Such a silence followed that the ticking of a distant clock sounded distinctly.
“Your uncle has many achievements to his credit. He hanged three men on a gallows sixty feet high, unless my memory is at fault. His hand struck off the head of Louis of France and his consort Marie Antoinette.”
The look of pride in the old man’s face was startling. His eyes kindled, he seemed to grow in height.
“By what fantastic freak of fate you come to have settled in England, what queer kink of mind decided you secretly to carry on the profession of Sanson and seek far and wide for poor, helpless wretches to destroy, I do not know.”
Michael did not raise his voice, he spoke in a calm, conversational tone; and in the same way did Longvale reply.
“Is it not better,” he said gently, “that a man should pass out of life through no act of his own, than that he should commit the unpardonable crime of self-murder? Have I not been a benefactor to men who dared not take their own lives?”
“To Lawley Foss?” suggested Michael, his grave eyes fixed on the other.
“He was a traitor, a vulgar blackmailer, a man who sought to use the knowledge which had accidentally come to him, to extract money from me.”
“Where is Gregory Penne?”
A slow smile dawned on the man’s face.