"Of great use, if you will tell me."
"Well, Doctor, I never thought to tell any one. It's always been a sore point with me, but I wasn't born legitimate! I tried hard to make up for it, and I did so too! No one was more respectable than I was in Hackney, until the drink came along and took me."
"Yes? Yes?"—The hunter was on the trail now, Heredity? Reversion? At last the game was flushed!—"Yes, tell me!"
"My father was a gentleman, Doctor. That's where I got my refined tastes. And that's where I got my love of drink—damn him! God Almighty curse him for the blood he gave me!"
"Yes? Yes?"
"My father was old Mr. Lothian, the solicitor of Grey's Inn Square. He was a well-known gentleman. My mother was his housekeeper, Eliza Hancock. My father was a widower when my mother went into his service. He had another son, at one of the big schools for gentlemen. That was his son by his real wife—Gilbert he was called, and what money was left went to him. My father was a drunkard. He never was sober—what you might rightly call sober—for years, I've heard . . . Mother died soon after Mr. Lothian did. She left a hundred pounds with my Aunt, to bring me up and educate me. Aunt Ellen—but I'm a gentleman's son, Doctor!—drunken old swine he was too! What about my blood now? Wasn't my veins swollen with drink from the first? Christ! you ought to know—you with your job to know—Now are you happy? I'm not a love child, I'm a drink child, that's what I am! Son of old Mr. Lothian, the gentleman-drunkard, brother of his son who's a gentleman somewhere, I don't doubt! P'r'aps 'e mops it up 'imself!—shouldn't wonder, this—brother of mine!"
The man's voice had risen into a hoarse scream. "Have you got what you came to get?" he yelled. His eyes blazed, his mouth writhed.
There was a crash as the deal table was overturned, and he leapt at the doctor.
In a second the room was full of people. Dark figures held down something that yelled and struggled on the truckle bed.
It was done with wonderful deftness, quickness and experience. . . . Morton Sims stood outside the closed door of the condemned cell. A muffled noise reached him from within, the prison doctor was standing by him and looking anxiously into his face.