"He has said nothing," interrupted Dora, "but I have eyes and ears, my dear Allen. Mr. Edermont is afraid of losing his----"
"His money," interrupted Allen in his turn. "Oh yes, of course."
"There is no 'of course' in the matter," said Miss Carew sharply; "he is afraid of losing his life."
"His life? Dora!"
"I am sure of it, Allen. Remember his favourite prayer in the Litany--the prayer which takes his wandering eyes round the church: 'From battle and murder, and from sudden death, good Lord, deliver us.'"
[CHAPTER II]
THE STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF DR. SCOTT.
The appearance of the individual who admitted them into what may be called the prison of Mr. Edermont was sufficiently odd to merit a description. Lambert Joad, the friend, factotum, and parasite of Dora's guardian, was a short, stout man verging on sixty years. He had a large bland face, clean-shaven, and bluish-red in hue; his mouth was loose, his chin double, his jowl pendulous; and his insignificant nose was scarcely redeemed by two watery eyes of a pale blue. A few tufts of white hair covered sparsely the baldness of his skull; and his ears, hands, and feet were all large and ill-shaped. He dressed in rusty black, wore carpet slippers, and a wisp of white ribbon did duty as a collar. This last adornment hinted at a clerical vocation, and hinted rightly, for Lambert Joad was an unsuccessful parson of the Anglican Church.
Some forty years previously he had been a college friend of Edermont's, and in due course had taken orders, but either from lack of brains, or of eloquence, or perhaps from his Quilpish looks, he had failed to gain as much as a curacy. In lieu thereof he had earned a bare subsistence by making notes in the British Museum for various employers, and it was while thus engaged that Edermont had chanced upon him again; out of sheer pity the owner of the Red House had taken the unlucky Joad to Kent, and there permitted him to potter about library and garden--a vegetable existence which completely satisfied the unambitious brain of the creature. He was devoted to the god who had given him this ease.
But the odd part of the arrangement was that Edermont would not permit his hanger-on to remain in the house at night. Punctually at nine Mr. Joad betook himself to the small cottage fronting the gates, and there ate and slept until nine the next morning, when he presented himself again in the library, to read, and dust, and arrange, and catalogue the many books. For twenty years this contract had been faithfully carried out by the pair of college friends. From nine to nine daylight Joad haunted the house; from nine to nine darkness he remained in his tumbledown cottage.