"Are you only a servant, perhaps, that rather sinister old servant who was
butler to Hawker and Verner? If so, you are certainly the only link between the
two periods. But if so, why do you degrade yourself to serve this dirty
foreigner, when you at least saw the last of a genuine national gentry? People
like you are generally at least patriotic. Doesn't England mean anything to
you, Mr. Usher? All of which eloquence is possibly wasted, as perhaps you are
not Mr. Usher.
"More likely you are Verner himself; and it's no good wasting eloquence to
make you ashamed of yourself. Nor is it any good to curse you for corrupting
England; nor are you the right person to curse. It is the English who deserve to
be cursed, and are cursed, because they allowed such vermin to crawl into the
high places of their heroes and their kings. I won't dwell on the idea that you're
Verner, or the throttling might begin, after all. Is there anyone else you could
be? Surely you're not some servant of the other rival organization. I can't
believe you're Gryce, the agent; and yet Gryce had a spark of the fanatic in his
eye, too; and men will do extraordinary things in these paltry feuds of politics.
Or if not the servant, is it the . . . No, I can't believe it . . . not the red blood of
manhood and liberty . . . not the democratic ideal . . ."
He sprang up in excitement, and at the same moment a growl of thunder
came through the grating beyond. The storm had broken, and with it a new
light broke on his mind. There was something else that might happen in a
moment.
"Do you know what that means?" he cried. "It means that God himself may
hold a candle to show me your infernal face."
Then next moment came a crash of thunder; but before the thunder a white
light had filled the whole room for a single split second.
Fisher had seen two things in front of him. One was the black-and-white
pattern of the iron grating against the sky; the other was the face in the corner.
It was the face of his brother.
Nothing came from Horne Fisher's lips except a Christian name, which
was followed by a silence more dreadful than the dark. At last the other figure
stirred and sprang up, and the voice of Harry Fisher was heard for the first
time in that horrible room.
"You've seen me, I suppose," he said, "and we may as well have a light
now. You could have turned it on at any time, if you'd found the switch."
He pressed a button in the wall and all the details of that room sprang into
something stronger than daylight. Indeed, the details were so unexpected that
for a moment they turned the captive's rocking mind from the last personal
revelation. The room, so far from being a dungeon cell, was more like a