“Maybe she is: ’tis all over now,” returned the other carelessly. “I’m glad to be at the end of it. They’ve been bothering me for weeks past, curse ’em! bringing me their fears and complaints, and asking me what they should do. I bade ’em go to the devil: I had other things to think about. If Tom had been alive ... well, no matter! I believe that scoundrel, Catnip, that I took out of the street, damme, and had in my own office, and made a prosperous man of—I believe he was the one who betrayed us. You call me a swindler, Merton Fillmore; but if every man had been as square as I’ve been, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“You are what I would have been, under the same conditions,” said Fillmore. “I neither condemn nor praise any man. Had you warning of the crash, yesterday?”
“At ten o’clock last night, at Vauxhall.”
“At Vauxhall?”
“That surprises you, eh? ’Twas our trysting-place, where we met to concoct our nefarious schemes, as they say in the play: and the safest one we could have chosen. Well, I thought I was ready for anything; but when they told me that, I called out, and struck the fellow down, and I don’t know what happened for a while after that. Here’s a queer thing: I had a notion I saw that Lockhart girl—the one that married Lancaster—just before I dropped; and again, at the inn, I thought I heard her voice. At the inn I awoke this morning, and that’s all I know about it. Faces and voices sometimes come before a man that way, when he’s a bit beside himself. But what made me think of her, eh?” He arose as he spoke, and began to button up his cloak.
“Is that all you have to tell me?” asked Fillmore.
“All? No. That’s all at present. The words in which I tell you all—you, or any one else—will be the last words that Frank Bendibow speaks. What do you care? What does anybody care? Let ’em find out, if they can. I shall be there: I am not going to run away, as Grantley did.”
“You must come home and spend the night with me.”
“No: my board and lodging will be at the expense of the government from this day on. Say what you like of Rackett’s, there was virtue enough in it to secure me that, at any rate. Thank you all the same, Fillmore: you’re the last man I shall ever give thanks to. Well, I’m off. Good day to you.”
“Where are you going?”