One of My Sons Part 32

"Oh!"

Sam and I stopped helping ourselves to wine and left the bottle to him.

"Do you know what time this was?" I asked.

"No; how should I? It was before ten, for at ten he was dead."

"It could not have been poison he threw out or even the remains of it," I remarked, "for that would imply suicide; and the verdict was one of murder."

Mr. Rosenthal was just far enough gone to accept this a.s.sertion.

"That's so. I wonder I never thought of that before. Then it must have been wine. Now, I wouldn't have thought so badly of Mr. Gillespie as that. I always considered him a sensible man, and no sensible man pours wine out of a window," he sapiently remarked, raising his gla.s.s.

It was empty, and he set it down again; then he took up the bottle.

That was empty, too. Grumbling some unintelligible words, he glanced at the cabinet.

We failed to understand him.

"There are but two excuses for a man who deliberately wastes wine," he proceeded, in tipsy argument with himself. "Either he has had enough--hard to think that of Mr. Gillespie at so early an hour in the evening--or else the liquor's bad. Now, only a fool would accuse a man like Mr. Gillespie of having bad liquor in his house, unless--unless--something got into it--Oh!" he suddenly exclaimed, with the complacency of one who has unexpectedly made a remarkable discovery, "there _was_ something in it, something which gave it a bad taste. Prussic acid has a bad taste, hasn't it?--and not liking the taste he flung the wine away. No man would go on drinking wine with prussic acid in it," he mumbled on. "Now, which of those fellows was it who poured him out that wine?"

We sat silent; both bound that he should supply his own answer.

"I ought to know; I've read about it enough. It was the slick one; the fellow who goes by me as if I were dirt--Oh, I know; it's Leighton!

Leighton!" And he stumbled to his feet with a sickening leer.

"I'm going down to the police station," he cried. "I'm going to inform the authorities----"

"Not to-night," I protested, rising and speaking somewhat forcibly in his ear. "If you go there to-night they will shut you up till morning--jail you!"

He laughed boisterously. "That would be a joke. None of that for me.

I'll see them dashed first." And he looked at us with a sickly smile, the remembrance of which will make me hate him forever. Suddenly he began to search for his hat. "I think I'll go home," he observed, with an air of extreme condescension. "Leighton Gillespie, eh? Well, I'm glad the question is settled. Here's to his health! and yours--and yours----"

He was gone.

We were both on our feet ready to a.s.sist him in his departure. But he got away in good shape, and when the lower door slammed we congratulated each other with a look. Then Sam seized the bottle and I the gla.s.s from which this fellow had drunk, and both fell cras.h.i.+ng into the fireplace. Then Sam spoke:

"I fear Leighton Gillespie will sleep his last sound sleep to-night."

"You must consider the drivel we have just listened to as of some importance, then," I declared.

"Taken with what Yox told us, I certainly do," was Sam's emphatic reply.

The sigh which escaped me was involuntary. If this was Sam's opinion, I must prepare myself for an interview with Hope. Alas! it was likely to bring me sorrow in proportion to the joy it brought her.

XXIII

IN MY OFFICE

It was with strange reluctance I opened the paper next morning. Though I had no reason for apprehending that my adventure of the day before had been shared by anyone likely to give information in regard to it, the consciousness of holding an important secret is so akin to the consciousness of guilt, I could not help dreading some reference to the same in the sheet I now unfolded. I wished to be the first to tell Miss Meredith of the new direction in which suspicion was pointing, and experienced great relief when, upon consulting the columns usually devoted to the all-engrossing topic of the Gillespie poisoning case, I came upon a direct intimation of the necessity, now universally felt, of holding Alfred accountable for his father's death, as the only one of the three who had shown himself unable to explain away the circ.u.mstantial evidence raised against him.

This expression of opinion on the part of the press had been antic.i.p.ated too long by Miss Meredith for it to prove a shock to her.

I therefore did not commit myself to an early interview, but went at once to my office, where important business awaited me.

I was in the midst of a law paper, when I was warned by a certain nervous perturbation fast becoming too common with me, that someone had been admitted to my inner office and now stood before me. Looking up, I saw _her_.

She wore a thick veil, and was clad in a long cloak which completely enveloped her. But there was no mistaking the outlines of the figure which had dwelt in my mind and heart ever since the fateful night of our first meeting, or the half-frightened, half-eager att.i.tude with which she awaited my invitation to enter. Agitated by her presence, which was totally unexpected in that place, I rose, and, with all the apparent calmness the situation demanded, I welcomed her in and shut the door behind her.

When I turned back it was to meet her face to face. She had taken off her veil and loosened her cloak at the neck; and as the latter fell apart I saw that the left hand clutched a newspaper. I no longer doubted the purpose of her visit. She had seen the article I have just quoted, and was more moved by it than I had expected.

"You must pardon this intrusion," she began, ignoring the chair I had set for her. "I have seen--learned something which grieves--alarms me.

You are my lawyer; more than that, my friend--I have no other--so I have come--" Here she sank into a chair, first drooping her head, then looking up piteously.

I tried to give her the support she asked for. Concealing the effect of her emotion upon me, I told her that she could find no truer friend or one who comprehended her more intuitively; then with a gesture towards the paper, I remarked:

"You are frightened at the impatience of the public. You need not be, Miss Meredith; there are always certain hot-headed people who advocate rash methods and demand any bone to gnaw rather than not gnaw at all.

The police are more circ.u.mspect; they are not going to arrest any one of your cousins without evidence strong enough to warrant such extreme measures. Do not worry about Alfred Gillespie; to-morrow it will not be his name, but----"

With a leap she was on her feet.

"Whose?" she cried, meeting my astonished gaze with such an agony of appeal in her great tear-dry eyes, that I drew back appalled.

It was not Alfred, then, she loved. Was it the handsome George, after all, or could it be--no, it could not be--that all this youth, all this beauty, nay, this embodiment of truest pa.s.sion and self-forgetting devotion, had fixed itself upon the unhappy man whom I had just decided to be unworthy of any woman's regard.

Aghast at the prospect, I plunged on wildly, desperately, but with a certain restraint merciful to her, if no relief to me.

"George, too, seems innocent. Leighton only--" Yes, it was he. I saw it as the name pa.s.sed my lips, saw it even before she gave utterance to the low cry with which she fell at my feet in an att.i.tude of entreaty.

"Oh!" she murmured, "don't say it! I cannot bear it yet. No schooling has made me ready. It is unheard of--impossible! He is so good, so kind, so full of lofty thoughts and generous impulses. I would sooner suspect myself, and yet--oh, Mr. Outhwaite, pity me! Every support is gone; everything in which I trusted or held to. If he is the base, the despicable wretch they say, where shall I seek for goodness, trustworthiness, and truth?"

I had no heart to answer. So it was upon the plainest, least accomplished, and, to all appearance, least responsive as well as least responsible, of Mr. Gillespie's three sons she had fixed her affections and lavished the warm emotions of her pa.s.sionate young life. Why had I not guessed it? Why had I let George's handsome figure and Alfred's lazy graces blind me to the fact that woman chooses through her imagination; and that if out of a half-dozen suitors she encounters one she does not thoroughly understand, he is sure to be the one to strike her untutored fancy. Alas! for her when, as in this case, this lack of mutual understanding is founded on the impossibility of a pure mind comprehending the hidden life of one who puts no restriction upon the worst side of his nature.

These thoughts were instantaneous, but they made a dividing line in my life. Henceforth this woman, in all her alluring beauty, was in a way sacred to me, like a child we find astray. Raising her from the appealing posture into which she had sunk, I a.s.sured her with as much gentleness as my own inner rebellion would allow:

"You have not trusted him yourself, or you would let no newspaper report drive you here for solace."

She cringed; the blow had told. But she struggled on, with a feverish desire to convince herself, if not me, of the worth of him she loved so pa.s.sionately.

"I know--it was my weakness--or his misfortune. He had given me no cause--no real cause--his eccentricities--my uncle's impatience with them--my own difficulty in understanding them--little things, Mr. Outhwaite, nothing deep, nothing convincing--I cannot explain--shadows--memories so slight they vanish while I seek them--I would have given worlds not to have been shaken in my faith, not to have included him for a minute in the accusation of that phrase, 'one of my sons'; but I am over-conscientious, and because the one I trusted--lived by, had not been exonerated by his father, I did not dare to separate him from the rest, in the doubts his father's accusation had raised. It would have been unjust to them, to the two who cared most for me--the two--" Here her voice trailed off into silence, only to rise in the sudden demand: "What has occasioned this change in public opinion? What have the police discovered, what have you discovered, that he should now be singled out--he against whom nothing was found at the inquest--who has a child----"

"Yet who allows himself to lead a double life."

I said this with a purpose. I knew what its effect must be upon so pure a soul, and I was not surprised at the emotion she displayed. Yet there was something in her manner as she pressed her two hands together which suggested the presence of a different feeling from the one I had expected to rouse in launching this poisoned arrow; and, hesitating with new doubt, I went falteringly on:

"Some men show a very different face in their homes and before their friends than in haunts where your pure imagination cannot follow them.