“To right yourself with the world?” I asked.
“Let it fall from me—the vampire!” he cried, contemptuously. “You are all the world I care, as your father was before you. It is not Abel I want, Richard; it is the secret he carried away with him—the secret, or the clue to it, which I have maddened after, pursuing it, the wicket friar’s-lantern, down the long mire of these coasts.”
“Secret?” I said, wondering. “What secret?”
“The book,” he answered—snapped, rather.
I turned and stared at him as we walked.
“You mean the book that—that you fought about?”
He nodded.
“Why,” I sniggered, incredulous, “was it worth all this?”
He did not resent my youthful irony—met it with a solemn self-deprecation, in fact.
“God knows, dear boy!” he said. “This, and more, I thought once. Now, Richard, forbear to indulge a lust till it masters you. I have damned myself like the wandering Jew. I have no rest in rest. The quest has become an obsession, a craze, which not even the discovery of the treasure itself could, I believe, appease.”