THE doctor (like me) had his shoes off. The doctor (like me) had come in without making the least noise. He cocked the pistol without saying a word. I felt that I was probably standing face to face with death, and I too said not a word. We two Rogues looked each other steadily and silently in the face--he, the mighty and prosperous villain, with my life in his hands: I, the abject and poor scamp, waiting his mercy.
It must have been at least a minute after I heard the click of the cocked pistol before he spoke.
"How did you get here?" he asked.
The quiet commonplace terms in which he put his question, and the perfect composure and politeness of his manner, reminded me a little of Gentleman Jones. But the doctor was much the more respectable-looking man of the two; his baldness was more intellectual and benevolent; there was a delicacy and propriety in the pulpiness of his fat white chin, a bland bagginess in his unwhiskered cheeks, a reverent roughness about his eyebrows and a fullness in his lower eyelids, which raised him far higher, physiognomically speaking, in the social scale, than my old prison acquaintance. Put a shovel-hat on Gentleman Jones, and the effect would only have been eccentric; put the same covering on the head of Doctor Dulcifer, and the effect would have been strictly episcopal.
"How did you get here?" he repeated, still without showing the least irritation.
I told him how I had got in at the second-floor window, without concealing a word of the truth. The gravity of the situation, and the sharpness of the doctor's intellects, as expressed in his eyes, made anything like a suppression of facts on my part a desperately dangerous experiment.
"You wanted to see what I was about up here, did you?" said he, when I had ended my confession. "Do you know?"The pistol barrel touched my cheek as he said the last words. Ithought of all the suspicious objects scattered about the room, of the probability that he was only putting this question to try my courage, of the very likely chance that he would shoot me forthwith, if I began to prevaricate. I thought of these things, and boldly answered:
"Yes, I do know."
He looked at me reflectively; then said, in low, thoughtful tones, speaking, not to me, but entirely to himself:
"Suppose I shoot him?"
I saw in his eye, that if I flinched, he would draw the trigger.
"Suppose you trust me?" I said, without moving a muscle.
"I trusted you, as an honest man, downstairs, and I find you, like a thief, up here," returned the doctor, with a self-satisfied smile at the neatness of his own retort. "No," he continued, relapsing into soliloquy: "there is risk every way;but the least risk perhaps is to shoot him.""Wrong," said I. "There are relations of mine who have a pecuniary interest in my life. I am the main condition of a contingent reversion in their favor. If I am missed, I shall be inquired after." I have wondered since at my own coolness in the face of the doctor's pistol; but my life depended on my keeping my self-possession, and the desperate nature of the situation lent me a desperate courage.
"How do I know you are not lying?" he asked.
"Have I not spoken the truth, hitherto?"
Those words made him hesitate. He lowered the pistol slowly to his side. I began to breathe freely.
"Trust me," I repeated. "If you don't believe I would hold my tongue about what I have seen here, for your sake, you may be certain that I would for--""For my daughter's," he interposed, with a sarcastic smile.
I bowed with all imaginable cordiality. The doctor waved his pistol in the air contemptuously.
"There are two ways of making you hold your tongue," he said.
"The first is shooting you; the second is making a felon of you.
On consideration, after what you have said, the risk in either case seems about equal. I am naturally a humane man; your family have done me no injury; I will not be the cause of their losing money; I won't take your life, I'll have your character. We are all felons on this floor of the house. You have come among us--you shall be one of us. Ring that bell."He pointed with the pistol to a bell-handle behind me. I pulled it in silence.
Felon! The word has an ugly sound--a very ugly sound. But, considering how near the black curtain had been to falling over the adventurous drama of my life, had I any right to complain of the prolongation of the scene, however darkly it might look at first? Besides, some of the best feelings of our common nature (putting out of all question the value which men so unaccountably persist in setting on their own lives), impelled me, of necessity, to choose the alternative of felonious existence in preference to that of respectable death. Love and Honor bade me live to marry Alicia; and a sense of family duty made me shrink from occasioning a loss of three thousand pounds to my affectionate sister. Perish the far-fetched scruples which would break the heart of one lovely woman, and scatter to the winds the pin-money of another!
"If you utter one word in contradiction of anything I say when my workmen come into the room," said the doctor, uncocking his pistol as soon as I had rung the bell, "I shall change my mind about leaving your life and taking your character. Remember that;and keep a guard on your tongue."
The door opened, and four men entered. One was an old man whom Ihad not seen before; in the other three I recognized the workman-like footman, and the two sinister artisans whom I had met at the house-gate. They all started, guiltily enough, at seeing me.
"Let me introduce you," said the doctor, taking me by the arm.
