There came a booming crash overhead and the room for a moment weltered with ghastly light. In its passing I saw Duke leap to his feet, and there was something beside him—a shape—a mist—one of the phantoms of his brain—no, of mine—Modred, pointing and smiling. It was gone in an instant—a mere trick of the nerves. But, as I stood shivering and blinded, I heard Duke cry in a terrible voice:
“Renny—listen! It was on such a night as this that my father poisoned me!”
CHAPTER XXI.
THE CALM BEFORE.
Long after the storm had broken and rolled away were we still sitting talking in the dim lamplight. In these hours I learned what dark confidences my friend had to give me as to his solitary and haunted past; learned more truly, also, than I had ever done as yet, the value of a moral courage that had enabled him, dogged by the cruelest hate of adversity, to emerge from the furnace noble and thrice refined.
He had been picked up, as a mere child drowning in the river, by the Thames police and had been ultimately consigned to a charity school, from which, in due course, he had been apprenticed to a printer. Thus far had his existence, emerging from profoundest gloom, run a straight and uneventful course—but before?
Into what deadly corner of a great city’s most secret burrows his young life had been first hemmed and then crushed out of shape who may say? When I had got him down again, unnerved but quiet now and wistful with apology over his outburst, he told me all that he knew.
“Thunder always seems to turn my brain a little, Renny, perhaps because it is associated in the depths of my mind with that strange young experience. The muttering sound of it brings a picture, as it were, before my eyes. I seem to see a confusion of wharfs and monstrous piles of blackness standing out against the sky; deadly water runs between, in which smudges of light palpitate and are splintered into arrows and come together again like drops of quicksilver.”
“And you are given something to drink?”
“It is poison; I know it as certainly as that it is my father who wishes to be quit of me. I can’t tell you how I know.”
“And before?”