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“Lisette,” I continued, seeing him still silent. “Lisette is charged with the possession of certain jewels once the property of Lady Mordant. I am the witness who has identified those jewels. Your dupe, Harry Avenhill, who came up to rob my house in Suffolk, is the man who will charge this woman with her crime and establish the case against her. Whether we go to Vienna or persuade Lady Mordant to withdraw the charge, it is for you to say. I will give you just ten minutes by that clock upon your chimney. Use them well, I implore you. Think what you are doing before it is too late to think at all—the liberty this woman craves or the charge and punishment. Which is it to be, old man? Speak quickly, for my time is precious.”

For a little while he sat, his hands drumming the table, his eyes half closed. I knew that he was asking himself what would be the gain or the loss should he beckon some one from the shadows to enter the house and kill me. One witness would thus be removed from his path—but who would answer for the others? And was it possible that his old enemy, who had outwitted him so often, would be outwitted to-night? This seemed to me his argument. I watched him rise suddenly from his chair, peer out to the darkness, and as suddenly sit again. Whether his courage had failed him or this were the chosen moment for the attack, I shall never be able to say with certainty. For me it was an instant of acute suspense, of nervous listening for footsteps, of quick resolution and prompt decision. Let there be an echo of a step, but one sound without, I said, and I would shoot the man where he sat. Thus was I determined. In this dread perplexity did the instant pass.

“I cannot write,” he gasped at last. “Put your questions to me, and I will answer them.”

“And sign the document I have brought with me. So be it—the questions are here, in order. Let your answers be as brief.”

I sat at the head of the table and spread the document before me. The lamp shed a warm aureole of light upon the paper, but left the outer room in darkness. My words were few, but deliberate; his answers often but a mutter of sounds.

“Joan Fordibras, whose daughter is she?”

“The daughter of David Kennard of Illinois.”

“Her mother?”

“I am not acquainted with her name—a French Canadian. The records in Illinois will tell you.”

“How came she to be the ward of this man Fordibras?”

“His cowardice—his conscience, as men call it. Kennard was charged with the great safe robberies of the year 1885—he was innocent. They were my planning—my agents executed them. But Kennard—ah, he betrayed me, he would have stood in my path, and I removed him.”

“Then he was convicted?”

“He was convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. Fordibras, under the name of Changarnier—his real name—he is the cousin of that Changarnier who did France much mischief in the year 1870—Fordibras was then the Governor of the Sing Sing prison on the Hudson River. He was in my pay, but David Kennard had been his friend, and he took the daughter and brought her up as his own child. I did not forbid it—why should I? A woman, if she is pretty, is useful to my purposes. I wished to humble this man of iron, and I have done so. Pshaw, what a figure he cuts to-day! Skulking in Tunis like a paltry cutpurse—afraid of me, afraid but proud, my friend—proud, proud, as one of your great nobles. That is Hubert Fordibras. Speak a word to the police, and you may arrest him. Hush—I will send you evidence. He is proud, and there is heart in him. Tear it out, for he is a traitor. He has shut his eyes and held out his hands, and I have put money into them. Tear the heart out of him, for he will kill the woman you love.”

I ignored the savage treachery of this, its brutality and plain-spoken hatred. The General’s pride must have been a bitter burden to this creeping scoundrel with his insufferable vanities and his intense desire to abase all men before him. The quarrel was nothing to me—I could well wish that Hubert Fordibras might never cross my path again.

“Traitor or not—it is your concern,” I said. “There is another question here. When Joan Fordibras wore my stolen pearls in London, was the General aware that they were stolen?”

A smile, revoltingly sardonic, crossed his ashen face.

“Would he have the brains? She wore them at my dictation. I had long watched you—you did not know it, but knowledge was coming to you. I said that you must be removed from my path. God of heaven! Why were you not struck dead before Harry Ross lay dead on Palling beach?”

“The young seaman who was found with the Red Diamond of Ford Valley in his possession! The brother of Colin Ross who took your place upon the Ellida? I begin to understand—he was carrying those jewels to London, and an accident overtook him? That was a grave misfortune for you.”

He clenched his hands and looked me full in the face.

“Had he lived I would have torn him limb from limb. He stole the jewels from my dispatch boat and was drowned escaping to shore. My friend, the good God was merciful to him that He let him die.”

I could not but smile at piety so amazing. In truth a new excitement had seized upon me, and my desire to escape the house had now become a fever of impatience. What if an accident befell me, or an agent of evil stood suddenly between Joan and my tidings! How if the cup were dashed from my lips at the last moment! Good God! What an agony, even in imagination!

“Mr. Imroth,” I said, rising upon the impulse. “I will cable at once to Vienna, saying that I have no evidence to offer, and the girl Lisette will be discharged. Go where you will, but leave England. To-night I spare you. But should you cross my path again, I will hang you as surely as there is an Almighty God to judge your deeds and punish you for them. That is my last word to you. I pray with all my soul that I shall never see your face again.”

He did not move, uttered no sound, sat like a figure of stone in his chair. And so I left him and went out into the night.

* * * * *

For I was going to Joan, to bear to her the supreme tidings of my message, to lay this gift of knowledge at her feet, and in those eyes so dear to read the truth which, beyond all else on earth, was my desire.

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My friend Mulock in his “Magnus and Morna,” has written that “ye should drink at a wedding with discerning lest you lose the way upon a straight road afterwards.” ’Tis no man I am to quarrel with a precept so honest or a reflection upon matrimony so prudent. We shall drink at the Goldsmith Club this night to the lost liberty of my dear comrade Ean Fabos, and would that it could be with that same measure the poet speaks of. If I doubt me of the possibility, ’tis to remember with Horace, that wine is mighty to inspire new hopes, and able to drown the bitterness of cares. Shall we reflect upon this loss to our club, and to society, with parched throats, and a hand upon the soda-water syphon? Bacchus and the Corybantes forbid! We will drown it in the best—at my dear friend’s request, and, as he would wish it, ah, noble heart!—at his expense.

He was married at the Parish Church in Hampstead, you should know, and Timothy McShanus it was who gave the bride away. The little witch of a shepherdess that has carried honest men twice round the world and back again, set other women weeping, and come at last to that sure port which Destiny had built for her—was she changed from the black-eyed minx I saw at Kensington, less mischievous, less sprightly, more of a woman, not so much the pretty child of the school-books? No, I say, a thousand times, no! There is golden light about her path, and all the spirits of laughter shine in her eyes. Could I search all the cities for a wife for my friend, this is the dear heart I would choose for him; this the companion I would name for his blessing. She has won a brave man’s love, and is happy therein. God be good to her, says old Timothy—and he is one that has read the heart of women.