"Yes; I have been thinking, and this is the result: You must either explain publicly and quite satisfactorily to the people of this town, the mystery of your long separation from Oliver and the life you have since led in this trebly barred house, or accept the opprobrium of such accusations as we have listened to to-day. There is no middle course, Judge Ostrander. I who have loved Oliver almost like a son;—who have a daughter who not only loves him but regards him as a perfect model of noble manhood, tell you so, though it breaks my heart to do it. I cannot see you both fall headlong to destruction for lack of understanding the nearness or the depth of the precipice you are approaching."
"So!"
The ejaculation came after a moment of intense silence—a silence during which she seemed to discern the sturdiness of years drop slowly away from him.
"So that is the explanation which people give to my desire for retirement and a life of contemplation. Well," he slowly added, with the halting utterance of one to whom each word is an effort, "I can see some justification for their conclusions now. I have been too self-centred, and too short-sighted to recognise my own folly. I might have known that anything out of the common course rouses a curiosity which supplies its own explanation at any cost to propriety or respect. I have courted my own doom. I am the victim of my own mistake. But," he continued, with a flash of his old fire which made him a dignified figure again, "I'm not going to cringe because I have lost ground in the first skirmish. I come of fighting blood. Oliver's reputation shall not suffer long, whatever I may have done in my parental confidence to endanger it. I have not spent ten years at the bar, and fifteen on the bench for nothing. Let the people look to it! I will stand by my own."
He had as completely forgotten her as if she had never existed. John Scoville, his widow, even the child bowed under troubles not unlike his own, had faded alike from his consciousness. But the generous Deborah felt no resentment at the determination which would only press her and hers deeper into contumely. She had seen the father in the man for the first time, and her whole heart went out in passionate sympathy which blinded her to everything but her present duty. Alas, that it should be so hard a one! Alas, that instead of encouraging him, she must point out the one weakness of his cause which he did not or would not see, that is, his own conviction of his absent son's guilt as typified by the line he had deliberately smeared across Oliver's pictured countenance. The task seemed so difficult, the first steps so blind, that she did not know how to begin and stood staring at him with interest and dread struggling for mastery in her heavily labouring breast.
Did he perceive this or was it the silence which drew his attention to her condition and the evils still threatening him? Whichever it was, the light vanished from his face as he surveyed her and it was with a return of his old manner, that he finally observed:
"You are keeping something from me—some fancied discovery—some clew, as they call it, to what you may consider my dear boy's guilt."
With a deep breath she woke from her trance of indecision and letting forth the full passion of her nature, she cried out in her anguish:
"I have but one answer for that, Judge Ostrander. Look into your own heart! Question your own conscience. I have seen what reveals it. I—"
She stopped appalled. Rage, such as she had never even divined spoke from every feature. He was no longer the wretched but calmly reasoning man, but a creature hardly human, and when he spoke, it was in a frenzy which swept everything before it.
"You have SEEN!" he shouted. "You have broken your promise! You have touched what you were forbidden to touch! You have—"
"Not so," she broke in softly but very firmly. "I have touched nothing that I was told not to, nor have I broken any promise. I simply saw more than I was expected to, I suppose, of the picture which fell the day you first allowed me to enter your study."
"Is that true?"
"It is true."
They were whispering now.
Drawing a deep breath, he gathered up his faculties. "Upon such accidents," he muttered, "hang the fate and honour of men. And you have gossiped about this picture," he again vociferated with sudden and unrestrained violence, "told Reuther—told others—"
"No." The denial was peremptory,—not to be disbelieved. "What I have learned, I have kept religiously to myself. Alas!" she half moaned, half cried, "that I should feel the necessity!"
"Madam!"—he was searching her eyes, searching her very soul, as men seldom search the mind of another. "You believe in the truth of these calumnies that have just been shouted in our ears. You believe what they say of Oliver. You with every prejudice in his favour; with every desire to recognise his worth! You, who have shown yourself ready to drop your husband's cause though you consider it an honest one, when you saw what havoc it would entail to my boy's repute. YOU believe—and on what evidence?" he broke in. "Because of the picture?"
"Yes."
"And the coincidence of his presence in the ravine?"
"Yes."
"But these are puerile reasons." He was speaking peremptorily now and with all the weight of a master mind. "And you are not the woman to be satisfied with anything puerile. There is something back of all this; something you have not imparted. What is that something? Tell—tell—"
"Oliver was a mere boy in those days and a very passionate one. He hated Etheridge—the obtrusive mentor who came between him and yourself."
"Hated?"
"Yes."
"HATED?"
"Yes, there is proof."
"Of his hate?"
"Yes, judge."
He did not ask where. Possibly he knew. And because he did not ask, she did not tell him, holding on to her secret in a vague hope that so much at least might never see light.
"I knew the boy shrank sometimes from Algernon's company," the judge admitted, after another glance at her face; "but that means nothing in a boy full of his own affairs. What else have you against him? Speak up! I can bear it all."
"He handled the stick that—that-"
"Oliver?"
"Yes."
"Never! Now you have gone mad, madam."
"I would be willing to end my days in an asylum if that would disprove this fact."
"But, madam, what proof—what reason can you have for an assertion so monstrous?"
"You remember the shadow I saw which was not that of John Scoville? The person who made that shadow was whittling a stick; that was a trick of Oliver's. I have heard that he even whittled furniture."
"Good God!" The judge's panoply was pierced at last.
"They tried to prove, as you will remember, that it was John who thus disfigured the bludgeon he always carried with pride. But the argument was a sorry one and in itself would have broken down the prosecution had he been a man of better repute. Now, those few chips taken from the handle of this weapon will carry a different significance. For in my folly I asked to see this stick which still exists at Police Headquarters, and there in the wood I detected and pointed out a trifle of steel which never came from the unbroken blades of the knife taken from John's pocket."
Fallen was the proud head now and fallen the great man's aspect. If he spoke it was to utter a low "Oliver! Oliver!"
The pathos of it—the heart-rending wonder in the tone brought the tears to Deborah's eyes and made her last words very difficult.
"But the one great thing which gives to these facts their really dangerous point is the mystery you have made of your life and of this so-called hermitage. If you can clear up that, you can afford to ignore the rest."
"The misfortunes of my house!" was his sole response. "The misfortunes of my house!"
XXIV
ONE SECRET LESS
Suddenly he faced Deborah again. The crisis of feeling had passed, and he looked almost cold.