ended in my drifting to this place, and meeting with
Mr. Candy. He wanted an assistant. I referred him, on the question of
capacity, to my last employer. The question of character remained. I
told him what I have told you--and more. I warned him that there were
difficulties in the way, even if he believed me. 'Here, as elsewhere,'
I said 'I scorn the guilty evasion of living under an assumed name: I am
no safer at Frizinghall than at other places from the cloud that follows
me, go where I may.' He answered, 'I don't do things by halves--I
believe you, and I pity you. If you will risk what may happen, I will
risk it too.' God Almighty bless him! He has given me shelter, he
has given me employment, he has given me rest of mind--and I have the
certain conviction (I have had it for some months past) that nothing
will happen now to make him regret it."

"The slander has died out?" I said.

"The slander is as active as ever. But when it follows me here, it will
come too late."

"You will have left the place?"

"No, Mr. Blake--I shall be dead. For ten years past I have suffered from
an incurable internal complaint. I don't disguise from you that I should
have let the agony of it kill me long since, but for one last interest
in life, which makes my existence of some importance to me still. I want
to provide for a person--very dear to me--whom I shall never see again.
My own little patrimony is hardly sufficient to make her independent of
the world. The hope, if I could only live long enough, of increasing
it to a certain sum, has impelled me to resist the disease by such
palliative means as I could devise. The one effectual palliative in my
case, is--opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted
for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the
virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has
gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it. I am
feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights
are nights of horror. The end is not far off now. Let it come--I have
not lived and worked in vain. The little sum is nearly made up; and I
have the means of completing it, if my last reserves of life fail me
sooner than I expect. I hardly know how I have wandered into telling you
this. I don't think I am mean enough to appeal to your pity. Perhaps, I
fancy you may be all the readier to believe me, if you know that what I
have said to you, I have sa