soundly if I"d known that, I can a.s.sure you. My duty is clear; respectable citizens must be protected against escaped jail-birds and vagrants of your order."
He sprang from his chair, and made a movement towards a great bell rope that hung at the side of the fireplace. But I was too quick for him; I caught him by the arm, and swung him away from it, so that he lurched and staggered towards the other side of the room. There, panting, and with his stick half raised as though to strike me down, he stood watching me.
"Now, I don"t want to hurt you," I said; "but in this matter I am desperate. There is more hangs to it than you can understand. You"ve done evil enough; the money I stole from you has been paid for in one long year of bitter bondage--paid for doubly, by reason of the fact that I have no name, and no place in the world, and no hope, and no future.
You"ve taken your toll out of me; all I ask now is to be let alone."
"I won"t do it!" he almost shrieked at me. "You shall go back to your prison; you shall rot there for just so many years as they will add to your original sentence. You shan"t live among honest men; you shall go back to your prison."
I think no shame even now of what I did. My rage against the vindictive old man was so great that I wonder I did not strike the feeble life out of him where he stood mouthing at me. I strode up to him and wrenched the stick out of his hands, took him by the collar of his dressing-gown and shook him backwards and forwards, until at last, half in terror and half in weakness, he dropped upon his knees before me.
"Don"t--don"t kill me, Norton," he whimpered.
"Then you must swear to me to let me alone," I said. "Promise that, and I"ll never come near you again, and you shall never hear of me again.
It"s an easy thing to do; surely you must see for yourself that I can"t rush into the light of day; I should never have come near you to-night, but that by the merest chance I found out that the woman Martha Leach was coming to you, and so guessed what her errand was. Come--swear to leave me alone!"
"I swear--I do truly swear!" he said; and I took my hands from him and let him stagger to his feet.
He got back to his chair again, and sat there, breathing hard, with his lips opening and shutting; I saw that he had had a bad fright. I do not think, after all, that even in my rage I could have killed him, badly as he had served me; but I was relieved now to see that I had effected my purpose. I did not think he would be likely to trouble me again with any threats of exposure; for the first time in his life he appeared to have a very wholesome dread of me. Indeed, now he began, as soon as he had got his breath, to seek in some measure to propitiate me.
"I was excited--annoyed," he said. "Of course, my dear boy, I should never have done anything against you--not really, you know. But it was a great shock to me, when that woman came and told me that you were alive and in the neighbourhood--that was a horrible shock. Not but what, Norton, I was glad, in a way--glad to know that you were alive again."
"We"ll take that for granted," I said with a laugh. "We have no reason to love each other, you and I, Uncle Zabdiel; and all I ask is that you shall forget that you ever saw me after I disappeared into my prison. To you, and to anyone else in the world who may be interested in the information, I am John New."
"Is that the name you have given yourself?" he asked sharply.
"The name that has been given to me by a certain friend I have found," I replied. "I spoke just now of a second matter about which I wanted to talk to you--a matter of serious moment to myself, and one in which you can do a kindly action."
He looked at me in the old suspicious manner; yet I saw that in his fear of me he was anxious to please me. "What is it?" he demanded. "And why should I do it? I don"t believe in kindly actions."
I seated myself on the table beside him, and laid the heavy stick behind me. "Uncle Zabdiel," I began, leaning down so as to look into his eyes, "you"re an old man, and, in the ordinary course of things, you can"t have very long to live."
"What the devil are you talking about?" he exclaimed angrily. "There"s nothing the matter with me; I"m younger and stronger, in my feelings at least, than I ever was. I"m hale and hearty."
"You"re a weak and defenceless old man, living all alone, with no one in the world to care for you--with no one to trouble much whether you live or whether you die," I went on persistently. "G.o.d knows you might have made something of me, if you"d ever set about it in any other fashion than that you chose to adopt; but you killed Norton Hyde, and he"s done with and forgotten. And you"re going on in the same hard, grinding fashion for the rest of your days, until some day, if nothing happens to you----"
He looked at me with gaping mouth. "What should happen to me?" he asked in a whisper.
I shrugged my shoulders. "How can I possibly tell?" I answered. "I say that if nothing happens to you, some fine morning you"ll be found lying out stark and stiff on that great bed of yours upstairs, with your eyes open or shut, as the case may be; and you"ll be just the husk of a poor old creature who couldn"t take his gold with him, and has slipped away in the night to meet the G.o.d whose laws of humanity and tenderness he had outraged from the beginning. Yes, Uncle Zabdiel, you"ll be just a dead old man, leaving behind you certain property, to be squabbled over and fought over. And that will be the end of you."
"You"re trying to frighten me," he said, with nervous fingers plucking at his lips. "I"m very well, and I"m very strong."
"I"m not trying to frighten you; I"m telling you facts. It is just left for you to set against all the wrong you have done one little good deed that may help to balance matters at the finish. And you won"t do it."
"I never said I wouldn"t do it," he pleaded. "You take me up so suddenly, Norton; you"ve no patience. I am an old man, as you say, and sometimes my health and strength are not what they were; but, then, doctors are so infernally expensive. Tell me what you want me to do, my boy; I"ll do it if I can."
I was so certain that I had absolutely subdued him that I did not hesitate to lay my plan before him: it was a plan I had had in my mind all the day before, and for some part at least of that night I had spent in the house.
"There is a young lady whom I have met under curious circ.u.mstances," I began earnestly, "and that young lady is in great danger."
"What"s that to do with me?" he snapped, with something of his old manner.
"Will you listen?" I asked impatiently. "Just understand that this young lady is nothing to me, and never can be anything; but I want to help her. She hasn"t a friend in the world except myself, and I want to find some place to which, in an emergency, I can bring her, and where she will be safe. I tell you frankly I wouldn"t suggest this to you if there were any other place on earth to which I could take her; but every other way of escape seems barred. If I can persuade her to trust me, will you give her shelter here?"
He looked up at me for a moment or two. I saw that it was in his mind to refuse flatly to have anything to do with the matter. But he had been more shaken that night even than I suspected, and he was afraid to refuse me anything. Nevertheless, he began to beat round the question, in the hope of evading a direct answer to it.
"What should I do with a girl here?" he asked. "There"s only one old woman who comes to the house to look after me. This is no place for a girl; besides, if she"s a decent sort of girl, she ought to have a mother or a father, or some sort of relative, to look after her."
"I"ve told you that she"s absolutely alone in the world," I replied to that.
"And what"s her danger?" he asked. "We live in the twentieth century, and there are the police----"
"Can _I_ apply to the police?" I asked him.
"No, I suppose you can"t," he acknowledged. "Well, at any rate, let me know what you want me to do, and how long the girl will stop--and I"ll do the best I can. After all, perhaps what you said about me being an old man, and being found dead, and all that sort of thing--perhaps it may have some truth in it. And I"ve not been so very hard on people, and even if I have, you seem to think that this kindness to the young lady will make it all right for me. Because, you know," he added, with a shake of the head, "it"s a great deal to ask anyone to do. Girls are more nuisance than they"re worth. Boys are bad enough--but girls!" He held up his hands in horror at the mere thought of them.
I felt very grateful to him, and quite elated at my success. I took one of his feeble old hands, which he yielded with reluctance, and shook it warmly. "You"re doing a greater kindness than you can imagine," I said.
"I"ll let you know if I can persuade the girl to come here; I won"t take you by surprise again."
"I"m glad to know that, at least," he said. "You"ve given me an awful shock as it is. Now I suppose you"ll go away again quietly?"
"Yes," I said, getting down from the table, "I"ll go away again. But let me give you a word of warning, Uncle Zabdiel: even the best of us are inclined to forget promises in this world. You have sworn that you will not tell any one my secret."
"My dear boy," he whined, "do you seriously think that I should betray you?"
"No," I answered, "I don"t think you would. It would be bad for you if you did; my vengeance would reach quite a long way."
"All right, my boy," he replied hastily, as he got to his feet and moved away from me. "No threats; no threats; they are quite unnecessary."
When I left him it was fully daylight. I came out of the house into the narrow, high-walled garden, and left him standing at the door in his black skull-cap and dressing-gown, peering out at me; then the door was closed, and the dark house swallowed him up.
I was now quite determined that I would go back to the house of Bardolph Just, and would find out for myself what was happening there. I had no real hope of meeting Debora, save by accident; I knew that since my disclosure I was less to her than any common tramp she might meet upon the roadside. But when I thought of her, without a friend, in that great house, and with one man and one woman at least bent upon her death, I felt that private considerations must be tossed aside, and that I must swallow my pride and my sense of injury, and must go to her help. If by some good fortune I could persuade her that the jail-bird she knew me to be was swallowed up in the man who hopelessly loved her, and was eager to help her, I might yet be able to perform that miracle of saving her.
I felt that I had conquered the man I had least hope of conquering--Uncle Zabdiel; I was less afraid of others than I had been of him.
The thought of Martha Leach troubled me most; there was something so implacable about her enmity. That she meant to destroy the girl, I knew; and I felt certain, from what I had heard, that she was equally bent on destroying me. I chuckled to myself at the thought that in that second business I had defeated her; I was equally confident that I should defeat her in the first. For in defeating her I knew that my surest weapon would be the doctor himself, because anything that happened to me in the way of exposure must bring that dead man from his grave, and must revive that scandal he was so anxious to cover up. I made a shrewd guess that the woman, in rushing full tilt against me, was doing so blindly, and without consulting Bardolph Just. Knowing the power of that man over her, I thought that I could stop her even more easily than I had stopped my uncle.