Read One of My Sons Page 25


  XXIII

  IN MY OFFICE

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

  This expression of opinion on the part of the press had beenanticipated 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 atonce to my office, where important business awaited me.

  I was in the midst of a law paper, when I was warned by a certainnervous perturbation fast becoming too common with me, that someonehad been admitted to my inner office and now stood before me. Lookingup, I saw _her_.

  She wore a thick veil, and was clad in a long cloak which completelyenveloped her. But there was no mistaking the outlines of the figurewhich had dwelt in my mind and heart ever since the fateful night ofour first meeting, or the half-frightened, half-eager attitude withwhich she awaited my invitation to enter. Agitated by her presence,which was totally unexpected in that place, I rose, and, with all theapparent calmness the situation demanded, I welcomed her in and shutthe door behind her.

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

  "You must pardon this intrusion," she began, ignoring the chair I hadset 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 Ihave come--" Here she sank into a chair, first drooping her head, thenlooking up piteously.

  I tried to give her the support she asked for. Concealing the effectof her emotion upon me, I told her that she could find no truer friendor one who comprehended her more intuitively; then with a gesturetowards 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 advocaterash methods and demand any bone to gnaw rather than not gnaw at all.The police are more circumspect; they are not going to arrest any oneof your cousins without evidence strong enough to warrant such extrememeasures. Do not worry about Alfred Gillespie; to-morrow it will notbe his name, but----"

  With a leap she was on her feet.

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

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

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

  "George, too, seems innocent. Leighton only--" Yes, it was he. I sawit as the name passed my lips, saw it even before she gave utteranceto the low cry with which she fell at my feet in an attitude ofentreaty.

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

  I had no heart to answer. So it was upon the plainest, leastaccomplished, and, to all appearance, least responsive as well asleast responsible, of Mr. Gillespie's three sons she had fixed heraffections and lavished the warm emotions of her passionate younglife. Why had I not guessed it? Why had I let George's handsome figureand Alfred's lazy graces blind me to the fact that woman choosesthrough her imagination; and that if out of a half-dozen suitors sheencounters one she does not thoroughly understand, he is sure to bethe one to strike her untutored fancy. Alas! for her when, as in thiscase, this lack of mutual understanding is founded on theimpossibility of a pure mind comprehending the hidden life of one whoputs no restriction upon the worst side of his nature.

  These thoughts were instantaneous, but they made a dividing line in mylife. Henceforth this woman, in all her alluring beauty, was in a waysacred to me, like a child we find astray. Raising her from theappealing posture into which she had sunk, I assured her with as muchgentleness as my own inner rebellion would allow:

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

  She cringed; the blow had told. But she struggled on, with a feverishdesire to convince herself, if not me, of the worth of him she lovedso passionately.

  "I know--it was my weakness--or his misfortune. He had given me nocause--no real cause--his eccentricities--my uncle's impatience withthem--my own difficulty in understanding them--little things,Mr. Outhwaite, nothing deep, nothing convincing--I cannotexplain--shadows--memories so slight they vanish while I seek them--I wouldhave given worlds not to have been shaken in my faith, not to have includedhim for a minute in the accusation of that phrase, 'one of my sons'; but Iam over-conscientious, and because the one I trusted--lived by, had notbeen exonerated by his father, I did not dare to separate him from therest, in the doubts his father's accusation had raised. It would have beenunjust to them, to the two who cared most for me--the two--" Here her voicetrailed off into silence, only to rise in the sudden demand: "What hasoccasioned this change in public opinion? What have the police discovered,what have you discovered, that he should now be singled out--he againstwhom 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 sopure a soul, and I was not surprised at the emotion she displayed. Yetthere was something in her manner as she pressed her two handstogether which suggested the presence of a different feeling from theone 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 theirfriends than in haunts where your pure imagination cannot follow them.The life lived under your eye is not the one really led by themelancholy being you have watched with such sympathetic interest."

  She did not seem to follow me.

  "What do you mean?" Her indignation was so strong that she leaped toher feet and eyed me with a manifest sense of outrage. "You speak asif you meant something I should not hear. _He!_ Claire's father----"

  It was a difficult task. Surely my lines had fallen in untowardplaces. But there was no doubt about my duty. If her fresh, unspoiledheart had made its home in a nest of serpents, it was well she shouldknow her mistake before the shame of the discovery should overwhelmher.

  Turning aside, so that I should not seem to spy upon her agitation, Ianswered her as such questions should be answered, with the truth.

  "Miss Meredith," said I, "when I undertook to sift this matter, and ifpossible bring to light some fact capable of settling the doubt thatis wearing away your life, I hoped to relieve your heart and restoreyour faith in the one cousin most congenial to you. That I have failedin this and find myself called upon to inflict suffering
rather thanto bring peace to your agitated heart is a source of regret to myselfwhich you can never measure. But it cannot be helped. I dare not keepback the truth. Leighton Gillespie is unworthy your regard, MissMeredith, not only because he lies under suspicion of having committedthe worst sin in the calendar, but because he has deceived you as tothe state of his own affections. He----"

  "Wait!" Her voice was peremptory; her manner noble. "I wish to sayright here, Mr. Outhwaite, that Leighton Gillespie has never deceivedme in this regard. I have cared for him because--because I could nothelp it. But he has never led me into doing so by any show of peculiarinterest in myself. George has courted me and Alfred nearly has, butnot Leighton; yet to him my whole heart went out, and if it is a shameto own it I must endure that shame rather than injure his cause byleaving you under the influence of a prejudice which has no foundationin fact."

  Before the generosity of this self-betrayal I bowed my head. Herbeauty, warm and glowing as it was at this moment of self-abandonment,did not impress me so much as the mingled candour and pride with whichshe exonerated this man from the one fault of which she knew him to beinnocent. It gave me a new respect for her and a shade more offorbearance for him, so that my voice softened as I replied:

  "Well, well, we will not charge him with deliberate falsehood towardsyou, only with the madness which leads a man to sacrifice honour andreputation to the fancied charms of an irresponsible woman. He isunder a spell, Miss Meredith, which I will not attempt to name. Theobject of it I have myself seen, and it was from her hand (possiblywithout her understanding the purpose for which he wanted it, as shehas no appearance of being a really wicked woman) that he obtained thepoison which did such deadly work in your uncle's house."

  The worst was said; and the silence that followed was one never to beforgotten by her or by me. When it was broken, it was by Hope, and inwords which came in such starts and with such pauses, I could onlyguess their meaning through my own identification with her shame andgrief.

  "Calumny!--it cannot be!--so good--so thoughtful in his bringing up ofClaire--that day he pulled her aside lest she should stumble againstthe little boy with the broken arm. It is a dream! a horrible dream!He depraved? he a buyer of poison?--no, no, no, not _he_, but the evilspirit that sometimes possesses him. Leighton Gillespie in his truehours is a man to confide in, to regard with honour, to--to--to----"

  I no longer made an effort at listening. She was not addressing me,but her own soul, with which for the moment she stood apart in thegreat loneliness which an overwhelming catastrophe creates. She didnot even remember my presence, and I did not dare recall it to her. Isimply let her lose herself in her own grief, while I fought my ownbattle, and, as I hope, won my own victory. But this could not last;she suddenly awoke to the nearness of listening ears, and, flushingdeeply, ceased the broken flow of words which had so worn upon myheart, and, regaining some of her lost composure, forcibly declared:

  "You are an honest man, Mr. Outhwaite, and, I am told, a reliablelawyer. You have too much feeling and judgment to malign a man alreadylabouring under the accusation which unites this whole family in onecloud of suspicion. Tell me, then, do you positively know Leighton tohave done what you say?"

  "Alas!" was my short but suggestive reply.

  Instantly she ceased to struggle, and with a calmness hardly to beexpected from her after such a display of feeling, she surveyed meearnestly for a moment, then said:

  "Tell me the whole story. I have a reason for hearing it, a reasonwhich you would approve. Let me hear what you learned, what you saw.It is not to be found in the papers. I have only found there a generalallusion to him calculated to prepare the mind for some greatdisclosure to-morrow--" And her hand tightened upon the sheet which Inow discovered to be the one morning journal I had failed to see. "Youwill pay no attention to my feelings--I have none--we are sitting incourt--let me hear."

  Respecting her emotion, respecting the attitude in which she hadplaced me, I did as she requested. With all the succinctness possible,I told her how I had been led to go to Mother Merry's and what I haddiscovered there. Then I related what we had learned from Rosenthal.The narrative was long, and gave me ample opportunity for studying itseffect upon her.

  But she made no betrayal of her feelings; perhaps, as she had said,she had none at this moment. With her hand clenched on her knee, shesat listening so intently that all her other faculties seemed to havebeen suspended for this purpose; only, as I approached the end, Inoticed that the grey shadow which had hung over her from the firsthad deepened to a pall beneath which the last vestige of her aboundingyouth had vanished.

  My own heart grew heavy as the gladness left hers, and I was nearly asdesolate as she when I made this final remark:

  "That is all, Miss Meredith. I as truly believe that LeightonGillespie bought the bottle of poison from the girl he calledMille-fleurs as if I had seen him laying the money down before her.But Rosenthal's admissions you must take at your own valuation. Hesays he saw your uncle, with backward looks and signs of secret fearand disturbance, pour out something from a glass on to the grass-plotunderneath his open window. Was it the wine which had been given himby Leighton, and did he do this because of the drug he had detected init?--a drug, alas! so fatal, it was not necessary for him to drink thefull glass in order to succumb to it? That is a question you mustanswer in your mind from the knowledge you have of your uncle and hisfamily."

  There was a hope held out in this last phrase which I expected to seeher embrace. But she did not; on the contrary, her depression remainedunchanged and she said:

  "I knew my uncle well. He was a just man, and, in times of greatdanger, a cool one. He would never have written for my eyes those fourwords--'one of my sons'--unless some new fact had added certainty tohis former conviction. The drug was in the wine handed him byLeighton; we must accept that fact whatever it may cost us."

  Her calmness amazed me. For the last few minutes she seemed upborne bysome secret thought I could neither fathom nor understand.

  But suddenly her old horror returned with the recurrence of some oldmemory. "Then it was his hand that stole towards my uncle's glass inthe dark!" she cried; "that murderous, creeping hand, the vision ofwhich has haunted me night and day since I heard of it. Oh, horrible!horrible! What a curse to fall upon a man! It is the work of thearch-fiend. Poor Leighton! poor Leighton!" she cried in her agony.

  Bowing her head, she sobbed bitterly, while I surveyed her inamazement. I did not understand her. She seemed to be weeping forLeighton, not for herself; at all events she did not show therepulsion I expected from her in face of such monstrous depravity. Wasthe fascination he exerted over her so great that she could not weighat their proper value characteristics so entirely evil? It did notseem possible. Yet there she sat mourning for him, instead of crushingthe very thought of him out of her heart.

  "I think I comprehend it all now," she finally whispered, half toherself and half to me. "I have had the thought before; it has comewhen that bewildering look of mad uneasiness has crossed his face andhe has left us to be gone days, sometimes weeks, without notice orexplanation. It is a strange idea, a secret, almost an uncanny, one;but it is the only one that can explain a crime for which one and allof my cousins seem to lack the inherent baseness. Dare I breathe it toyou? It may be the saving of Leighton, if true; God knows it is myonly excuse for clinging to him still."

  "And you do cling to him still?" I asked, knowing what her answerwould be, but hoping against hope.

  The look she gave recalled all her old beauty. Would that I might havebeen the cause of it! or that a woman would love where she was lovedand not where her heart must encounter disgrace and bitter suffering.

  "I cannot help doing so," she murmured. "He will soon need my aid, ifnot my comfort; for I know what these horrible contradictions mean. Iunderstand them, understand him, and even the revolting crime of whichhe may have been guilty. Hypocrisy does not explain it; depravity doesnot explain it; his good acts are too real, the nobility
of his naturetoo unmistakable. Disease alone can account for it. He is the victimof double consciousness, and he leads two lives--your ownexpression--because the two hemispheres of his brain do not act inunison. Wickedness is not his normal condition. His normal conditionis a noble one. By nature he is a God-fearing man, devoted to goodworks and high thoughts. When he goes astray it is because the balanceof his faculties has been disturbed. This is no new thing to thepsychologist. You yourself have heard of men so afflicted. LeightonGillespie is one."

  Was her own brain turned by her terror, anxiety, and wonder? Surelyshe was either mad or playing with my common sense. But the calmdignity of her manner proved that she had advanced this astonishing,this fantastic explanation of Leighton Gillespie's contradictoryactions in good faith. Despair seized me at this proof of histenacious hold upon her, and I could not quite restrain a touch ofirony.

  "You would make him out a sort of Jekyll and Hyde," I ventured. "Alas!I fear the courts do not take into account the theories of theromancer in their judgment of criminals."

  The sarcasm passed unheeded. Growing more and more beautiful as herearnestness increased, she said with simple confidence:

  "Talk to Dr. Bennett; he has known my cousin almost from his birth.Ask what these sudden changes mean in a man whose primal instinctshave always been good. Ask why this devoted father, this kind son,suddenly loses himself, it may be at table, it may be while sittingwith his own child by the fire, and, deaf to all remonstrance, blindto the most touching appeals of those about him, goes suddenly out anddoes not come back till he can be himself again in the presence of hisfamily and under the eye of his friends. Previous to that awfulmorning when my uncle unsealed to my eyes the horrible secret thatrested like a cloud over the household, I used to give anotherexplanation to these varying moods, and see in them a promise of morepersonal hopes and an augury of my own future happiness; so easy is itfor a woman to deceive herself when she worships a man without fullycomprehending him. I thought--" Here her calm candour grew almostheroic in the effort she made to impress me with the reasons shecherished for her belief, "I thought he was jealous of George or angrywith Alfred, and was driven away by his fears of self-betrayal or hisdread of being led into making unworthy reprisals. But now I see thatit was his abnormal nature which had come into play, a nature of whichhe may be ignorant when in full health, and for the manifestations ofwhich he may be no more responsible than we are for the vagaries wecommit in dreams."

  "You have not read the latest discoveries in hypnotism," I rejoined."A man can be driven into no act for which he lacks the naturalinstinct. But I do not want to be cruel, Miss Meredith. I am toosincere in my desire to save you unnecessary pain and heartache. Sinceyou wish it, I will see Dr. Bennett, but----"

  My smile seemed to unnerve her.

  "But you do not think he will agree with me in my interpretation ofthis crime and Leighton's connection with it?"

  "I do not, Miss Meredith."

  "Then," she cried, with a high look and a gleam of quiet resolve thatmade me realise how small was my influence in face of her overpoweringlove for this man, "God's will be done! I shall believe in what I havesaid till he whom I have trusted is proved the heinous malefactor youconsider him. When that hour comes, I perish, killed by the greatestshame that can overwhelm a woman. To love one who has never soughtyour affection may cause the cheek to burn and the heart to recoilupon itself; but to have given all one's youth and the most cherishedimpulses of the heart to a man who is no more than a whited sepulchreof deceit and revolting crime--that would be to sap life at its springand tear up the heart by its roots. Oh, Mr. Outhwaite, forgetting allwomanly delicacy, forgetting everything but your forbearance and theconfidence with which you inspire me, I have poured out my soul beforeyou. Prove to me that this man is good--moral in his instincts, Imean, except when the evil spirit has a grip upon him--and I willbless you as the saviour of my self-respect. But if you cannot,--"here she turned pale and tottered,--"then do not expect me to survive.I--I--could not."

  The alternative was a bitter one. I did not see at that moment how shecould expect, still less how I could perform, such a miracle. But Icould not see her depart without some gleam of encouragement, and so Itold her that if the tide turned so as to free Alfred from suspicionand land Leighton in the courts, I would embrace the opportunity thusoffered to do all that lay in my power to prove her theory a true one.

  And with this understanding between us she went away, leaving me totake up, with what courage I could, my own broken and disjointedlife.