Sime shook his head wisely; this was in accordance with his ideas.
"You know Antony Ferrara?" continued Cairn. "Well, he has done this for me. His damnable practices are worse than any disease. Sime, the man is a pestilence! Although the law cannot touch him, although no jury can convict him--he is a murderer. He controls--forces--"
"It will give you some idea, Sime, of the pitch to which things had come, when I tell you that my father drove to Ferrara's rooms one night, with a loaded revolver in his pocket--"
"No." Cairn leant forward across the table--"to shoot him, Sime, shoot him on sight, as one shoots a mad dog!"
"As God is my witness, if Antony Ferrara had been in his rooms that night, my father would have killed him!"
"It would have been a martyrdom. The man who removes Antony Ferrara from the earth will be doing mankind a service worthy of the highest reward. He is unfit to live. Sometimes I cannot believe that he does live; I expect to wake up and find that he was a figure of a particularly evil dream."
"This incident--the call at his rooms--occurred just before your illness?"
"The thing which he had attempted that night was the last straw, Sime; it broke me down. From the time that he left Oxford, Antony Ferrara has pursued a deliberate course of crime, of crime so cunning, so unusual, and based upon such amazing and unholy knowledge that no breath of suspicion has touched him. Sime, you remember a girl I told you about at Oxford one evening, a girl who came to visit him?"
"Well--he killed her! Oh! there is no doubt about it; I saw her body in the hospital."
"How? Only he and the God who permits him to exist can answer that, Sime. He killed her without coming anywhere near her--and he killed his adoptive father, Sir Michael Ferrara, by the same unholy means!"
Sime watched him, but offered no comment.
"It was hushed up, of course; there is no existing law which could be used against him."
"They are ruled out, Sime, the laws that _could_ have reached him; but he would have been burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages!"
"I see." Sime drummed his fingers upon the table. "You had those ideas about him at Oxford; and does Dr. Cairn seriously believe the same?"
"He does. So would you--you could not doubt it, Sime, not for a moment, if you had seen what we have seen!" His eyes blazed into a sudden fury, suggestive of his old, robust self. "He tried night after night, by means of the same accursed sorcery, which everyone thought buried in the ruins of Thebes, to kill _me_! He projected--things--"