“Dawson!” gasped the man against whom the monk had warned me. “Let’s have him in. But, by Gad! we must be careful of what we say, for, if all is true of him, he has the cuteness of Old Nick himself.”
“Leave him to me,” I said. Then turning to Glave, said, “Show the gentleman in.”
And we both waited in breathless expectancy for the appearance of the man who knew the truth concerning the carefully-guarded past of Burton Blair, and who, for some mysterious reason, had concealed himself so long in the guise of an Italian.
A moment later he was ushered in, and bowing to us exclaimed with a smile—
“I suppose, gentlemen, I have to introduce myself. My name is Dawson—Richard Dawson.”
“And mine is Gilbert Greenwood,” I said rather distantly. “While my friend here is Reginald Seton.”
“I have heard of you both from our mutual friend, now unfortunately deceased, Burton Blair,” he exclaimed; and sank slowly into the grandfather armchair which I indicated, while I myself stood upon the hearthrug with my back to the fire in order to take a good look at him.
He was in well-made evening clothes, over which he wore a black overcoat, yet there was nothing about him suggestive of the man of strong character. He was of middle height, and his age I judged to be nearly fifty. He wore gold-framed round eye-glasses with thick pebbles, through which he seemed to blink at us like a German professor, and his general aspect was that of a sedate and studious man.
Beneath a patchy mass of grey-brown hair his forehead fell in wrinkled notches over a pair of sunken blue eyes, one of which looked upon the world in speculative wonder, while the other was grey, cloudy, and sightless. Straggling eyebrows wandered in a curiously uncertain manner to their meeting-place above a somewhat fleshy nose. Below the cheeks and beard and moustache blended in a colour-scheme of grey. From the sleeves of his overcoat, as he sat there before us, his lithe, brown fingers shot in and out, twisting and tapping the padded arms of the chair with nervous persistence, and in a manner which indicated the high tension of the man.
“My reason for intruding upon you at this hour,” he said half apologetically, yet with a mysterious smile upon his thick lips, “is because I only arrived back in London this evening and discovered that my friend Blair has, by his will, left in my hands the control of his daughter’s affairs.”