"Look me full in the face, Mr. Dunbar, and tell me if you see anything there that reminds you of the past."
Henry Dunbar started.
He opened his eyes widely enough this time, and started at the handsome face before him. It was as handsome as his own, and almost as aristocratic-looking. For Nature has odd caprices now and then, and had made very little distinction between the banker, who was worth half a million, and the runaway convict, who was not worth sixpence.
"Have I met you before?" he said. "In India?"
"No, Mr. Dunbar, not in India. You know that as well as I do. Carry your mind farther back. Carry it back to the time before you went to India."
"What then?"
"Do you remember losing a heap of money on the Derby, and being in so desperate a frame of mind that you took the holster-pistols down from their place above the chimney-piece in your barrack sitting-room, and threatened to blow your brains out? Do you remember, in your despair, appealing to a lad who served you, and who loved you, better perhaps than a brother would have loved you, though he was your inferior by birth and station, and the son of a poor, hard-working woman? Do you remember entreating this boy—who had a knack of counterfeiting other people's signatures, but who had never used his talent for any guilty purpose until that hour, so help me Heaven!—to aid you in a scheme by which your creditors were to be kept quiet till you could get the money to pay them? Do you remember all this? Yes, I see you do—the answer is written on your face; and you remember me—Joseph Wilmot."
He struck his hand upon his breast, and stood with his eyes fixed upon the other's face. They had a strange expression in them, those eyes—a sort of hungry, eager look, as if the very sight of his old foe was a kind of food that went some way towards satisfying this man's vengeful fury.
"I do remember you," Henry Dunbar said slowly. He had turned deadly pale, and cold drops of sweat had broken out upon his forehead: he wiped them away with his perfumed cambric handkerchief as he spoke.
"You do remember me?" the other man repeated, with no change in the expression of his face.