The old sense of unreality was strong upon him again.He was listening to the Tocsin's story.It was strange that he should be doing that--that it could be really so! It seemed as though magically he had been transported out of the world where for years past he had lived with danger lurking at every turn, where men set watch about his house to trap him, where the denizens of the underworld yowled like starving beasts to sink their fangs in him, where the police were ceaselessly upon his trail to wreak an insensate vengeance upon him; it seemed as though he had been transported away from all that to something that he had dreamed might, perhaps, sometime happen, that he had hoped might happen, that he had longed for always, but now that it was his, that it also was full of the sense of the unreal.And yet as his mind followed the thread of her story, and leaped ahead and vaguely glimpsed what was to come, be was conscious in a sort of premonitory way of a vaster peril than any he had ever known, as though forces, for the moment masked, were arrayed against him whose strength and whose malignity were beyond human parallel.In what a strange, almost incoherent way his brain was working! He roused himself a little and looked around him--and, with a shock, the starkness of the room, the abject, pitiful air of destitution brought home to him with terrific, startling force the significance of the scene in which he was playing a part.His face set suddenly in hard lines.That she should have been brought to assume such a life as this--forced out of her environment of wealth and refinement, forced in her purity to rub shoulders with the vile, the dissolute, forced to exist as such a creature amid the crime and vice, the wretched horror of the underworld that swirled around her! There was anger now upon him, burning, hot--a merciless craving that was a savage, hungry lust for vengeance.
And then she was speaking again:
"Father's death occurred very shortly after my uncle's message advising us to postpone our trip was received.On his death, Travers, very naturally, as father's lawyer, cabled my uncle to come to New York at once; and my uncle replied, saying that he was coming by the first steamer."She paused again--but only for an instant, as though to frame her thoughts in words.
"I have told you that I had never seen my uncle, that even my father had not seen him for twenty years; and I have told you that the man you know as Henry LaSalle is an impostor--I am using the word 'uncle' now when I refer to him simply to avoid confusion.You are, perhaps, expecting me to say that I took a distinctive dislike to him from the moment he arrived? On the contrary, I had every reason to be predisposed toward him; and, indeed, was rather agreeably surprised than otherwise--he was not nearly so uncouth and unpolished as, somehow, I had pictured his life would have made him.
Do you understand, Jimmie? He was kind, sympathetic; and, in an apathetic way, I liked him.I say 'apathetic' because I think that best describes my own attitude toward every one and everything following father's death until--THAT NIGHT."She rose abruptly from her chair, as though a passive position of any kind had suddenly become intolerable.
"Why tell you what my father and I were to each other!" she cried out in a low, passionate voice."It seemed as though everything that meant anything had gone out of my life.I became worn out, nervous; and though the days were bad enough, the nights were a source of dread.I began to suffer from insomnia--I could not sleep.This was even before my supposed uncle came.I used to read for hours and hours in my room after I had gone to bed.But"--she flung out her hand with an impatient gesture--"there is no need to dwell on that.One night, about a week after that man had arrived, and a little over a month after father had died, I was in my room and had finished a book I was reading.I remember that it was well after midnight.I had not the slightest inclination to sleep.Ipicked up another book--and after that another.There were plenty in my room; but, irrationally, of course, none pleased me.Idecided to go down to the library--not that I think I really expected to find anything that I actually wanted, but more because it was an impulse, and furnished me for the moment with some definite objective, something to do.I got up, slipped on a dressing gown, and went downstairs.The lights were all out.I was just on the point of switching on those in the reception hall, when suddenly it seemed as though I had not strength to lift my hand, and I remember that for an instant I grew terribly cold with dread and fear.From the room on my right a voice had reached me.The door was closed, but the voice was raised in an outburst of profanity.
I--I could hear every word.
"'If she's out of the way, there's no come-back,' the voice snarled.
'I won't listen to anything else! Do you hear! Why, you fool, what are you trying to do--hand me one! Turn everything into cash, and divvy, and beat it--eh? And I'm the goat, and I get caught and get twenty years for stealing trust funds--and the rest of you get the coin!' He swore terribly again.'Who's taken the risk in this for the last five years! There'll be no smart Aleck lawyer tricks--there'll be no halfway measures! And who are you to dictate! She goes out--that's safe--I inherit as next of kin, with no one to dispute it, and that's all there is to it!'
"I stood there and could not move.It was the voice of the man Iknew as my uncle! My heart seemed to have stopped beating.I tried to tell myself that I was dreaming, that it was too horrible, too incredible to be real; that they could not really mean to--to MURDERme.And then I recognised Hilton Travers' voice.
"'I am not dictating, and you are not serious, of course,' he said, with what seemed an uneasy laugh.'I am only warning you that you are forgetting to take the real Henry LaSalle into account.He is bound to hear of this eventually, and then--'
"Another voice broke in--one I did not recognise.