“Then all this is mine!” I exclaimed, even then unable to fully realise the truth.
“All,” answered the monk, “except the share to me, or rather to my Order, for distribution to the poor, as payment for its guardianship, and that to the Signor Dawson—with, I suppose,” and he turned towards Reggie, “some acknowledgment to your friend. I warned you against him once,” he added, “but it was owing to what Dawson told me—lies.”
“I have already pledged myself to continue to act towards your Order as Burton Blair has done,” I replied. “As to Dawson that is another matter, but certainly my friend Seton here will not be forgotten, nor you personally, as the faithful holder of the secret.”
“Any reward of mine goes to my Order,” was the manly fellow’s quiet reply. “We are forbidden to possess money, our small personal wants being supplied by the father superior, and of this world’s riches we desire none save that necessary to relieve the poor and afflicted.”
“You shall have some for that purpose, never fear,” I laughed.
Then, as the air exhausted by the lights seemed to grow more foul, we decided to return to the cell so cunningly constructed at the mouth of the narrow outer gallery.
We had reached the brink of that terrible abyss where the black flood roared deep below, and I had passed over the narrow hand-bridge and gained the opposite side safely, when, without warning, a pair of strong hands seized me in the darkness, and almost ere I could utter a cry I was forced backwards to the edge of the awful chasm.
The hands held me in an iron grip by the throat and arm, and so suddenly had I been seized that for the first instant I believed it to be a joke on Reggie’s part—for he was fond of horseplay when in jubilant spirits.
“My God!” I however heard him cry a second later, as I suppose the flickering lamplight fell upon my assailant’s countenance, “why, it’s Dawson!”
Knowledge of the terrible truth that I had been seized by my worst enemy, who had followed us in, well knowing the place, aroused within me a superhuman strength, and I grappled with the fellow in a fierce death struggle. Ere my two companions could reach and rescue me we were swaying to and fro in the darkness on the very edge of the abyss into which it was his intention to hurl me to the same death that the two Swiss Guards had probably been consigned by the wily cardinal.