"You have heard the source from which the voice comes—that voice which has, as I understand, excited so much curiosity in my household. I am aware of the rumours to which it has given rise. These speculations, whether scandalous or superstitious, are such as I can disregard and forgive. What I should never forgive would be a disloyal spying and eavesdropping in order to satisfy an illicit curiosity. But of that, Mr. Colmore, I acquit you.
"When I was a young man, sir, many years younger than you are now, I was launched upon town without a friend or adviser, and with a purse which brought only too many false friends and false advisers to my side. I drank deeply of the wine of life—if there is a man living who has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I envy. My purse suffered, my character suffered, my constitution suffered, stimulants became a necessity to me, I was a creature from whom my memory recoils. And it was at that time, the time of my blackest degradation, that God sent into my life the gentlest, sweetest spirit that ever descended as a ministering angel from above. She loved me, broken as I was, loved me, and spent her life in making a man once more of that which had degraded itself to the level of the beasts.
"But a fell disease struck her, and she withered away before my eyes. In the hour of her agony it was never of herself, of her own sufferings and her own death, that she thought. It was all of me. The one pang which her fate brought to her was the fear that when her influence was removed I should revert to that which I had been. It was in vain that I made oath to her that no drop of wine would ever cross my lips. She knew only too well the hold that the devil had upon me—she who had striven so to loosen it—and it haunted her night and day the thought that my soul might again be within his grip.
"It was from some friend's gossip of the sick room that she heard of this invention—this phonograph—and with the quick insight of a loving woman she saw how she might use it for her ends. She sent me to London to procure the best which money could buy. When I returned she lay actually in the throes of death. And with her last breath—the very last that she breathed upon earth—she whispered this message into it, a message to strengthen my resolves and to retain her influence upon my actions. Into her ear I whispered that twice a day for ever afterwards I should listen to her dear voice, and so, smiling at the success of her plan, she passed gently away.
"So now you have my secret, Mr. Colmore, and you understand why this japanned box and that which it contains is more to me than all my ancestral home. I trust you, and I believe you to be worthy of my trust. But after this the sight of you would be painful to me, and so good-bye! You will find no cause to regret having left my service, but you will understand that we must never meet again."
So this was the last time that I was ever destined to see Sir John Bollamore, and I left him standing in his library, with his hand upon the instrument which brought him that ever-recurring, intangible, and yet intimate reminder from the woman whom he loved. You may have read about his death in a carriage accident last Midsummer. I do not fancy that it was a very unwelcome event to him.
