I shrugged my shoulders. "How can I possibly tell?" I answered. "I say that if nothing happens to you, some fine morning you'll be found lying out stark and stiff on that great bed of yours upstairs, with your eyes open or shut, as the case may be; and you'll be just the husk of a poor old creature who couldn't take his gold with him, and has slipped away in the night to meet the God whose laws of humanity and tenderness he had outraged from the beginning. Yes, Uncle Zabdiel, you'll be just a dead old man, leaving behind you certain property, to be squabbled over and fought over. And that will be the end of you."
"You're trying to frighten me," he said, with nervous fingers plucking at his lips. "I'm very well, and I'm very strong."
"I'm not trying to frighten you; I'm telling you facts. It is just left for you to set against all the wrong you have done one little good deed that may help to balance matters at the finish. And you won't do it."
"I never said I wouldn't do it," he pleaded. "You take me up so suddenly, Norton; you've no patience. I am an old man, as you say, and sometimes my health and strength are not what they were; but, then, doctors are so infernally expensive. Tell me what you want me to do, my boy; I'll do it if I can."
I was so certain that I had absolutely subdued him that I did not hesitate to lay my plan before him: it was a plan I had had in my mind all the day before, and for some part at least of that night I had spent in the house.
"There is a young lady whom I have met under curious circumstances," I began earnestly, "and that young lady is in great danger."
"What's that to do with me?" he snapped, with something of his old manner.
"Will you listen?" I asked impatiently. "Just understand that this young lady is nothing to me, and never can be anything; but I want to help her. She hasn't a friend in the world except myself, and I want to find some place to which, in an emergency, I can bring her, and where she will be safe. I tell you frankly I wouldn't suggest this to you if there were any other place on earth to which I could take her; but every other way of escape seems barred. If I can persuade her to trust me, will you give her shelter here?"
He looked up at me for a moment or two. I saw that it was in his mind to refuse flatly to have anything to do with the matter. But he had been more shaken that night even than I suspected, and he was afraid to refuse me anything. Nevertheless, he began to beat round the question, in the hope of evading a direct answer to it.
"What should I do with a girl here?" he asked. "There's only one old woman who comes to the house to look after me. This is no place for a girl; besides, if she's a decent sort of girl, she ought to have a mother or a father, or some sort of relative, to look after her."