“You will?” The slow intensity of her tone was indescribable. “Know that I don’t bear interference from strangers.” And catching up the child, she rushed by him like a flash. “You are probably one of those missionaries who go stealing about unasked into respectable persons’ rooms,” she called back. “If by any chance you wander into his, tell him his child is in good hands, do you hear, in good hands!” And with a final burst of her hideous laugh, she dashed down the stairs and was gone.
Mr. Sylvester stood shocked and undecided. His fatherly heart urged him to search at once for the parent of this lame boy, and warn him of the possible results of entrusting his child to a woman with so little command over herself. But upon taking out his watch and finding it later by a good half-hour than he expected, he was so struck with the necessity of completing his errand, that he forgot everything else in his anxiety to confront Holt. Knocking at the first door he came to, he waited. A quick snarl and a surprised, “Come in!” announced that he had scared up some sort of a living being, but whether man or woman he found it impossible to tell, even after the door opened and the creature, whoever it was, rose upon him from a pile of rags scattered in one corner.
“I want Mr. Holt; can you tell me where to find him?”
“Upstairs,” was the only reply he received, as the creature settled down again upon its heap of tattered clothing.
Fain to be content with this, he went up another flight and opened another door. He was more successful this time; one glance of his eye assured him that the man he was in search of, sat before him. He had never seen Mr. Holt; but the regular if vitiated features of the person upon whom he now intruded, his lank but not ungraceful form, and free if not airy manners, were not so common among the denizens of this unwholesome quarter, that there could be any doubt as to his being the accomplished but degenerate individual whose once attractive air had stolen the heart of Colonel Japha’s daughter.
He was sitting in front of a small pine table, and when Mr. Sylvester’s eyes first fell upon him, was engaged in watching with a somewhat sinister smile, the final twirl of a solitary nickle which he had set spinning on the board before him. But at the sound of a step at the door, a lightning change passed over his countenance, and rising with a quick anticipatory “Ah!” he turned with hasty action to meet the intruder. A second exclamation and a still more hasty recoil were the result. This was not the face or the form of him whom he had expected.
“Mr. Holt, I believe?” inquired Mr. Sylvester, advancing with his most dignified mien.
The other bowed, but in a doubtful way that for a moment robbed him of his usual air of impudent self-assertion.
“Then I have business with you,” continued Mr. Sylvester, laying the man’s own card down on the table before him. “My name is Sylvester,” he proceeded, with a calmness that surprised himself; “and I am the uncle of the young man upon—whom you are at present presuming to levy blackmail.”
The assurance which for a moment had deserted the countenance of the other, returned with a flash. “His uncle!” reechoed he, with a low anomalous bow; “then it is from you I may expect the not unreasonable sum which I demand as the price of my attentions to your nephew’s interest. Very good, I am not particular from what quarter it comes, so that it does come and that before the clock has struck the hour which I have set as the limit of my forbearance.”
“Which is seven o’clock, I believe?”
“Which is seven o’clock.”
Mr. Sylvester folded his arms and sternly eyed the man before him. “You still adhere to your intention, then, of forwarding to Mr. Stuyvesant at that hour, the sealed communication now in the hands of your lawyer?”
The smile with which the other responded was like the glint of a partly sheathed dagger. “My lawyer has already received his instructions. Nothing but an immediate countermand on my part, will prevent the communication of which you speak, from going to Mr. Stuyvesant at seven o’clock.”
The sigh which rose in Mr. Sylvester’s breast did not disturb the severe immobility of his lip. “Have you ever considered the possibility,” said he, “of the man whom you overheard talking in the restaurant in Dey Street two years ago, not being Mr. Bertram Sylvester of the Madison Bank?”
“No,” returned the other, with a short, sharp, and wholly undisturbed laugh, “I do not think I ever have.”
“Will you give me credit, then, for speaking with reason, when I declare to you that the man you overheard talking in the manner you profess to describe in your communication, was not Mr. Bertram Sylvester?”
A shrug of the shoulders, highly foreign and suggestive, was the other’s answer. “It was Mr. Sylvester or it was the devil,” proclaimed he—“with all deference to your reason, my good sir; or why are you here?” he keenly added.
Mr. Sylvester did not reply. With a sarcastic twitch of his lips the man took up the nickle with which he had been amusing himself when the former came in, and set it spinning again upon the table. “It is half-past six,” remarked he. “It will take me a good half hour to go to my lawyer.”
Mr. Sylvester made a final effort. “If you could be convinced,” said he, “that you have got your grasp upon the wrong man, would you still persist in the course upon which you seem determined?”
With a dexterous sleight-of-hand movement, the man picked up the whirling nickle and laid it flat on the table before him. “A
