“He professed a profound interest in the great work,” she continued presently, “and was indeed not a little forward in contributing to it. He attached himself to us, accompanied us everywhere, and quickly made himself indispensable to my father, who regarded his skill and courage with something approaching infatuation. There was no rock so high, no swamp so perilous, but Mr Wyllie would dare it in pursuit of valuable specimens. He seemed endowed with a demoniac energy, to possess a charmed life. He was wonderful, I admit; but there was always something about him that repelled me, that made me conscious of an instinctive antipathy in his presence. My dear father would habitually, when possible, revive and release the drugged insects after finishing with them; Mr Wyllie, on the contrary, would strip off their beautiful wings with a savage zest, or crush them between his coarse fingers into glittering meal. He was a dangerous man, and he always carried about with him, pinned into the inside crown of his flat-topped felt hat, a dried specimen of the moth called the Death’s Head. It was his piratical emblem, he would declare; and indeed it was a suitable one. Judge, then, of my horror and disgust, when I came to realize, as I did, that his pursuit all this time was not of my father’s interests, but of my father’s unhappy child!”
Her fair head drooped, and she spoke in a lower voice.
“I will not dwell upon the details of my discovery, but will hasten to the conclusion. Unthwarted by my declared aversion, confident in my father’s sympathy, this man made no secret, after his first avowal and repulse, of his intention to possess me. My father was blind to my misery and deaf to my protestations. The other held him in complete moral subjugation. I was at this time grown to be a woman, and of an age to assert myself. I was forming some wild scheme of escape, when the blow fell that for a while deprived me of my reason. One day my father, having rashly climbed a cliff-side in pursuit of a specimen, slipped, and was hurled lifeless at my very feet. The shock threw me into a cataleptic trance, from which I did not recover for several weeks.
“That occurred in Switzerland, in the Zermatt valley, and when I awoke to my senses it was to find myself lying in a little hospice at St Niklaus which latterly we had been making our headquarters, and Mr Wyllie assuming the sole charge of my fortune and destinies.
“I cannot describe the feelings with which I realized my unhappy orphaned position, or the intensified horror with which I regarded this man, now justified in some measure in claiming my gratitude. He had devoted himself, while I lay insensible, to my affairs and my comfort, and might have expected some acknowledgment; but I looked upon him with an indescribable loathing, which, struggle as I would, I could make but a poor show of concealing. He was fully conscious of my attitude, of course, and, finding all efforts to conciliate me useless, brought matters very quickly to a crisis. One day he asked me abruptly what I proposed doing for a living, if I persisted in my refusal to join my fortunes with his. I stared at him in amazement; when he informed me, with the utmost sang-froid, that, by a lately executed will, my father had left him all his small fortune (including the material for the book) in trust for me, provided that I married him within a year of the testator’s death, and to him solely, in the event of my rejecting that condition. Furthermore he acquainted me with the facts that a considerable undischarged debt lay to my discredit at the hospice, that, so far as he knew, I was entirely without means, and that if he came forward to assist me, it must be on the express stipulation that I would give myself to him in pledge for that accommodation, when he would hope to convince me in time of the wisdom and policy of my subscribing to the terms of the will.
“Mr Balm, I seemed to see in a flash the whole black depravity of the man. More, I remembered then that he had been on the hill with my father on the day of the fatal accident, and, in a fit of ungovernable passion and horror, I denounced him to his face. I accused him of having coerced my father into making the will, and then, in order to secure the permanency of its provisions, of tempting my unhappy parent to his destruction.
“I thought for a moment he would have killed me; and then he answered. I wish never again to invite a scene so appalling in its revelation of the secret abysses of wickedness. Utterly unnerved and overcome, I stammered out some propitiatory phrases, and escaped to my room. My only thought, my only hope was flight. I had a sum of money in my possession—for of late years my father had committed to me the business of our expenditure—and with that, and my small stock of jewels, I stole out in the grey of the next dawn, and made my way to Visp. I need not trouble you with the details of my flight—its happy accidents and living apprehensions. It is enough to say that I succeeded eventually in reaching London in safety. The experience of my later life had taught me wisdom and caution, and I was fortunate in keeping my head and my wits in somewhat bewildering circumstances. I parted with my jewels for a fair sum, and then, wishing to remove myself as far as possible from the likely arena of my persecutor’s enquiries, decided to bury myself in some obscure district of the suburbs, where I could rally my small forces, and think out the means to procure myself a livelihood. My travels combined with my early studies had made me fairly proficient in several European languages, and my father had always carried about with him for his correspondence a portable typewriter, which I had soon learned to manipulate. Finally, accident established me here, where I have now lived, in doubt and agitation, for a little over a week.”
She ended, and for a full minute a profound silence succeeded her narration.
“Pardon me,” said Gilead, then: “there is something more.”
“The telegram?” she answered, with a broken, most pitiful sigh. “O! Mr Balm, I can only assume that, ambiguous as I had supposed my advertisement to be, he must have seen and profited by it to get upon my tracks. It reached me only shortly before your arrival, and upon its receipt I had a short return of the illness with whose first attack he had been so fatally associated. He may be even here now, close by, somewhere in the neighbourhood!”