From outside the lad closed the door. Geoffrey knew that a bad moment was coming, and set his teeth. But the moment was worse than he anticipated, for Harry's voice when he spoke was broken, and his eyes moist.
"O Geoffrey," he said, "can not you do what I asked? If you knew what it meant to me! There are two men in the world whom I love. There, you understand—and I can not bear it, simply I can not bear it!"
The temptation had been severe before; it was a trifle to this.
"No, I can't!" cried Geoffrey, eager to get the words spoken, for each moment made them harder to speak. "O Harry, some day you will understand. Before your marriage—I give it a date—I swear to you in God's name that you will understand how it is that I can not come with you to ask Mr. Francis's forgiveness!"
Disappointment deepened on Harry's face, and a gleam of anger shone there.
"I will not ask you a third time," he said, and went into the dining room.
Geoffrey had still three hours to wait in London before the starting of his train, and these were chequered with an incredible crowd of various hopes and fears. At one time he hugged himself on the obvious superiority of their dispositions against Mr. Francis; he would even smile to think of the toils enveloping that evil schemer; again mere exhilaration at the unknown and the violent would boil up in effervescence; another moment, and an anguish of distrust would seize him. What if, after all, Dr. Armytage had been playing with him, how completely and successfully, he writhed to think? A week ago the sweat would have broken out on him to picture Harry travelling down to Vail with that man of sinister repute, to be alone in the house with him, Mr. Francis, and the foxlike servant. Had he been hoodwinked throughout? Was the doctor even now smiling to himself behind his paper at the facility of his victim? At the thought, London turned hell; he had taken the bait like a silly staring fish; even now he was already hauled, as it were, on to dry land, there to gasp innocuously, impotent to stir or warn, while who knew what ghastly subaqueous drama might even now be going on? He had trusted the doctor on evidence of the most diaphanous kind, unsupported by any testimony of another. The sleeping-draught given to Harry, the brushing aside of the revolver he had passed to him, when to shoot was impossible—these, with a calculated gravity of face and an assumption of anxious sincerity, had been enough to convince him of the man's honesty. He could have screamed aloud at the thought, and every moment whirled Harry nearer, helpless and unsuspecting, to that house of death!
Meantime the journey of the two had been for the most part a silent passage. Each was absorbed in his own thoughts and anxieties: Harry, restless, impatient, eager for the quicker falling behind of wayside stations, while the doctor brooded with half-closed eyelids, intent, it would seem, on the pattern of the carriage mat, his thoughts inconjecturable. Once only, as the train yelled through Slough, did he speak, but then with earnestness.
"Don't let your uncle know I have come, Harry," he said. "It may be that Sanders has unnecessarily alarmed you. So see him first yourself, and if this has been a heart attack like to what he had before, and he seems now to be quietly recuperating, do not let him know I am here. It may only alarm him for his condition."
"Pray God it may be so!" said Harry.