“Do you like living, Soolsby?”
“Do you want to kill me, my lord?”
There was a dark look in Eglington’s face. “But answer me, do you want to live?”
“I want to live long enough to see the Earl of Eglington in his own house.”
“Well, I’ve made that possible. The other night when you were telling me your little story, you were near sending yourself into eternity—as near as I am knocking this ash off my cigar.” His little finger almost touched the ash. “Your hand was as near touching a wire charged with death. I saw it. It would have been better for me if you had gone; but I shut off the electricity. Suppose I hadn’t, could I have been blamed? It would have been an accident. Providence did not intervene; I did. You owe me something, Soolsby.”
Soolsby stared at him almost blindly for a moment. A mist was before his eyes; but through the mist, though he saw nothing of this scene in which he now was, he saw the laboratory, and himself and Eglington, and Eglington’s face as it peered at him, and, just before the voice called outside, Eglington’s eyes fastened on his hand. It all flashed upon him now, and he saw himself starting back at the sound of the voice.
Slowly he got up now, went to the door, and opened it. “My lord, it is not true,” he said. “You have not spoken like a gentleman. It was my lady’s voice that saved me. This is my castle, my lord—you lodge yonder.” He pointed down into the darkness where the lights of the village shone. “I owe you nothing. I pay my debts. Pay yours, my lord, to him that’s beyond and away.”
Eglington kept his countenance as he drew on his great-coat and slowly passed from the house.
“I ought to have let you die, Soolsby. Y’ou’ll think better of this soon. But it’s quite right to leave the matter to me. It may take a little time, but everything will come right. Justice shall be done. Well, good night, Soolsby. You live too much alone, and imagination is a bad thing for the lonely. Good night-good night.”
Going down the hill quickly, he said to himself: “A sort of second sight he had about that wire. But time is on my side, time and the Soudan—and ‘The heathen in his blindness....’ I will keep what is mine. I will keep it!”