“Yes, and on very good authority too. But I was too young to know much about it. Do you know what has happened in the family?”
“Ah, the Spaniards are the men for proverbs. ‘Believe no man dead till he comes and proves it.’ But women can always believe what they wish. Curse the woman, she has caused all my troubles. But wait a little longer.”
The deep thick voice, and the glare of his father’s eyes, made Downy tremble. “Surely you will not—in this condition—you will go to a hospital and get cured—you will leave the management of things to me.”
“Will I? No doctor in the world can cure me, or lengthen the months of my rotting away. And I got it by goodness, I took it by goodness. If I had stuck to my nature, I should have been sound. No more goodness for me in this world, and none in the next. Can a leper go to heaven?”
For a while they sat silent, the old man puffing his smoke through his muffler, and lifting the glass between his great wrists every now and then; the young man absorbed in this awful puzzle, with his vast head drooping on his breast. It had never even crossed his mind to ask whether this man might be an impostor. He felt that every word was true; and now what possible course remained for him? At length his father spoke again.
“Come, cheer up, my hearty, as the sailors said to me, though they took care to say it a long way off. You don’t seem delighted to have found a father, and a man of such renown and rank. Why, I am the Marquis of Torobelle, and you are the heir to the title. Lord Roarmore doesn’t sound much after that. But alas, I have nothing to keep up the title, and I dropped it among the Indians. I shall have to trouble you a little in that way; one cannot live on glory. Oh, but they treated me infamously, when I could do no more for them. They drove me across the Rio Negro into Patagonia, and paid a tribe of the wandering Indians never to let me back again. They passed me on to the Moluches, and I tried to make my escape from them, but was caught and left for dead again, till a woman took pity on me. Then I married her, and lived on putrid fish with a roving horde of the Eastern tribes, in a miserable country, where no white man goes. Then I took the disease from the diet and the nursing of my poor woman in her illness, and for five years I was shut up in the leper’s den—as they called a reeking peninsula, which explorers know as Saint Jacob; at the back of a place called the Bottomless Pit. There was no getting out; there were thirty of us, sometimes more, and sometimes less, sometimes we got victuals, and sometimes we starved, and I was the only white man there.
“Although we were quite close to the sea, and almost surrounded by it, we were far away from all chance of ships, on a desolate, barbarous coast in a curve a hundred leagues out of the line of traffic. And there I must have wasted into a sandy skeleton, for there was no possibility of escape inland, unless a good angel had been sent to fetch me. For the ship was taking soundings, or something of the sort, having come far away from the usual course, to find the truth about the bottomless gulf; and all I could do would have gone for nothing, except for that young lady. They were giving us a wide berth, as if we all were savages, when luckily for me she brought her spy-glass to bear, and declared that she saw a white man among the rest. The others laughed at her, for you may be pretty sure that there was not much white about me just then; but she stuck to it, and ran for the Captain, and insisted that a boat should be sent to see about it. Oh, I could worship that girl, I could; though it isn’t much good to me, after all.
“Come, you ought to say you will take care that it is, and devote all your days and your money to the welfare of your persecuted parent. You must have expected me long ago, or at any rate had some hopes of it, for I sent you a message several years ago, and some documents too from Mendoza, before I was banished finally. A knockabout fellow swore to find out all about you, and deliver them the next time he was in London. Do you mean to say he has never done it?”
“Not till last autumn; and it was so old, I thought nothing more would come of it. A sort of half Englishman, half Spaniard. But a faithful fellow, and thought wonders of you. When he first came with your message, he got into a scrape before he could deliver it. He stabbed a man at the Docks, and had to bolt again, and he fought shy of London for years after that. But to see you like this was the last thing I could dream of. You said not a word of this in your letter.”
“Because I had not got it then. I took it from misery and starvation, and living among the savages. Ah, I have seen a good deal of the world, and met with some wonderful people. How small even London seems to me!”