Part 26 (1/2)

”You are right; it would be better,” murmured Frederick, hardly heeding what he said. Then, as he encountered his father's eye resting upon him with implacable scrutiny, he added, in weak repet.i.tion: ”Why should she give her money to me? What was I to her that she should will me her fortune?”

The father's finger trembled to a certain line in the doc.u.ment, which seemed to offer some explanation of this; but Frederick did not follow it. He had seen that his father was expecting a reply to the question he had previously put, and he was casting about in his mind how to answer it.

”When did you know of this will?” Mr. Sutherland now repeated. ”For know of it you did before you came to me for money.”

Frederick summoned up his full courage and confronted his father resolutely.

”No,” said he, ”I did not know of it. It is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.”

He lied. Mr. Sutherland knew that he lied and Frederick knew that he knew it. A shadow fell between them, which the older, with that unspeakable fear upon him roused by Sweet.w.a.ter's whispered suspicions, dared no longer attempt to lift.

After a few minutes in which Frederick seemed to see his father age before his eyes, Mr. Sutherland coldly remarked:

”Dr. Talbot must know of this will. It has been sent here to me from Boston by a lawyer who drew it up two years ago. The coroner may not as yet have heard of it. Will you accompany me to his office to-morrow? I should like to have him see that we wish to be open with him in an affair of such importance.”

”I will accompany you gladly,” said Frederick, and seeing that his father neither wished nor was able to say anything further, he bowed with distant ceremony as to a stranger and quietly withdrew. But when the door had closed between them and only the memory of his father's changed countenance remained to trouble him, he paused and laid his hand again on the k.n.o.b, as if tempted to return. But he left without doing so, only to turn again at the end of the hall and gaze wistfully back.

Yet he went on.

As he opened his own door and disappeared within, he said half audibly:

”Easy to destroy me now, Amabel. One word and I am lost!”

BOOK II

THE MAN OF NO REPUTATION

XXI

SWEEt.w.a.tER REASONS

And what of Sweet.w.a.ter, in whose thoughts and actions the interest now centres?

When he left Mr. Sutherland it was with feelings such as few who knew him supposed him capable of experiencing. Unattractive as he was in every way, ungainly in figure and unprepossessing of countenance, this b.u.t.t of the more favoured youth in town had a heart whose secret fires were all the warmer for being so persistently covered, and this heart was wrung with trouble and heavy with a struggle that bade fair to leave him without rest that night, if not for many nights to come. Why? One word will explain. Unknown to the world at large and almost unknown to himself, his best affections were fixed upon the man whose happiness he thus unexpectedly saw himself destined to destroy. He loved Mr.

Sutherland.

The suspicion which he now found transferred in his own mind from the young girl whose blood-stained slippers he had purloined during the excitement of the first alarm, to the unprincipled but only son of his one benefactor, had not been lightly embraced or thoughtlessly expressed. He had had time to think it out in all its bearings. During that long walk from Portchester churchyard to Mr. Halliday's door, he had been turning over in his mind everything that he had heard and seen in connection with this matter, till the dim vision of Frederick's figure going on before him was not more apparent to his sight than was the guilt he so deplored to his inward understanding.

He could not help but recognise him as the active party in the crime he had hitherto charged Amabel with. With the clew offered by Frederick's secret anguish at the grave of Agatha, he could read the whole story of this detestable crime as plainly as if it had been written in letters of fire on the circle of the surrounding darkness. Such anguish under such circ.u.mstances on the part of such a man could mean but one thing--remorse; and remorse in the breast of one so proverbially careless and corrupt, over the death of a woman who was neither relative nor friend, could have but one interpretation, and that was guilt.

No other explanation was possible. Could one be given, or if any evidence could be adduced in contradiction of this a.s.sumption, he would have dismissed his new suspicion with more heartiness even than he had embraced his former one. He did not wish to believe Frederick guilty. He would have purchased an inner conviction of his innocence almost at the price of his own life, not because of any latent interest in the young man himself, but because he was Charles Sutherland's son, and the dear, if unworthy, centre of all that n.o.ble man's hopes, aims, and happiness.

But he could come upon no fact capable of shaking his present belief.

Taking for truth Amabel's account of what she had seen and done on that fatal night--something which he had hesitated over the previous day, but which he now found himself forced to accept or do violence to his own secret convictions--and adding to it such facts as had come to his own knowledge in his self-imposed role of detective, he had but to test the events of that night by his present theory of Frederick's guilt, to find them hang together in a way too complete for mistake.

For what had been his reasons for charging Amabel herself with the guilt of a crime she only professed to have been a partial witness to?

They were many.

First--The forced nature of her explanations in regard to her motive for leaving a merry ball and betaking herself to the midnight road in her party dress and slippers. A woman of her well-known unsympathetic nature might use the misery of the Zabels as a pretext for slipping into town at night, but never would be influenced by it as a motive.