“You are owner of two of the richest gold workings in the Transvaal, and I—always a Lazarus—am your confidential secretary. Most confidential, I assure you,” he added, smiling. “The master a murderer; the servant a forger!”
Having thus filled up the long blank in my memory, I did not rest until I had satisfactorily accounted for the events of that fateful night. Subsequently I discovered that the violent blow on my head, received in the accident, had produced such an effect on my brain as to render oblivious all the events of my past. From that moment I commenced a second life. One of my fellow-passengers, noticing my injury, was endeavouring to steal the box of bullion, when I shot him dead with my revolver. Afterwards, when I had recovered consciousness, I opened the box, and, secreting part of the money in my pockets, tried to get away unobserved. But I was arrested, tried for murder, and transported. The rest is known.
At my trial I refused to give any account of myself, for the simple reason that I remembered nothing. My mind was an absolute blank. I had lived an entirely different life for ten years, until I accidentally struck my head a violent blow against the corner of a mantelshelf in my drawing-room, causing the memory of my earlier life to return as suddenly as it had fled, and thus leaving a gap of ten years for me to fill.
Mine was an extraordinary case; but, as I afterwards discovered, my duality of brain was by no means unprecedented. Such vagaries of the mind, although rare, are known to medical science.
When, a week afterwards, I returned to Johannesburg—that dusty, noisy City of Mammon—Lena welcomed me warmly. The same evening, after I had explained to her the cause of my sudden disappearance and apparent insanity, she went to her room, and on her return handed me a faded blue envelope, secured by the official seal of the Bank of England.
“This,” she said, “you asked me to keep for you, on the day we were married.”
I glanced at the superscription, and recognised the handwriting. It contained the lost bank-notes!
Placing them in the fire, I watched the flames consume them, and from that night I commenced life afresh.
Jean is my secretary no longer. I effected a compromise with him, and at the present moment, owing to his shrewd business tact, combined with successful speculation, he is one of the most prosperous promoters of the South African mining companies in the City of London.