It was well that he did so at that precise moment; for, before he rose again, he heard the sharp report of a pistol, and a crashing sound among some of the old wood work of which the summer-house was composed, told him that a shot had there taken effect. Affairs were now getting much too serious; and, accordingly, Dr. Chillingworth thought that, rather than stay there to be made a target of, he would face the intruder.
"Hold--hold!" he cried. "Who are you, and what do you mean by that?"--"Oh! somebody is there," cried the man, as he advanced. "My friend, whoever you are, you were very foolish to throw a stone at me."
"And, my friend, whoever you are," responded the doctor, "you were very spiteful to fire a pistol bullet at me in consequence."--
"Not at all."
"But I say yes; for, probably, I can prove a right to be here, which you cannot."--"Ah!" said the stranger, "that voice--why--you are Dr. Chillingworth?"
"I am; but I don't know you," said the doctor, as he emerged now from the summer-house, and confronted the stranger who was within a few paces of the entrance to it. Then he started, as he added,--
"Yes, I do know you, though. How, in the name of Heaven, came you here, and what purpose have you in so coming?"
"What purpose have you? Since we met at Varney's, I have been making some inquiries about this neighbourhood, and learn strange things."--"That you may very easily do here; and, what is more extraordinary, the strange things are, for the most part, I can assure you, quite true."
The reader will, from what has been said, now readily recognise this man as Sir Francis Varney's mysterious visitor, to whom he gave, from some hidden cause or another, so large a sum of money, and between whom and Dr. Chillingworth a mutual recognition had taken place, on the occasion when Sir Francis Varney had, with such cool assurance, invited the admiral to breakfast with him at his new abode.
"You, however," said the man, "I have no doubt, are fully qualified to tell me of more than I have been able to learn from other people; and, first of all, let me ask you why you are here?"--"Before I answer you that question, or any other," said the doctor, "let me beg of you to tell me truly, is Sir Francis Varney--"
The doctor whispered in the ear of the stranger some name, as if he feared, even there, in the silence of that garden, where everything conspired to convince him that he could not be overheard, to pronounce it in an audible tone.
"He is," said the other.--"You have no manner of doubt of it?"
"Doubt?--certainly not. What doubt can I have? I know it for a positive certainty, and he knows, of course, that I do know it, and has purchased my silence pretty handsomely, although I must confess that nothing but my positive necessities would have induced me to make the large demands upon him that I have, and I hope soon to be able to release him altogether from them."
The doctor shook his head repeatedly, as he said,--
"I suspected it; I suspected it, do you know, from the first moment that I saw you there in his house. His face haunted me ever since--awfully haunted me; and yet, although I felt certain that I had once seen it under strange circumstances, I could not identify it with--but no matter, no matter. I am waiting here for him."
"Indeed!"--"Ay, that I am; and I flung a stone at you, not knowing you, with hope that you would be, by such means, perhaps, scared away, and so leave the coast clear for him."
"Then you have an appointment with him?"--"By no means; but he has made such repeated and determined attacks upon this house that the family who inhabited it were compelled to leave it, and I am here to watch him, and ascertain what can possibly be his object."
"It is as I suspected, then," muttered this man. "Confound him! Now can I read, as if in a book, most clearly, the game that he is playing!"
"Can you?" cried the doctor, energetically--"can you? What is it? Tell me, for that is the very thing I want to discover."--"You don't say so?"
"It is, indeed; and I assure you that it concerns the peace of a whole family to know it. You say you have made inquiries about this neighbourhood, and, if you have done so, you have discovered how the family of the Bannerworths have been persecuted by Varney, and how, in particular, Flora Bannerworth, a beautiful and intelligent girl, has been most cruelly made to suffer."
"I have heard all that, and I dare say with many exaggerations."--"It would be difficult for any one really to exaggerate the horrors that have taken place in this house, so that any information which you can give respecting the motives of Varney will tend, probably, to restore peace to those who have been so cruelly persecuted, and be an act of kindness which I think not altogether inconsistent with your nature."