Yet, in his own heart, he knew well enough that never was the calm, determined-looking man before him--the man who, hitherto, had been so bright and careless, but who now stood stern as Nemesis at the other end of the table--further removed from madness than he was this night. He knew and felt that it was not with a lunatic but an avenger that he had to deal.
"I am not mad," Julian replied calmly. "Meanwhile, take your right hand out of that drawer by your side, and keep it out. Pistol shots will disturb the whole house, and, if you do not do as I bid you I shall have to fire first," and he tapped his breast significantly as he spoke, so that the other could be in no doubt of his meaning.
"Now," he continued, when Sebastian had obeyed him, he laughing with a badly assumed air of contempt as he did so, all the same, laying his large brown hand upon the table--"now," said Julian, "I will tell you all that I believe to be the case in connection with you and with me, all that I know to have been the case in connection with your various attempts to injure me, and, also, all that I intend to do, to-morrow, when I reach Belize and have taken the most eminent lawyer in the place into my confidence."
As he mentioned the word "lawyer," Sebastian started visibly; then, once more, he assumed the contemptuous expression he had previously endeavoured to exhibit, but beyond saying roughly again that Julian was a madman, he made no further remark for the moment, and sat staring, or rather glaring, at the other man before him. Yet, had that other man been able to thoroughly comprehend, or follow, that glance--which, owing to the lamp being between them, he was not entirely able to do--he would have seen that, instead of resting on his face, it was directed to beyond where he stood. That it went past him to away down to the farther end of the room; to where the open window was.
"Charles Ritherdon," said Julian now, "had a son born in this house twenty-six years ago, and that son was stolen within two or three days of his birth by his uncle, George Ritherdon. You are not that son, and you know it. Yet you know who is. You know that I am."
"You lie," Sebastian said with an oath; "you are an impostor. And even if what you say is true--who am I? I," he said, his voice rising now, either with anger or excitement, "who have lived here all my life, who have been known from a child by dozens of people still alive? Who am I, I say?"
"That at present I do not know. Perhaps the lawyer to whom I confide my case will be able to discover."
"Lawyer! Bah! A curse for your lawyers. What can you tell him, what proof produce?"
And still, as he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed, as Julian thought, upon him, but in absolute fact upon that portion of the room which was in shadow behind where the latter stood.
Upon, too--although Julian knew it not, and did not, indeed, for one moment suspect such to be the case--a white face, that, peeping round the less white curtains which hung by the window, never moved the dark eyes that shone out of it from off the back of the man who confronted Sebastian. Fixed upon, too, the form to which that face belonged, which, even as Sebastian had raised his voice, had drawn itself a few feet nearer to the other; finding shelter now behind the curtains of the next or nearest window.