Yes! That was over! Another step was taken. Once more he had progressed a step towards his desire, in spite of the most adverse happenings and the most forbidding aspects of fate.
The unaccustomed brandy at the Palace Hotel, and the bromide solution he had dropped into it, had calmed his nerves, and suddenly he laughed aloud in the rich, silent room, a laugh of pure triumph and excitement.
Even as the echoes of his voice died away, his eyes fell upon the table and saw that there was a letter lying there addressed to him. The address was written in a well-known handwriting. He took it up, tore open the envelope and read the communication.
It was this—
"I have been down here for several days, trying to escape from London and the thoughts which London gives me. But it has been quite useless. I saw to-day, quite by chance, in the hotel register, that you have arrived here. I did not think that we were ever likely to meet again, except in the most casual way. I hope not. Since I have been here, the torture of my life has increased a thousand-fold, and I have come to the conclusion that my life must stop. I am not fit to live. I don't blame you too much, because if I hadn't been a scoundrel and a wastrel all my life, I should never have put myself in your hands. As far as your lights go, you have acted well to me. You have paid me generously for the years of dirty work I have done at your bidding. For what I have done lately, you have made me financially free, and I shall die owing no man a penny, and with no man, save you only, knowing that I die without hope—lost, degraded and despairing. Don't think I blame you, William Gouldesbrough, because I don't. When I was at Eton, I was always a pleasure-loving little scug. I was the same at Oxford. I have been the same in all my life in town. I have never been any good to myself, and I have disappointed all the hopes my people had for me. It's all been my own fault. Then I became entangled with you, and I was too weak to resist the money you were prepared to pay me for the things I have done for you.
"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I have always been, I can no longer feel I have any proper place among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall die without anybody knowing what I really am.
"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye; and I wish to God—if there is really a God—that I had never crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.
"Eustace Charliewood."
As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figure became rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into the depths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker until every vestige of it was consumed.
He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the wide carpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.
He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.
In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the "chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of the lift-roof rising up towards him.