"Every word of it," I answered.
"Well, now, tell me what you have been doing since, and how you came to be in this house, and in this garden. I have got to know, and it will go better with you, if you tell me with your own lips, than if you force me to find it out for myself, as I most assuredly shall. I don't want to kill you. It is horrible to me to have to take a life—unless the safety of the cause is concerned, and then I'd kill you or anyone else as unconcernedly—much more unconcernedly than I'd kill a superfluous litter of kittens brought into the world by the family cat."
Doubt his sanity I might and did, but of his seriousness and sincerity I was in no sense sceptical. If I refused to speak, the chances were that I should not be allowed to leave the place alive. In the matter of personal strength, I was hopelessly outmatched, and as my revolver had dropped out of my hand when I had received the blow which felled me, and had been secured by him, I was, save for a pocket-knife, entirely unarmed.
All things considered, to tell him my story seemed the best course to pursue. He would learn very little that mattered or that he could not find out without me; whereas it was quite possible that if, in return, I could induce him to speak of the "cause" to which he was so warmly attached, and in the interests of which he was ready to stop at nothing, I might, on the contrary, learn something which would be very well worth the knowing.
"I'll tell you my story," I bargained, "if you in return will tell me what is this cause which you say you have at heart. Who knows that it might not be a cause with which I myself sympathise, and might wish to befriend?"
"I agree," he said quietly. "But first I think we'll shut the door and have a light. I've been in this place before. If I can help it, I never enter any place without finding out all I can about it beforehand. There's a gas-jet, and if you'll wait a moment, I'll light it. It can't be seen from the outside."
Commencing with the invitation to write an article on the opium den, I very briefly narrated what had befallen me, keeping back nothing except my love for Kate, and the fact of the dream-tableaux, neither of which seemed to me to come within my bargain.
He listened without a comment, though he now and then interpolated a pointed question. When I had done, he lit a cigarette, and began to pace backward and forward.
"Mr. Rissler," he said abruptly, after a short silence, "were you ever poor?"
"Ever poor?" I laughed. "If you had asked me if I were ever rich, I might, by thinking hard, remember a time when I had a few pounds in hand. But ever poor? My dear sir, I can't recall a time when I was ever anything else."