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“Yes, my lord,” replied Baines with a promptitude that made Gerry heave in his chair with unrestrained excitement, “he sent your lordship a message which perhaps you’ll understand, for I must confess I didn’t.”

It is not advisable to wear your emotions upon your sleeve before a servant, and it was a stonily indifferent face I turned to Baines and an unquivering voice in which I bade him deliver his word from the dead, but I will own that discomfort and nervous expectancy had me by the throat. Gerry’s face expressed nothing but unstinted and tremulous glee and triumph.

“‘Go and see Captain Dorinecourte,’ he said, ‘when you get home, Baines. Mr. Crum will have told him why I’m out here. Then say to him from me that if he’s worthy of the name he bears’—I’m only repeating it as he said it, my lord,” interposed Baines apologetically—“‘that he’ll continue with Monsieur Lessaution what I’ve begun, and what’s nearly done too,’ he added. He was getting weaker all the time, my lord, and I don’t think I caught all he said, but there was a lot about the alphabet, and the ruins at Chichitza, and that the French gentleman had nearly got it all—all of what I don’t know, my lord—and things of that kind, when I think he must have been wandering, but just at the last he sat up on his cot and spoke quite loud and clear. ‘After all these generations, when I had it in my grasp, it’s gone to Jack. It’s the cursedest luck in the world, Baines,’ he said, turning to me very wild-like and passionate, ‘the cursedest luck, and if Jack throws away his chance, I’ll—I’ll——’ and then a sort of cough or sob took him sudden in the throat, and he fell back gasping. I held his head, my lord,” went on Baines, his voice getting perceptibly unsteadier, “but it was no use. He turned his eyes to me, and I’m sure he took me for some one else, for he smiled so beautiful and glad that it made him look quite different and like some other person. His lips moved again, but I couldn’t hear any sound. He just breathed deep and quiet-like two or three times, and then was still, and I’m sure he had no pain,” and as he concluded his simple tragedy a large tear rolled over the brim of the faithful valet’s eye and fell with quite a sparkle on the carpet.