You may wonder why I confide all this to the phonograph, Polycarp. I
will tell you. The record will be placed by me to-morrow in my safe in
your vault. To-night I shall lock it up in the safe here. When I am
dead, Polycarp, you will find that the secret instructions instruct you
to realize all my estate, and to keep the proceeds in negotiable form
until a lady named Mrs. Catherine Pounds, a widow, comes to you with an
autograph letter from me. You will hand everything to that lady, or to
her representative, without any further inquiry. But it has struck me
this very day, Polycarp, that you, with your confounded suspicious and
legal nature, when you see Mrs. Catherine Pounds, if she should come in
person, may recognise in her a striking resemblance to Camilla. And you
may put difficulties in the way, and rake up history which was not
meant to be raked up. This phonographic record is to prevent you from
doing so, if by chance you have an impulse to do so. Think it over
carefully, Polycarp. Consider our situation, and obey my instructions
without a murmur. The thought of the false death certificates and burial
certificates, and of the unprofessionalism of Darcy, will abrade your
legal susceptibilities; but submit to the torture for my sake, Polycarp.
You are human. I shall add to the letter which Mrs. Catherine Pounds
will bring you a note to say that if you have any scruples, you are to
listen to the phonographic records in the safe; if not, you are to
destroy the phonographic records.
Do I seem gay, Polycarp?
I ought to be. I have carried through my scheme. I have outwitted
Ravengar. I have saved Camilla from death at his hands. I can look
forward to an idyll--brief, perhaps, but ecstatic--in a villa with the
loveliest view on all the Mediterranean. I ought to be gay. And yet I am
not. And it is not the knowledge of my fatal disease that saddens me.
No; I think I have been saddened by a day and a night spent with that
coffin. It is a fraud of a coffin, but it exists. And when I saw it
just now occupying the drawing-room, it gave me a sudden shock. It
somehow took hold of my imagination. I was obliged to look within, and
to touch the waxen image there. And that image seemed unholy. I did not
care to dwell on the thought of it going into the ground, with all the
solemnities of the real thing. What do you suppose will happen to that
waxen image on the Judgment Day, Polycarp? Surely, someone in authority,
possibly a steward, fussy and overworked, will exclaim: 'There is some
mistake here!' I can hear you say that I am mad, Polycarp, that Francis
Tudor was always a little 'wrong.' But I am not mad. It is only that my
brain is too agile, too fanciful. I am a great deal more sane than you,
Polycarp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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