“Ah, it is you, is it, good wench? I thought that no one else could have wished me well so piously a while ago. You did me an ill turn, although you did not mean to do so, when you let me out of the Cage last night. Was it last night, or a week, or a month ago?”
“It was only last night,” interposed the doctor gravely. “Now, do not ask any more questions, or I shall have to forbid them being answered. It is my duty to tell you that with every word you speak your life is ebbing away.”
“Then there is the less time to lose,” answered Derrick obstinately. “As for answering me, I do not want that. All I ask of you is, that you shall listen; and what I say, I charge you all, as a dying man, to remember—to repeat—to proclaim.” Here he paused from weakness.—“Doctor,” gasped he, “a glass of brandy—a large glass, for I am used to it. I must have it.—Good. I feel stronger now. Do you think, if you took down my words in writing, that I could manage”—here a shudder seemed to shake his poor bruised and broken frame, as though with the anticipation of torture—“to set down my name at the bottom of it?”
“No, my poor fellow—no. You could no more grasp a pen at present than you could rise and leave this house upon your feet. You must feel that yourself.”
“I do—I do,” groaned Ralph. “It is all the more necessary, then, that you should listen. My real name is not that one by which I have, been known at Mirk. It is not Derrick, but Gavestone: the same name, good wench, by which your mistress went before she was married to Sir Robert Lisgard. But that was not her maiden name—no, no. Do you not wonder while I tell you this? or did I speak of it last night, when I was mad with drink and rage?”
“You said something of the sort, sir; but I knew it all before that. You are my Lady's husband, and Sir Richard and the rest are all her bastard children—that is, in the eye of the law.”
“You knew it, did you?” returned Ralph after a pause. “You were in the plot with her against me, then? I am glad of that. I should be sorry to have left the world fooled to the last; for I thought that you at least were an honest wench, although all the world else were liars. So, after all, you knew it, did you? Well, at all events, it is news to the doctor here.”
“No, sir,” returned the old gentleman, quietly applying some Eau de Cologne and water to the patient's brow; “I must confess I knew it also.”
“And yet you told nobody!” ejaculated Ralph. “You suffered this imposture to go on unexposed!”
“I only heard of the facts, you speak of—from Lady Lisgard's own lips—two days ago at furthest,” returned Dr Haldane; “and I certainly told nobody, since the telling could do no good to any human being—not even to yourself, for instance—and would bring utter ruin and disgrace upon several worthy persons.”