‘Well, sir, we are at your service,—if you will be so good as to favour us with a second edition of that pleasant yarn you have been spinning. But—let us begin at the right end!—what’s your name?’
‘My name is Robert Holt.’
‘That so?—Then, Mr Robert Holt,—let her go!’
Thus encouraged, Mr Holt repeated the tale which he had told me, only in more connected fashion than before. I fancy that Sydney’s glances exercised on him a sort of hypnotic effect, and this kept him to the point,—he scarcely needed a word of prompting from the first syllable to the last.
He told how, tired, wet, hungry, desperate, despairing, he had been refused admittance to the casual ward,—that unfailing resource, as one would have supposed, of those who had abandoned even hope. How he had come upon an open window in an apparently empty house, and, thinking of nothing but shelter from the inclement night, he had clambered through it. How he had found himself in the presence of an extraordinary being, who, in his debilitated and nervous state, had seemed to him to be only half human. How this dreadful creature had given utterance to wild sentiments of hatred towards Paul Lessingham,—my Paul! How he had taken advantage of Holt’s enfeebled state to gain over him the most complete, horrible, and, indeed, almost incredible ascendency. How he actually had sent Holt, practically naked, into the storm-driven streets, to commit burglary at Paul’s house,—and how he,—Holt,—had actually gone without being able to offer even a shadow of opposition. How Paul, suddenly returning home, had come upon Holt engaged in the very act of committing burglary, and how, on his hearing Holt make a cabalistic reference to some mysterious beetle, the manhood had gone out of him, and he had suffered the intruder to make good his escape without an effort to detain him.
The story had seemed sufficiently astonishing the first time, it seemed still more astonishing the second,—but, as I watched Sydney listening, what struck me chiefly was the conviction that he had heard it all before. I charged him with it directly Holt had finished.
‘This is not the first time you have been told this tale.’
‘Pardon me,—but it is. Do you suppose I live in an atmosphere of fairy tales?’
Something in his manner made me feel sure he was deceiving me.
‘Sydney!—Don’t tell me a story!—Paul has told you!’