“Secret?—oh!” said Uncle David.
“Yes, secret; and you will please to say nothing of it to any living creature until the twenty-first of October next, when I retire. You understand commerce, Mr. Arden. My practice is confidential, and I should lose perhaps eighty thousand francs in the short space that intervenes, if I were thought to have played a patient such a trick. It is but twenty days of reserve, and then I go and laugh at them, every one. Piff, puff, paff! ha! ha!”
“Yes, I promise that also,” said Uncle David dryly, and to himself he thought, “What a consummate old scoundrel!”
“Very good, Sir; we shall want this of Yelland Mace again, just now; his face and coffin, ha! ha! can rest there for the present.” He had replaced the mask in its box, and that lay on the floor. The door of the iron press he shut and locked. “Next, I will show you Mr. Longcluse: those are dead.”
He waved his short hand toward the row of iron doors which he had just visited.
“Please, Sir, walk with me into this room. Ay, so. Here are the resurrections. Will you be good enough—L, Longcluse, M, one, two, three, four; three, yes, to hold this candlestick for a moment?”
The baron unlocked this door, and, after some rummaging, he took forth a box similar to that he had taken out before.
“Yes, right, Walter Longcluse. I tell you how you will see it best: there is brilliant moonlight, stand there.”
Through a circular hole in the wall there streamed a beam of moonlight, that fell upon the plaster-wall opposite with the distinctness of the circle of a magic-lantern.
“You see it—you know it! Ha! ha! His pretty face!”