“Ah! no, m’sieur, you do not evade me like that! You are playing a deep game, but you omitted me from your reckoning. The ticket you bought this morning was not for Paris, but for New York via Havre.”
“How—how do you know my intentions?” Markwick demanded, starting. “You confounded skunk, you’ve been spying upon me again!”
But the little Frenchman only grinned, exhibited his palms, and with a slight shrug of his shoulders, said:
“I was not at the police bureau in Paris for fifteen years without learning a few tricks. You are clever, M’sieur, shrewd indeed, but if you attempt to leave to-night without settling with me, then you will be arrested on arrival at Dover. Choose—money and liberty; no money and arrest.”
“Curse you! Then this is the way you’d blackmail me?” Markwick cried, his face livid with rage. “I secured your services for a certain fixed sum, which I paid honourably, together with three further demands.”
“In order to secure my silence,” the Frenchman interrupted. “Because you were well aware of your future if I gave information.”
“But you will not—you shall not,” answered the man who had met me in the garden at Richmond on that memorable night. His face wore a murderous look such as I had never before seen. It was the face of an unscrupulous malefactor, a countenance in which evil was portrayed in every line. “If it were not that we are here, in a public place, I’d wring your neck like a rat.”
“Brave words! brave words!” exclaimed the other, laughing contemptuously. “A sign from me and the prison doors would close behind you for ever. But see! The train will leave in a few moments. Will you pay, or do you desire to stay and meet your accusers?”
Markwick glanced at the train wherein all the passengers had taken their scats. The guards were noisily slamming the doors, and the ticket-examiners, passing from end to end, had now finished their work. He bit his lips, glanced swiftly up at the dock, and snatching up his small bag said, with a muttered imprecation:
“I care nothing for your threats. I shall go.”