He pulled himself up with a jerk, drew a deep breath and cast an uneasy look up and down the street.
“Do you know,” he half whispered, “I sometimes think I am followed. I cannot seem to get away all by myself. There is always some one around. Do you think that pure fancy? Am I getting to be a little batty? Are they afraid that I will destroy myself? I have been tempted to do so, but I am not yet ready to meet my uncle’s eye.”
I heard this though it was rather muttered than said and my cold heart seemed to turn over in my bosom, for despair was in the tone and the vision which came with it was not that of Orpha but of another woman—the woman he had lost as he had lost his fortune and lost the man whose gaze he dared not cross death’s river to meet.
I tried to take his hand—to bridge the fathomless gulf between us; but he fixed me with his eye, and, laughing with an echo which caused the two or three passers-by to turn their heads as they hurried on, he said in measured tones:
“You are the cause of it all.” And turned away and passed quickly down the street, leaving me both exhausted and unenlightened.
XLIV
Next day I received a telegram from Mr. Jackson. It was to the effect that he would like some information concerning a man named John E. Miller, who had his office somewhere on Thirty-fifth Street. He was an attorney and in some way connected with the business in which we were interested.
This, as you will see, brings us to the incident related in the first chapter of this story. Having obtained Mr. Miller’s address from the telephone book, I was searching the block for his number when the gentleman himself, anxious to be off to his injured child and, observing how I looked this way and that, rushed up to me and making sure that I answered to the name of Edgar Quenton Bartholomew, thrust into my hands a letter and after that a package containing, as he said, a key of much importance, both of which were obviously meant for Edgar and not for me.
Why, in the confusion of the moment, I let him go, leaving the key and letter in my hand, and why, after taking them to my hotel, I had the struggle of my life deciding what I should do with them, should now be plain to you. For I felt as sure then as later, that the key which had thus, by a stroke of Providence, come into my possession was the key found by some one and forwarded by some one, without the knowledge of the police, to this Mr. Miller who in turn supposed he had placed it in Edgar’s hands.
Believing this, I also believed that it was the only Open sesame to some hitherto undiscovered drawer or cupboard in which the will might be found. If passed on to Edgar what surety had I that if this will should prove to be inimical to his interests it would ever see the light.