“And d’ye mind,” cried Sir John, “how he bet me you would not live a month?”
“Ay,” said Carew, “and Jennico knows best himself if in his gay youth, in foreign parts, he has not given good cause for this mortal enmity, though to be sure the mystery thickens when we remember how friendly you were with each other. Jennico is such a close dog; he keeps such a dashed tight counsel!”
I smiled. Jennico would keep his counsel still. I meant these good fellows should expound my riddles for me, not I theirs.
“But since I am dead,” said I, “I fear, Jack, thou hast lost on me again.”
“The gentleman did not leave his address,” said Sir John with a grin; and he furtively squeezed my hand to express his secret sense of the little transaction of the I O U’s.
“We made some clamour at the Embassy, I promise you,” interposed Carew; “we were anxious to pay him all his due, you may be sure. But devil a bit of satisfaction could we get, save indeed that the Ambassador took to his bed with a fit of gout, and you being dead, Jennico,—you are dead still, remember,—to bury you was the best thing your friends could do for you, till you were able to take fit measures to protect yourself. And indeed it was that queer old Tartar of yours, your János, or whatever you call him, who loudly insisted upon your demise, when we found the first alarm was unfounded and that you still breathed. Gad, I believe you have as many lives as a cat! This fellow then says to us in his queer jargon: ’My master lives, but he must all the same be thought dead.’ And faith he besought us with such urgency, that, what with seeing you lying there, and knowing what we knew of the foul play that had been practised upon you, we were ready enough to fall in with his desires. Sir John bethought him of his mother’s house at Richmond, and offered to accompany you there,—or rather your body: you were little less just then. Next the surgeon swore the journey would kill you, and your servant swore you should not be harboured in the town. The fellow knew you: ’Good breed,’ he said, ’not easily killed!’ And so he won the day, and Miles the surgeon gave in; but indeed he told me apart, ’twas waste of time disputing, for anyhow you could not see the noon. But here you are at my Lady Beddoes’s house at Richmond, alive and like to live, though you have ceased to exist for most men. There was a charming, really a most touching, obituary notice in the Gazettes; you have been duly lamented at the clubs—and forgotten within the usual nine days. Rumours will soon begin to get about of course, but nobody knows anything positive. The secret is still kept. János, I believe, has contrived to assuage the anxiety of your relatives.”
Here the speaker took so copious a pinch to refresh himself after his long speech that he set me off sneezing, whereupon my special Cerberus promptly made his appearance and bundled the visitors forth without more ado.
| * | * | * | * | * | * |
I have said that my friend’s belief in the Chevalier’s implication in the divers murderous onsets that had been made upon me, previous to his own, did not surprise me. The memory of M. de Ville-Rouge’s cry, as he dealt me what he believed my death stroke,—a cry in which it would be hard to say whether savage triumph or sheer vindictiveness most predominated,—had come back on me, as soon as I could think at all, with most revealing force.
His arrival in England had coincided with the beginning of the persecution. The look on his face as I had last seen it, that smile and that dimple, had haunted me during long hours of delirium with a most maddening, grotesque, and horrible likeness to the face of her I had so loved. Coupling these things in later sanity of mind with the other evidence, I could not doubt but that here had been some relative of Ottilie, who had interest to put an end to her husband’s existence. Had not her pock-marked Mercury at the close of our interview uttered words of earnest warning? ay, I minded them now: