“It is the absolute truth, Sir Gilbert, incredible though it may seem. I had heard no sound, but all at once some instinct told me that I was no longer alone. I turned, and by the light of my lantern saw the figure standing in the shadow a little way back in the other room. Its face was towards me, but so hidden by its cowl, that hardly anything could be seen of it except its long grizzled beard. What followed, I hardly know, only that I heard the door shut and the key turned, and realised that I was a prisoner.”
“I presume that neither of you spoke to the other?”
“Not a word passed between us.”
For a little while Sir Gilbert remained buried in thought. Then he said: “You may go for the present and remain in your own room till I send for you. In what way I may ultimately determine to deal with you I have not yet made up my mind.”
When Luigi—glad enough, one may be sure, to get away—had crept out of the room with the air of a whipt cur, Sir Gilbert turned to Lisle. “You must get through your work without me this morning. I need scarcely tell you that I am very much put about by this business. Preserve the notes you have taken, and when you have an hour to spare you may write them out for me. Perhaps I may never need them, but one cannot tell. Come, Louisa.”
They went no farther than the morning-room. Lady Pell could not help seeing how shaken Sir Gilbert was, and at her persuasion he drank a glass of sherry.
“The shocking disclosures of this morning,” he began after a few minutes given to silent cogitation, “require, as it seems to me, to be considered from two very opposite points of view. On the one hand, there is the audacious palming off upon me of a supposititious grandson and all the side issues resulting therefrom—as to which I shall have something to say later on. On the other hand, there is this mysterious affair of the Grey Monk, to whose most opportune interference we seem to owe it that Captain Verinder’s vile scheme has suffered such a signal collapse. Now there cannot, I think, be the slightest doubt that, let the origin of the previous appearances have been what it may, there was nothing in the least degree supernatural about last night’s manifestation. That it was a being of flesh and blood as much as you or I, to my mind admits of no question.”
“There I agree with you, Gilbert,” remarked Lady Pell. “It was no ghost that locked up Luigi Rispani in the strong room.”
“And it was no ghostly hand that wrote the letter which has served so completely to unseal my eyes.”
“But who can this mysterious personage be, and where can he have sprung from?”