“With no hope?”
“Hope? With every hope,” I said, smiling. “My name is not my own, but it must serve me to my end, and I shall wear it threadbare and leave it to no one.”
“Is there no hope?” she asked, quietly. 221
“None for the man who was. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions and general mountebank,” I said, laughing down the rising tide of bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had forgotten—my dead self.
“No hope?” she repeated.
Suddenly the ghost of all I had lost rose before me with her words—rose at last after all these years, towering, terrible, free once more to fill the days with loathing and my nights with hell eternal,... after all these years!
Overwhelmed, I fought down the spectre in silence. Kith and kin were not all in the world; love of woman was not all; a chance for a home, a wife, children, were not all; a name was not all. Raising my head, a trifle faint with the struggle and the cost of the struggle, I saw the distress in her eyes and strove to smile.
“There is every hope,” I said, “save the hopes of youth—the hope of a woman’s love, and of that happiness which comes through love. I am a man past thirty, madame—thirty-five, I believe my dossier makes it. It has taken me fifteen years to bury my youth. Let us talk of Mornac.”
“Yes, we will talk of Mornac,” she said, gently.
So with infinite pains I went back and traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness.