"I mean to look after you," he assured me. "You shall live again, Charles Avaline; you shall take up your life where you thought once you had laid it down. You have been snatched from death; you shall come out into the world with me again; you shall come into your kingdom!"
I went with him placidly enough when presently we left the inn, and set off through the town. If you wonder that I should have submitted myself so readily to him, I ask you to remember the life I had lived, and the fear in which I stood of this great world that was closing about me. I was to have the past brought back to me fully and strongly, but I did not know that then; I was to live again, in another way, the life I once had lived, and to understand it in a new fashion.
We came to a railway station, and my companion took a ticket for London; he seemed to understand that I had my pass from the prison—in fact, he asked me for it. The station master at the little place looked at me queerly, but I think he was used to poor prisoners who came to him with Government slips of paper to take them to various parts of the kingdom. He shut us into a third-class carriage alone together, and we started for London. And on the way, strangely enough, my companion raked over that long buried past of mine, and reminded me who I was, and what I was. I remember that I cowered before him, as I might have cowered before a judge who knew my record, and was passing sentence upon me.
"Charles Avaline, twenty years ago you killed a man," he began.
I nodded my head; I remembered that, at least. Had I not struck the man down many and many a time since, and seen him lying at my feet. But in the long dreary course of the years I had forgotten what it was for, or why it had been done; I only knew that he had deserved to die, and that I had done well to kill him.
"The gallows was built for you, Charles Avaline; the hangman stood ready for you; the grave yawned for you. But you were reserved for something else, Charlie; there was still some work for you to do in the world."
I leaned forward on my seat, and stared at him; for there was a dim feeling in my mind that I had met him somewhere, and that I knew him. The mention of my name in that form—"Charlie"—seemed to wake within me some old memory that had been dead. His knowledge of my crime, and of how I had gone down so near to death, set me wondering what manner of man this was that had seized me at the very prison gates, and now held me in his power by his knowledge of me.
"Who are you?" I demanded, staring at him fearfully. "What is your name?"
"You shall know soon enough," he replied, and relapsed into silence. I sat in a corner of the carriage, staring at him, and wondering about him; striving to fit him in with some dream I had had—a dream that had begun in some old time before the prison closed upon me. But the habit of thought had long been lost to me; my brain was a poor mechanical dull thing, long rusty for want of exercise. In fact, I do not think that I should have recognized him at all, if I had not noticed again that curious action of his thin white fingers, twining over each other restlessly. I had the courage to lean forward and pluck off his hat, and stare into his face. I think I must have shrieked out his name.