“I cannot see why,” said the Warden. “I advise it by all means, since I shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your visit to me.”
“My dear friend,” said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence which he had not meditated a moment before, “there is a foolish secret which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only not revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like; because, too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of myself and laugh at myself.”
“Is it a long story?” asked the Warden.
“I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity,” said Redclyffe.
“I will fill my pipe then,” answered the Warden, “and listen at my ease; and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will impute it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our English hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning.”
He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal—for the first time in his life—the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and purposes, if such they could be called, with which he had amused himself so many years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he could remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old woman, in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor, and educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities, his morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death, and the singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a considerable time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only interrupted it by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued to smoke his pipe slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
“This Doctor of yours was a singular character,” said he. “Evidently, from what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences, he must have been of this part of the country,—of this immediate neighborhood,—and such a man could not have grown up here without being known. I myself—for I am an old fellow now—might have known him if he lived to manhood hereabouts.”
“He seemed old to me when I first knew him,” said Redclyffe. “But children make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five then, as well as I can judge.”
“You are now twenty-seven or eight,” said the Warden, “and were four years old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you know, my friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who your Doctor was?”
“How strange this seems!” exclaimed Redclyffe. “It has never struck me that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any surroundings or any friends.”