"I want you to tell me, if you will, sir," he said at last, "where the man has gone. I was a fool when I lost him; I have not done my work well."
"I will tell you presently, when I have heard your story," I said. "You have made a threat of murder. I don't think it would be quite wise on my part to let you loose on anyone in your present frame of mind."
"Then hear me, and judge for yourself, sir," he answered solemnly.
"What I know is this," I said. "I know that Mr. Gregory Pennington went to the doctor's house on one particular night, and that he hanged himself in a room there. I, who found him hanging, found you in the room, apparently dazed."
"I have to think back a long way," said Capper, leaning forward on the seat, and resting his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands. "It's all so much like a dream, and yet all so clear. Let me try to tell you, sir, what happened that night."
He sat for a long time in that attitude, as though striving to piece together all his recollections of that time; as though even yet he feared that his memory might play him false.
"I don't need to say anything about myself, sir, except just this: that Mr. Pennington picked me out of the gutter, and made a man of me. If ever one man worshipped another on this earth, I worshipped him; I would have died for him. He made me his servant, and yet his friend. He knew that I had been something better in the days before he found me; he made me something better again. He was quite alone in the world, and his income was administered by a trustee, a lawyer. That's all you need know about it. We wandered about all over the world. He thought nothing of starting off for the other side of the world, taking me with him always, at a moment's notice—which, perhaps, accounts for the fact that no one has made any enquiries about him.'"
I did not answer that; perhaps the time was coming when I should have to tell him the sequel to what he was now telling me.
"Then he met the young lady—Miss Debora Matchwick—and he used often to go and see her. One night he came home raging, and told me that Dr. Just had turned him out of the house, and had told him he was not to go there again. He was very much in love with the young lady, and the affair upset him a lot. But he told me that he had made up his mind to go there as often as he thought fit; he meant to defy the doctor."
He paused so long again that I was almost minded to speak to him; he seemed to be brooding. All at once he sat upright, and folded his arms, and went on again. His voice had taken on a new sternness.