“You gave him some of the coins?”
“He has had enough to melt into a grill as big as St. Lawrence’s, and he shall fry on it some day. More than that—more than that!”
He clenched his hands in impotent fury.
“There was one thing in the jar worth a soul’s ransom—a cameo, Renalt, that I swear was priceless—I, who speak from intuition—not knowledge. The beauty of the old world was crystallized in it. An emperor would have pawned his crown to buy it.”
His words brought before me with a shock the night of Modred’s death, when I had stood listening on the stairs.
“One evening—a terrible evening, Renalt—when I went to fetch a new bribe for him from the hiding-place (he demanded it before he would move a finger to help that poor boy upstairs), I found this cameo gone. He swore he hadn’t set eyes on it, and to this day I believe he lied. How can I tell—how can I tell? Twenty times a week, perhaps, my vice brought the secret almost within touch of discovery. Sometimes for days together I would carry this gem in my pocket, and take it out when alone and gaze on it with exquisite rapture. Then for months it would lie safely hidden again. If I had dropped and lost it in one of my fits—as he suggested—should I have never heard of it again? Renalt”—he held out two trembling hands to me—“it was the darling of my heart! Find it for me and I will bless you forever.”
He ended almost with a sob. I could have wept myself over the pitiful degeneration of a noble intellect.
“Father, you said he cajoled—threatened. Didn’t you ever reveal to him——”
“Where the jar was hid? No; a million times, no! He would have sucked me dry of the last coin. He knew that I had made a rich find—no more.”
“And on the strength of that vague surmise you have allowed him to blackmail you all these years?”