Stelfox listened to this rebuke in meek silence, with his eyes upon the ground. When his master had finished speaking, he respectfully retired without a word, either of protest or of excuse.
John Bradfield watched him retreat with a malignant expression of face. He had serious cause of dissatisfaction with Stelfox, but he was not sure whether it would be wise in him to show it; for John felt that he was standing on a volcano, and that an eruption might take place at any minute. He was just forming in his mind the resolution to keep Marrable and the astute Stelfox apart, when he heard a noise behind him, and turning, found that Marrable had got off the bed on which he had been placed, and in spite of the pain his ankle gave him, was dragging himself along, by the help of the furniture, towards the door.
“What are you doing? Where are you coming to?” asked John, sharply, as he sprang towards the injured man to help him back to bed. “You mustn’t move until the doctor has seen you. We’ve sent for him, and he will be here in a few minutes.”
There was nothing about which John Bradfield was more anxious than the prevention of a meeting between Marrable and Stelfox, whom he strongly suspected of an unwholesome curiosity. But the injured man was excited and obstinate; and he almost forgot the pain his ankle was causing him as he clung to John Bradfield’s arm, and whispered, hoarsely:
“What was that you said about a lunatic? Let me speak to the man, John; let me speak to him! I must get to the root of this, or I shall go mad myself!”
John Bradfield saw that the man was thoroughly frightened, and within an ace of becoming noisy in his vehement questionings. So he said that if Alfred would be quiet, and allow himself to be helped back on to the bed, he should learn all about it.
“What I want to know is,” said Marrable, sticking to his point when his host showed anew a disposition to dally with his promised explanation, “who the man was that I saw? And who the lunatic is you spoke about, and where he lives?”
“The lunatic is the man you saw,” answered John Bradfield, doggedly, when he could fence no longer. “I took him in myself out of charity, and he lives under my roof.”
“But how does he come to be the image of Gilbert Wryde?” persisted Marrable.
“How should I know? It’s a chance resemblance, that all. It was on account of that likeness that I was attracted to him, and took pity on him, and brought him into my own house,” added Bradfield, with a happy thought.