Ernest William Hornung

“ The man haunted him; it was better to have him there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher continually saw him when he was not there at all.
Better, again, to talk of some things than to dwell on them night and day, especially when those subjects seemed to possess an equally awful fascination for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in his line; that accounted for the doctor's morbid taste, and the patient's most terrible experience was quite enough to account for his. ”

“ Yet suddenly he was all on edge, listening with nerves laid bare by forced vigils in that slumberous room, brown as an Arab in its weird lighting; the silver patch in his hair changed from a florin to a new penny, the whites of his eyes like broad gold rings; their one flaw augmented by an infinite fatigue, their one care the human wreckage on the bed—shattered utterly by him, to be by him built up afresh, but not in the midst of excursions and alarms. ”

“ She had stepped up to Dollar, had taken his arm, had even put her other hand in front of her own revolver.
"Let him go on; we may as well know where we are," she had said in the middle of Scarth's speech. And now she asked him what he proposed, as if she were inquiring the price of a dress, with the civility doubly due to an inferior.
"You have had my proposal," said Scarth. "It's not the kind that one repeats before a third party."
"I may as well ring them up," said Lady Vera, trying to disengage her arm; but Dollar's had closed upon it, and his left hand held hers as in a vise. ”

“ On the Balkan battle-fields there may have been myriads of such faces, not with the unique intellectual quality of this one, but alike in their fierce contempt of battle, murder, and sudden death, as little matters not worth a qualm, whether in the active or the passive party to the business. Among educated Englishmen the temperament is rare, and rarer still the mental attitude; in the combination lie the makings of the hell-born villain, and Mostyn Scarth was the finished article. ”

“ I believe you saw something of each other in Switzerland?"
"We did," replied Dollar weightily. "He was supposed to be looking after a young temporary lunatic, who was of age, rich, and not irresponsible in the eye of the law. Scarth induced the boy to leave him vast sums of money in a will, and then made two distinct attempts to murder him."
"No!"
"He did. You ask what I know of this man, and I make no bones about telling you. It's a thing the whole world ought to know for its protection. He made two separate attempts on the lad's life, the last more ingenious than the first ”

“ Scarth you meant when you told me the other day that poor Croucher had fallen into such bad hands?"
"Poor Croucher! Yes, it was; and there really is no comparison between them. One was born in the scarlet, so to speak, but the other's the only really educated and quite cold-blooded villain I have ever met."
Vera Moyle sat forward in the patient's chair, in the very attitude of two years before, with the same firelight illumining the same steadfast look of moral and intellectual honesty ”

“ He never was as bad as you thought him; you say yourself that he's a saint compared with Mr. Scarth." Dollar was too savage to smile at this free version of what he had said. "Well, they have fallen out, and Croucher's in a bad way altogether; and he has turned to me for a helping hand—not for money or anything of that kind." ”

“ Are you free to stop as you are, or is there anything you want to settle up first?"
"There's me rooms," said Croucher, eagerly. "There's nuffink worth fetching, but I shouldn't like to bilk the people, 'speshly w'en 'er lidyship's gawn an' give me the money, Gawd bless 'er!"
Dollar precipitated the creature's exit, on the verge of fresh saurian tears, of which there were further signs for his benefit on the mat. He might be a bad man, too, might Mr. Croucher, but he wasn't as bad as Mostyn Scarth. ”

“ He had been "tret somefink crool," he declared, but without entering into particulars, for which Dollar did not press; but on the character of Mostyn Scarth there were no such reservations. Croucher denounced that monster with the white hatred of a holy warrior, casting up his eyes with all manner of passionate and pious invocations.
"Only take me away from 'im, before it's too late!" he implored, reluctant murder in the whites of his rolling eyes. "'E's a bad man, a very bad man 'e is! ”

“ But don't you ask me to lend you that!"
"They always seem to forget somefink," said Alfred Croucher, another long mile out of town.
"The first thing being that the best murders oughtn't to look like murders," the criminologist agreed. "They ought to look like accidents, or suicides at the most. ”