“Ten years in heaven!” I exclaimed, as much astonished as I had just been horrified. Was the man mad, after all, or did he speak in paradoxes? “Ten years in heaven!”
Mr. Fortescue smiled again, and then it occurred to me that his ten years of heaven might have some connection with the veiled portrait and the shrine in his room up-stairs.
“You take me too literally,” he said. “I spoke metaphorically. I did not mean that, like Swedenborg and Mohammed, I have made excursions to Paradise. I merely meant that I once spent ten years of such serene happiness as it seldom falls to the lot of man to enjoy. But to return to our subject. You would like to know more of my past; but as it would not be satisfactory to tell you an incomplete history, and to tell you all—Yet why not? I have done nothing that I am ashamed of; and it is well you should know something of the man whose life you have saved once, and may possibly save again. You are trustworthy, straightforward, and vigilant, and albeit you are not overburdened with intelligence—”
Here Mr. Fortescue paused, as if to reflect; and, though the observation was not very flattering—hardly civil, indeed—I was so anxious to hear this story that I took it in good part, and waited patiently for his decision.
“To relate it viva voce” he went on, thoughtfully, “would be troublesome to both of us.”
“I am sure I should find it anything but troublesome.”
“Well, I should. It would take too much time, and I hate travelling over old ground. But that is a difficulty which I think we can get over. For many years I have made a record of the principal events of my life, in the form of a personal narrative; and though I have sometimes let it run behind for a while, I have always written it up.”
“That is exactly the thing. As you say, telling a long story is troublesome. I can read it.”
“I am afraid not. It is written in a sort of stenographic cipher of my own invention.”
“That is very awkward,” I said, despondently. “I know no more of shorthand than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only tangible result was a splitting headache.”