He shook his head. "No other way at all," he replied. "Come, be reasonable; I'm not going to land you into a trap. Put the matter clearly to yourself. You are a pariah, outside the pale of civilised things; I offer you a fresh start. Mr. Norton Hyde, the convict, commits suicide--I pledge my word to you that the fraud shall not be discovered.

A certain young girl is saved from much trouble, and sorrow, and anxiety; I also am saved from the consequences of a very rash act, committed by our dead friend here. So far as you are concerned, you can start afresh, with your record wiped out. Come--yes or no?

"I don't trust you," I said. "What do you want to do with me? what purpose have you in this, apart from the hushing up of a scandal?"

He became thoughtful at that; presently, looking up, he answered me with what seemed to be a charming frankness, "You have the right to ask, and although I might refuse to reply, I want to treat you fairly," he said.

"In a certain business in which I am interested--a certain scheme I have on hand--I want help. You will be a man who has thrown everything, as it were, into the melting-pot of life: you will have everything to win, and nothing to lose. In other words, you are just the creature I want--the man ready to my hand, to do anything I may suggest. You haven't answered me yet; is it to be yes or no?"

I said, "No!" quickly, and he moved towards the bell with an impatient frown. He had only three steps to take, but in that brief moment I had a vision of myself handcuffed and going back to my prison; I could not bear it. He was within an inch of the bell, when I cried out the word that was to change all my life, and was to set me upon the most desperate venture I had yet had anything to do with. I cried out, "Yes."

He smiled, and came back to me. "You should learn to make up your mind more quickly," he said. "Now, let us see what we have to do. You've nothing to be afraid of, and you need take no notice of that creature in the corner there; he knows nothing, and will remember nothing. Strip yourself to the skin."

As I began to undress, I glanced at the old man in the corner; he sat in the same att.i.tude, with his head sunk in his hands. "What is wrong with him?" I asked.

Dr. Bardolph Just was bending over the body of the man on the couch; he did not look round. "Something snapped in his brain a little time ago,"

he answered me. "It is as though you had snapped the mainspring of a watch; the brain in him died at that moment."

"What caused it?" I asked, still shedding my clothes.

"Shock. Get your clothes off, and don't talk so much," he snapped.

He tossed certain garments to me one by one, and I flung him my own in return. So the change was made, and I presently stood up and looked down at myself, and saw myself as that young man who had stood in the garden and had talked to the girl. For, indeed, I was something like him in figure, and height, and appearance. When the doctor moved away from the couch I gasped, for there I lay, in the dress I had worn for a year, branded and numbered--and dead. It was not a pretty sight; I turned away from it, shuddering.

But the doctor laughed softly. "It is not given to every man to see himself as he will one day be," he said.

"What was his name?" I whispered.

"Gregory Pennington," he answered, looking at the body. "So you see at one stroke we get rid of Gregory Pennington, and of a certain unfortunate convict, named Norton Hyde. So far as your further christening is concerned, we must arrange that later, for this matter must be taken with a certain boldness, or weak spots may be discovered in it. I think you said you were hungry, and I daresay you've had enough of this room for the present."

"More than enough," I replied.

"Then come along, and let us see if we can find something to put better courage into you," he said. And gratefully enough I followed him from the room in that new disguise.

The house was a very large one. We traversed a number of corridors before coming to a room which seemed to be half-study and half-surgery.

I should not have known as to the latter half of it, but for the fact that the doctor, who did not seem to care to summon any servants there may have been, left me there while he went in search of food. I peeped behind a screen at one end of the room, and saw an array of bottles, and test tubes in stands, and other paraphernalia. At the further end of the room were great book cases reaching to the ceiling, and a big desk with a reading-lamp upon it. But even here, though the furniture was handsome, the room had a neglected appearance, as, indeed, I afterwards found every room in that house had.

Bardolph Just came back in a little while, carrying food and a decanter.

After he had set the food out on a table, and I had fallen to with a relish, he laughed softly, and said that, after all, he had forgotten to bring me a gla.s.s. He declared, however, that that was a matter soon remedied, and he went behind the screen, and came out with a tall measuring-gla.s.s in his hand. It seemed an uncanny thing to drink wine out of; but I had no choice.

He presently pulled open a drawer in the desk, and took out a cigar, and lighted it; as I had finished my meal, he tossed one to me, and I gratefully began to smoke. The man was evidently still turning over some matter in his mind, for he said nothing while he sat twisting the cigar round between his lips and looking at me. His back was turned towards the door of the room, and presently in that house of horror I saw the door begin slowly to open.

I suppose I ought to have cried out, but once again I was fascinated by what might happen at any moment, and perhaps in sheer wonder as to what was coming in. It was nothing worse, as it turned out, than the little, old grey-haired man I had seen in the further room, and who had evidently followed us. He crept in now, step by step, with that curious smile upon his face, and when he was fairly in the room closed the door--I noticed that it closed with a sharp little click, as though it had a spring lock.

Dr. Bardolph Just did a curious thing. As the lock clicked he suddenly sat rigid, gripping the arms of his chair, and staring at me as though from my face he would learn what was behind him. Seeing, I suppose, nothing in my expression to guide him, he suddenly swung sharply round and faced the little old man; and I thought at that moment that a quick sigh broke from him, as of relief. I wondered what he had expected to see.

"What the devil do you want?" he demanded, in a voice raised but little above a whisper. "Why do you follow me about?"

The old man spread out his hands in a deprecating fashion, and shook his head. "Nothing, sir," he said, "nothing at all. But he won't speak to me--and he has never been like that before. I don't understand it. I knelt beside him just now, and his dress was different--and--and--" I saw his hands go up to his lips, and pluck at them in that strange fashion--"and he won't speak to me."

The doctor turned from him to me, and shrugged his shoulders. "This is a nice apparition to be following a man about," he said petulantly. "I can't make him out at all."

"Who is he?" I ventured to ask in a whisper.

"The servant of the dead man--one of those faithful old fools that attach themselves to you, and won't be shaken off, I suppose. He came here to-night, following his unfortunate master. What the deuce am I to do with him?"

"He seems harmless enough," I whispered. "But isn't it rather dangerous to have him about here, after the fraud that has been committed. Won't he speak? Won't he say that this dead man is not the escaped convict, but his master?"

"There's no fear of that," replied the other. "I tell you something has snapped in his brain; he doesn't understand. If I turned him out into the world now, he would remember nothing, and would have no story to tell, even if he were questioned. But I don't want to turn him out--and yet he haunts me."

"You say he changed in a moment?" I asked.

Dr. Just nodded. "When he saw his master dead, he simply cried out, and afterwards remained as you see him now. I must dispose of him for the night, at least," he said, getting to his feet, and approaching the old man. "Come, Capper, I want you."

The little old man looked round at him as he said that name, and I saw a faint fear come into his eyes. He shrank away a little, but the doctor grasped his arm quickly, and drew him towards the door. He went out in that grasp pa.s.sively enough, and I was left alone again.

I had almost fallen asleep, worn out with the excitements of the day, when the doctor came back again. I started to my feet drowsily, and faced him.

"Good-night!" he said, and held out his hand to me--a cold hand, but firm and strong in its touch. "You may see and hear strange things in this house," he added, "but it is not your business to take any notice of them. You will be, I hope, properly grateful to me--the man who has saved you, and given you a new lease of life."

"Yes, I shall be grateful," I promised him.

He conducted me to a room in what seemed to be an outlying wing of the house, and left me to my own reflections. In truth, I was too tired to give much time to thought. I slipped off my clothes and got into bed, and was asleep in five minutes.

But I was not destined to sleep well, after all. In the first place, I was troubled most unaccountably by dreams, in which I saw myself going through the most extraordinary adventures, and finally hanging to what seemed to be the roof of Penthouse Prison, with the little old man of the grey hair grinning up at me from the ground below. And through my dreams there appeared always to go the light, quick figure of that girl I had seen in the grounds of the house; and always she went searching for someone. I dreamed at last that she came straight to me, and took me by the arms, and stared at me, and cried out that she had found the man she wanted. And so I sat up in bed in the darkness, struggling with someone very real, who was gripping me.

I almost shrieked, as I rolled out of bed, and tried to disengage myself from the arms of a man who was clinging to me. I contrived to drag him towards the window, where, by the faint light of the stars outside, I saw that it was the man Capper--that seemingly half-witted creature who had been the servant of the dead man.

"What do you want?" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

"I've been dreaming," said Capper.

"Well, what of that?" I demanded testily, "I've been dreaming, too."

"Yes, but not dreams like mine," whispered the old man, looking fearfully over his shoulder. "Tell me, do you think they'll come true?"

"I don't know what they were," I reminded him.

He clutched me by the arm, and stared up in my face. There seemed almost a light of madness in his eyes. "I dreamed that it happened a long time ago--before my head went wrong. I dreamed of a blow struck in the dark; I thought someone (it might have been myself, but I'm not sure even of that)--I dreamed that someone screamed, 'Murder!'"

In a growing excitement he had raised his voice almost to a scream; I clapped my hand over his lips as he got out the dreadful word. I felt my hair stirring on my scalp. I wondered if by chance something dreadful had happened in that house, of which this old man knew, and the memory of which was locked away in that closed brain of his.

"Let me stay here to-night," he pleaded, clinging to me. "I'll be still as a mouse; I'll lie in this corner on the floor."

So I let him lie there, and I went back to my bed. For a long time I lay awake, watching him and thinking about him; but gradually towards the morning I fell asleep, and slept heavily. When I awoke at last, with the sun shining in at my window, the man was gone, and my door stood open.

That was to be a day of happenings. Even now my mind holds but a confused memory of them, in which I seem to be now myself, and now some other man; now living on hope, and now sunk into the depths of fear and despair. For what I have to tell seems so incredible, that only by some knowledge of the man who carried the plot boldly through can any idea of how the business was arranged be arrived at.

Dr. Bardolph Just acted with promptness and decision that day. A messenger flew down towards London to summon the police; and a telegram sped over the wires back to Penthouse Prison. The missing convict had been found; all the world might come to the house of Dr. Bardolph Just, and see this thing for themselves. At the last, when we actually expected the enemy to arrive at our gates, as it were, I nervously plucked the doctor's sleeve, and whispered a question.

"What about his hair? They'll be sure to notice that."