Chapter 20 - Page 2

must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only
not revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like;
because, too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of
myself and laugh at myself."

"Is it a long story?" asked the Warden.

"I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity," said Redclyffe.

"I will fill my pipe then," answered the Warden, "and listen at my
ease; and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I
will impute it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken
of our English hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning."

He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal--for the first time
in his life--the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and purposes, if
such they could be called, with which he had amused himself so many
years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he could
remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old woman,
in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor, and
educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities,
his morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death,
and the singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a
considerable time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had
only interrupted it by now and then a question to make it plainer,
continued to smoke his pipe slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.

"This Doctor of yours was a singular character," said he. "Evidently,
from what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences, he
must have been of this part of the country,--of this immediate
neighborhood,--and such a man could not have grown up here without
being known. I myself--for I am an old fellow now--might have known him
if he lived to manhood hereabouts."

"He seemed old to me when I first knew him," said Redclyffe. "But
children make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five
then, as well as I can judge."

"You are now twenty-seven or eight," said the Warden, "and were four
years old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you
know, my friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who
your Doctor was?"

"How strange this seems!" exclaimed Redclyffe. "It has never struck me
that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
surroundings or any