“But have you no relations?” I inquired, foreseeing a great difficulty in carrying out these verbal instructions.
“Relations! Bah! what are relations?” he cried excitedly. “Only an infernal encumbrance. I suppose I have some somewhere—everybody has more or less.”
“And don’t you know where yours are?”
“No, nor do I wish to know,” he snapped. “I am alone—you understand—entirely alone. And, moreover, I trust that if you are my friend, as you seem to wish to be, you will so far respect my memory as not to believe all that will probably be said against me. To you only I admit that I am not what I have represented myself to be—that is all. I accept your kindness, but, alas! with considerable shame.”
I drew the Italian notes from the wallet, and counted them.
“There are twenty-eight thousand lire here,” I remarked, “one thousand one hundred and twenty pounds.”
“What does it concern me how much there is?” he asked, smiling. “Use it as I’ve directed. Indeed,” he added, after a pause, “you need not tell any one that you have it.”
“I shall tell my friend Sampson, or people may think that I’ve stolen it,” I said.
“Yes,” he remarked hoarsely, with a sigh, “people are always ready to think ill of one, are they not?”
And then, as the bar of sunlight crept slowly across the worn-out carpet, a deep silence again fell, broken only by the stranger’s fierce, vengeful mutterings which to me conveyed no distinct meaning.