“You have never seen the Thames by moonlight,” I remarked to him, “and I am told that it is lovely beyond description. On Thursday next it will be full-moon; will you come?”
I had spoken warmly in my anxiety to secure his company, but he answered me coldly, “I cannot accompany you—I am full of sympathies and antipathies; I love you, Wyndham, as much, I think, as life itself, but I hate and loathe the moonlight worse than death. Don’t stare at me, dear boy, it is constitutional and cannot be helped.”
Rather than go alone or leave my friend I gave up the intended trip on the river, but for the next week I, nevertheless, saw nothing of him. He was reported “not at home.” When he returned he informed me, in reply to my inquiry as to his absence, that he had been called out of town. He had often been absent in a similar way before and the occurrence occasioned me no surprise.
Shortly after this I was sent to the United States by the firm I represented, to deliver certain papers of importance to a client in Chicago.
As I was about to leave, my friend Pasquale somewhat surprised me by saying, “Wyndham, I can’t stand this place without you, so I think I shall go off for a time too; my father has been urging me for a long while to take a two months’ holiday, and has recommended Norway salmon-fishing as a soothing and pleasant recreation. Sport of the kind would be worse than death to me with my hatred of seeing suffering: so, as he leaves the choice to me, I am thinking of going over to Paris. I happen to know the Chief of Police there, and I want to master their wonderful detective system and to see whether I am right in supposing that I know more than others do about the peculiarities of the human mind, more especially in its relation to the perpetration of crime; and, so, dear old friend,” he concluded, “if you hear of any wonderful captures during your absence, look out for my name!”
And so we parted with, on my side, many a yearning heartache for the friend I was leaving behind me.
As the stately Cunarder carrying me on board steamed out from Liverpool, the same day a channel boat bore Pasquale from Dover to Calais.
CHAPTER III.
WHEN I arrived in New York I had not much opportunity of reading up back numbers of the daily papers, but I was startled to see that the Chief Commissioner of the London Police, Sir Charles Pendreth, had been found dead in his bed by his own hand, and that, immediately following upon his suicide, had occurred that of two of the leading police magistrates of the metropolis.
These occurrences, dire enough in themselves, were rendered still more terrible by the fact that each had killed himself in the same way—by severing his jugular vein with his razor,—and had left behind him a letter in his well-known handwriting explaining why he had committed self-destruction.