“How, Mr. Meyer? I am not a magician.”
“Ah! but you are. I will tell you how, having your promise. Listen now, both of you. I have studied. I know a great many secret things, and I read in your face that you have the gift—let me look in your eyes a while, Miss Clifford, and you will go to sleep quite gently, and then in your sleep, which shall not harm you at all, you will see where that gold lies hidden, and you will tell us.”
“What do you mean?” asked Benita, bewildered.
“I know what he means,” broke in Mr. Clifford. “You mean that you want to mesmerize her as you did the Zulu chief.”
Benita opened her lips to speak, but Meyer said quickly:
“No, no; hear me first before you refuse. You have the gift, the precious gift of clairvoyance, that is so rare.”
“How do you know that, Mr. Meyer? I have never been mesmerized in my life.”
“It does not matter how. I do know it; I have been sure of it from the moment when first we met, that night by the kloof. Although, perhaps, you felt nothing then, it was that gift of yours working upon a mind in tune, my mind, which led me there in time to save you, as it was that gift of yours which warned you of the disaster about to happen to the ship—oh! I have heard the story from your own lips. Your spirit can loose itself from the body: it can see the past and the future; it can discover the hidden things.”
“I do not believe it,” answered Benita; “but at least it shall not be loosed by you.”
“It shall, it shall,” he cried with passion, his eyes blazing on her as he spoke. “Oh! I foresaw all this, and that is why I was determined you should come with us, so that, should other means fail, we might have your power to fall back upon. Well, they have failed; I have been patient, I have said nothing, but now there is no other way. Will you be so selfish, so cruel, as to deny me, you who can make us all rich in an hour, and take no hurt at all, no more than if you had slept awhile?”