"
"Then he must celebrate his worship down below for a little while. The
old fool pretends to know everything, but he never guessed what I was
going to do. Besides, we don't want him breaking in upon our privacy, do
we? He might see the gold when we find it, and rob us of it afterwards."
XVII
THE FIRST EXPERIMENT
Again Benita and her father stared at each other blankly, almost with
despair. They were trapped, cut off from all help; in the power of a
man who was going mad. Mr. Clifford said nothing. He was old and growing
feeble; for years, although he did not know it, Meyer had dominated
him, and never more so than in this hour of stress and bewilderment.
Moreover, the man had threatened to murder him, and he was afraid, not
so much for himself as for his daughter. If he were to die now, what
would happen to her, left alone with Jacob Meyer? The knowledge of his
own folly, understood too late, filled him with shame. How could he have
been so wicked as to bring a girl upon such a quest in the company of an
unprincipled Jew, of whose past he knew nothing except that it was murky
and dubious? He had committed a great crime, led on by a love of lucre,
and the weight of it pressed upon his tongue and closed his lips; he
knew not what to say.
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