Dr. Morton Sims spoke in a sharp, urgent voice.
"Why did you ask me to come here, Hancock?" he said. "You know that I am glad to be here, if I can be of any use to you. But you don't seem to want the sort of sympathetic help that the chaplain here could give you far better than I can. What do you want to say to me? Have you really anything to say? If you have, be a man and say it!"
There was a brief but horrible interlude.
"Well, you are cruel, doctor, not 'arf!--and me with only an hour or two to live,"--the man said with a cringing and sinister grin.
The doctor frowned and looked at the man steadily. Then he asked a sudden question.
"Who were your father and mother?" he said.
The convict looked at the doctor with startled eyes.
"Who told you?" he asked. "I thought nobody knew!"
"Answer my question, Hancock. Only a few minutes remain."
"In your work--It was so that I could leave a warning to others, that I wanted to see you."
"Well, Doctor, I never thought to tell any one. It's always been a sore point with me, but I wasn't born legitimate! I tried hard to make up for it, and I did so too! No one was more respectable than I was in Hackney, until the drink came along and took me."
"Yes? Yes?"--The hunter was on the trail now, Heredity? Reversion? At last the game was flushed!--"Yes, tell me!"
"My father was a gentleman, Doctor. That's where I got my refined tastes. And that's where I got my love of drink--damn him! God Almighty curse him for the blood he gave me!"
"My father was old Mr. Lothian, the solicitor of Grey's Inn Square. He was a well-known gentleman. My mother was his housekeeper, Eliza Hancock. My father was a widower when my mother went into his service. He had another son, at one of the big schools for gentlemen. That was his son by his real wife--Gilbert he was called, and what money was left went to him. My father was a drunkard. He never was sober--what you might rightly call sober--for years, I've heard . . . Mother died soon after Mr. Lothian did. She left a hundred pounds with my Aunt, to bring me up and educate me. Aunt Ellen--but I'm a gentleman's son, Doctor!--drunken old swine he was too! What about my blood now? Wasn't my veins swollen with drink from the first? Christ! _you_ ought to know--you with your job to know--_Now_ are you happy? I'm not a _love_ child, I'm a _drink_ child, that's what I am! Son of old Mr. Lothian, the gentleman-drunkard, brother of his son who's a gentleman somewhere, I don't doubt! P'r'aps 'e mops it up 'imself!--shouldn't wonder, this--brother of mine!"