But he wrapped it all in deep secrecy, for, as the conviction of his true identity grew complete, his fears were multiplied.  Radbolts indeed!  The whole of Christendom—­Principalities and Powers—­were on his track.  They would shut him up, kill him perhaps!  Cunningly he hid his secret—­save what could not be entirely hidden, the physical deformity.  But he hid it with his shawl; he never ate out of his own house; the combination knife-and-fork was kept sedulously hidden.  Only to Beaumaroy did he reveal the hidden thing; and, later, on Beaumaroy’s persuasion, he let into the portentous secret one faithful servant—­Beaumaroy’s unsavory retainer, Sergeant Hooper.

He never accepted Hooper as more than a distasteful necessity—­somebody must wait on him and do him menial service; he was not feared, indeed, for surely such a dog would not dare to be false, but cordially disliked.  Beaumaroy won him from the beginning.  Whom he conceived him to be Beaumaroy himself never knew, but he opened his heart to him unreservedly.  Of him he had no suspicion; to him he looked for safety and for the realization of his cherished dreams.  Beaumaroy soothed his terrors and humored him in all things—­what was the good of doing anything else, asked Beaumaroy’s philosophy.  He loved Beaumaroy far more than he had loved anybody except himself in all his life.  At the end, through the wild tangle of mad imaginings, there ran this golden thread of human affection; it gave the old man hours of peace, sometimes almost of sanity.

So he came to his death, directly indeed of a long-standing organic disease, yet veritably self-destroyed.  And so he sat now, dead amidst his shabby parody of splendor.  He had done with thrones; he had even done with Tower Cottage—­unless indeed his pale shade were to hold nocturnal converse with the robust and flamboyant ghost of Captain Duggle; the one vaunting his unreal vanished greatness, mouthing orations and mimicking pomp; the other telling, in language garnished with strange and horrible oaths, of those dark and lurid terrors which once had driven him from this very place, leaving it ablaze behind.  A strange couple they would make, and strange would be their conversation!

Yet the tenement which had housed the old man’s deranged spirit, empty as now it was—­aye, emptier than Duggle’s tomb—­was still to be witness of one more earthly scene and unwittingly bear part in it.

CHAPTER XIII

RIGHT OF CONQUEST

What has been related of Mr. Saffron’s life before he ascended the throne on which he still sat in the Tower represented all that Beaumaroy knew of his old friend before they met—­indeed he knew scarcely as much.  He told the brief story to Doctor Mary in the parlor.  She heard him listlessly; all that was not much to the point on which her thoughts were set, and did not answer the riddle which the scene in the Tower put to her.  She was calm now—­and ashamed that she had ever lost her calmness.