“Why not, Arnold, since I put you here?” he returned, looking at me in a quizzical manner. “I have paid you periodical visits during the last five and thirty years. You looked charming in your sleep, Arnold! The fact is, it was a difficult situation. There was no way of destroying you, even if I had been so minded. I might have buried you ten feet underground, or thrown you into the sea, I suppose, but the men who moved you would have betrayed me unless I murdered them—in short, it was a problem how to dispose of you without violating my naturally humane impulses. So I did the best thing—covered the cylinder with mud and let you lie here.
“That Jurgensen timepiece was splendidly contrived, Arnold,” he continued. “Too splendidly, in fact, for in the haste of sealing you I left the pointer six months ahead of time, as well as with Esther. It has perhaps occurred to you that you went to sleep in June and awoke in December?”
It had not occurred to me, but I made no answer to his sneering question.
“In fact, Jurgensen gave me a six months’ leeway on his hundred-years clock, and the complication of figures prevented me from discovering it. I moved the pointer to the end of the dial, assuming that the last point was a hundred, and not a hundred and a half. And then, Arnold, there was another most regrettable mistake. You remember that you were sealed up quickly, and rather impulsively, so to say? I found that, in hurriedly capping you down, I forgot entirely to add twenty-four days upon the smaller dial for the leap-years; and so you returned that much ahead of Esther. It was a very bungled arrangement excusable in you, but not in me.”
“Lazaroff!” I began, and then corrected myself with an apology as I saw his brows contract. “Sanson—”
“Thank you,” he replied ironically.
“You will at least answer two or three questions, will you not?” I pleaded. “How did you induce Esther to enter the second cylinder? Why did you trick me? And how have you contrived to outlive the century without appearing more than half your age? I think my questions pardonable.”
“I shall answer them all,” said Sanson. “I may tell you that it was never my plan to send our monkeys ahead of us into this world. I meant to go, Arnold. But unexpectedly there came into my life something against which I had made no provision. In other words, absurd as it sounds, I fell in love. Then I planned to take Esther with me. But this plan, too, was changed, for, to be quite frank, I gathered that she preferred you to me. I then conceived the entertaining idea of taking you both with me, so that our rivalry might be renewed in a world where your advantages of personality would be counterbalanced by my power. Arnold, I never for an instant doubted that I should stand where I stand today. So, having persuaded you to enter the cylinder—and how I laughed at your imbecile complaisance—I invited Esther to follow you. There was no difficulty. On the contrary, she could hardly be convinced that I was in earnest. However, I speedily convinced her by the simple process of putting on the cap. Then, since the cylinders can be manipulated from within, I myself entered the third.”
“You, Sanson!” I gasped. “You, too, have slept a hundred years?”
His look became envenomed, and the quick gust of passion that came upon him was, to my mind, evidence of a mentality unbalanced by unrestrained authority.