"One word!" I interposed eagerly. "Did my name occur in any of his
wanderings?"
"You shall hear, Mr. Blake. Among my written proofs of the assertion
which I have just advanced--or, I ought to say, among the written
experiments, tending to put my assertion to the proof--there IS one, in
which your name occurs. For nearly the whole of one night, Mr. Candy's
mind was occupied with SOMETHING between himself and you. I have got the
broken words, as they dropped from his lips, on one sheet of paper. And
I have got the links of my own discovering which connect those words
together, on another sheet of paper. The product (as the arithmeticians
would say) is an intelligible statement--first, of something actually
done in the past; secondly, of something which Mr. Candy contemplated
doing in the future, if his illness had not got in the way, and stopped
him. The question is whether this does, or does not, represent the lost
recollection which he vainly attempted to find when you called on him
this morning?"
"Not a doubt of it!" I answered. "Let us go back directly, and look at
the papers!"
"Quite impossible, Mr. Blake."
"Why?"
"Put yourself in my position for a moment," said Ezra Jennings. "Would
you disclose to another person what had dropped unconsciously from the
lips of your suffering patient and your helpless friend, without first
knowing that there was a necessity to justify you in opening your lips?"
I felt that he was unanswerable, here; but I tried to argue the
question, nevertheless.
"My conduct in such a delicate matter as you describe," I replied,
"would depend greatly on whether the disclosure was of a nature to
compromise my friend or not."
"I have disposed of all necessity for considering that side of the
question, long since," said Ezra Jennings. "Wherever my notes included
anything which Mr. Candy might have wished to keep secret, those notes
have been destroyed. My manuscript experiments at my friend's bedside,
include nothing, now, which he would have hesitated to communicate to
others, if he had recovered the use of his memory. In your case, I
have every reason to suppose that my notes contain something which he
actually wished to say to you."
"And yet, you hesitate?"
"And yet, I hesitate. Remember the circumstances under which I obtained
the information which I possess! Harmless as it is, I cannot prevail
upon myself to give it up to you, unless you first satisfy me that there
is a reason for doing so. He was so miserably ill, Mr. Blake! and he was
so helplessly dependent upon Me! Is it too much to ask, if I request you
only to hint to me what your interest is in the lost recollection--or
what you believe that lost recollection to be?"
To have answered him with the frankness which his language and his
manner both claimed from me, would have been to commit myself to openly
acknowledging that I was suspected of the theft of the Diamond. Strongly
as Ezra Jennings had intensified the first impulsive interest which
I had felt in him, he had not overcome my unconquerable reluctance to
disclose the degrading position in which I stood. I took refuge once
more in the explanatory phrases with which I had prepared myself to meet
the curiosity of strangers.