He stopped suddenly with a gasping intake of the breath, and let his head roll forward on his breast like a fainting man. Vincott pushed me gently within the room, and I heard the door clang behind me. For a moment I could not speak. The tears rose in my throat and drowned the words. Julian was the first to recover his composure.
"I crave your pardon," he said, and his voice sounded in my ears with a sad familiarity like the echo of our boyhood. "I mistook you for another." And he sat down on a bench and covered his face with his hands.
"Julian!" I said, finding at length my voice, and I held out my hands to him. He uncovered his face and stared at me in sheer incredulity. Then with a cry of joy he sprang forwards, stumbling pitifully from the hindrance of his fetters.
"Morrice at last!" He lifted his hands and clapped them down into mine, and the quick movement jerked the chain between his handlocks so that it fell cold across my wrists. So we stood silent, memory speeding to and fro between our eyes and telling the same wistful tale within the heart of each of us. But in that brumous cell, lit only by a smoky lamp which served rather to deepen the shadows of the space which it left obscure than to illumine the circle immediately about it, such thoughts could not beguile one long; and a strange, unaccountable fear began to creep up in my mind like a mist. It seemed to me that the chain pressed ever tighter and tighter about my wrists, and grew cold like a ring of ice. The chill of it slipped into the marrow of my bones. I came almost to believe that I myself was manacled, and with that I felt once again that premonition of evil drawing near, which had numbed my spirit in the grey dawn at London. Now, however, the warning came to me with a clearer and more particular message. I had a penetrating conviction that this cell prefigured some scene in the years to come wherein I should fill the place of Julian; and, seeing him, I saw a dim image of myself as when a man looks into a clouded mirror. So thoroughly, indeed, did the fancy master me that I too became, as it were, the shadow and reflex of another, a mere counter and symbol representing one as yet unknown to me.
"I thought you would never come," said my friend, and I woke out of my trance.
"I started at once from Leyden," I replied; but Julian cut short my explanation.
"I am sure of it. I never doubted you. We have but half an hour, and I have much to tell."
He turned away and flung himself down on the bench, which was broad and had a rail at the back, such as you may see outside a village alehouse.
"Vincott has told you the history of my arrest?"
"Yes!" said I. The lamp stood upon a stool beside the bench, and I lifted it up and placed it on a rough bracket which was fixed to the wall above. The light fell full upon his face, which had grown extraordinary thin, with the skin very bloodless and tight about his jaws, so that the bones looked to have sharpened. Only around his eyes was there any colour, and that of a heavy purple. I sat down upon the stool, and Julian gave something like a sigh of content.