Suddenly it was all over. She turned and I read my doom in her sorrowing face.

"You are good," she cried, "and it would be an infinite rest to be lifted out of the agony I am in and be cared for by someone I could perfectly trust. But I cannot accept a devotion which fails to awaken in me aught but simple grat.i.tude and friendliness. Unfortunately for me, and perhaps unfortunately for him whom I cannot trust myself to name, I have given my whole heart--" She choked back the words with a certain wildness. Then she faced me with mournful dignity and avowed calmly, and with a certain finality which caused my hopes to sink back into the depths from which they had so inconsiderately sprung, "I have fixed my heart where perhaps I should not. Pity me, but do not blame."

_I_ blame, _I!_ who had committed the same folly, was suffering from the same mistake!

"He may be the one true heart amongst them. Sometimes I think he is; sometimes I think his faults are blemishes upon a nature n.o.ble enough for any love and worship; then doubt comes, horrible, corroding doubt, and I see in him a fiend, a monster, a being too dreadful to contemplate, much less dream of and adore. Oh, if I did but know----"

"You shall know!" I burst forth, forgetting my own misery in hers. "I have been selfish in urging my personal wishes upon you when I should have been occupied with yours. Henceforth I shall think only of you.

To see you happy, to see you at peace, shall be my joy and prove my consolation. I cannot rejoice at the task, if task it can be called, but from this day on my energies shall be devoted to the settling of that doubt which, while it exists, robs you of all peace of mind. If Alfred is the guiltless man we are fain to believe him, you shall know it. I feel that it is possible to prove him so, and my feelings have often been very reliable guides in difficult undertakings."

She was startled; she was more than startled; she was alarmed. "I don't understand you," she cried. "What can you do? If the one guilty heart among my cousins refuses to respond to the appeal made to it by my uncle, how can you hope to move so callous a soul to a sense of its duty?"

"I cannot. With the hand of the law raised in threat against him, he would be throwing away his life to proclaim his guilt to anyone now.

It would be folly on our part to expect it. But there are other means by which this question may be settled. We do not gather figs of thorns or grapes of thistles. Consider, then, in which of these three b.r.e.a.s.t.s the thorns are found thickest; and, if uncertainty yet remains, to which of your cousins your uncle's death offered the greatest release."

"Have I not already asked myself these questions? Have I not repeated them over and over in my own mind till their ceaseless repet.i.tion has well-nigh maddened me? I think I know George, yet I dare not say he has a heart incapable of crime. I think I know Alfred and I think I know Leighton; but what certainty can this imaginary knowledge give me of the integrity of men who hide their best impulses under wild ways or cloud them with plausible hypocrisies? There is not an open soul among the three; and unless one of them consents to confess his crime, we can never feel sure of the two true men who are guiltless. That is, I never can. I should be haunted by doubts just as I am to-day, and to be doubt-haunted is misery, the depth of which you cannot judge unless you know my history."

"And that I cannot ask for--" I began.

"Yet why should I keep it from you? You have earned my confidence. You are, and are likely to remain, my only friend; then why should I hold back facts well known to those who come in daily contact with me? I am unfortunate in having a father who is no father to me. From earliest childhood till I left him to come to New York, I had never received from either parent a caress which was more than a formality. My father's lack of sympathy rose from the mortal disappointment he suffered when, of his two children, it was the girl and not the boy who survived the illness which prostrated both. My mother--but I will not talk of her; she has been dead a dozen years--only you will believe me when I say that all tokens of affection were lacking to my childhood and that the first word expressive of warmth and protection came to me from the cousin who met me at the train the day I entered upon my new life in my dear uncle's home. Do you wonder this unexpected tenderness blinded me a little to faults which I had no reason then to think would ever develop into anything worse?"

I rose to leave; my self-control was not strong enough for me to bear up against these repeated attacks. As I did so, I said:

"Miss Meredith, you have heard my promise. May I be prospered in my undertaking, for success in it means not only satisfaction to myself but great relief to you. Why do you tremble?"

"I fear--I dread your interference. Sometimes I wish never to know the truth. You will call me inconsistent, unreasonable. Indeed, I know I am; but what can you expect from a girl upon whom the blessing of G.o.d has never rested?"

This was a new phase in her nature, the more distressing to me, that, knowing little of women, I did not understand her. She saw the effect of her outburst, and melted immediately.

"This is a bad return for your generosity," she cried. "Ascribe it to my weakness and the dread I feel lest he----"

"The guilty man," I interposed, "is not a subject for sympathy. But he whom you love is not the guilty man," I bravely a.s.sured her. "Take my word and my hope for that. A man who could win your regard has no such black spot in his breast."

And, bowing over her hand, I escaped before she could propound any of the many questions my declared purpose was likely to call up.

BOOK II

THE MAN

XVII

THE MONOGRAM

I had made my promise to Miss Meredith with an apparent hopefulness which may have deceived her, but did not deceive myself. When the glow of my first enthusiasm pa.s.sed, I sat down in the solitude of my own room to reconsider the events of the day, but one thing was clear to me, and that was the unpromising nature of the task I had set myself to perform. What excuse had I for the self-confidence I had shown?

What means were at my command which were not also at the command of the police? She herself had asked this same question, and I had parried it. But I could not parry the demands of my own intelligence.

They must be met and answered. But how? In vain I pondered ways and means; laid innumerable plans and relentlessly discarded them; projected interviews which I knew were fruitless, and worked myself through labyrinths of reasoning which ended in nothing and left me no farther advanced at the end than I was in the beginning.

Wearied at last in mind and body, I retired, and during my sleep had an inspiration upon which I proceeded to act early the next morning.

Revisiting Sam Underhill's apartment, I told him my difficulty and opened up my scheme. Sam Underhill, with all his faults and numberless eccentricities, was a good fellow at bottom, and just the man to respect my confidence. He was, besides, the only person within the range of my acquaintances who could a.s.sist me in the plan I had formed; a plan which demanded the active cooperation of someone not so well known to the police as myself. Hampered as I was by my well-known connection with the Gillespie poisoning case, I could not personally make a move towards the ravelment of its mystery without subjecting myself to the curiosity of the people among whom my investigations might carry me, even if I escaped drawing upon myself the attention of the District Attorney's office and the suspicion of the men whose business I was in a measure attempting to usurp. But he was a free agent; he could come and go without arousing distrust or awakening professional jealousy. At all events he, and he alone, could put me into communication with the private detective whom I had decided to employ. As I had always been accustomed to visit Sam's rooms, my presence there at any hour of the day or night would raise no comment.

I had only his laziness to fear, a laziness which with him was as marked a characteristic as it was with Alfred Gillespie, whom he so carelessly criticised.

Seated with him over an impromptu chafing-dish breakfast, I first tested his good nature by a sally or two, and finding it well up to the mark, took him, as I have already said, sufficiently into my confidence to rouse his interest; then I put the blunt question:

"Which of the three Gillespie boys do you, upon mature reflection, consider the most capable of the crime attributed to this family?"

His manner changed at once.

"Oh, come now!" he cried, "don't calculate upon putting me in that box. Like the rest of the world I prefer to await developments before committing myself on so delicate a matter. Why, Outhwaite, prejudice is as bad as the hangman! If I had settled positively in my own mind which of the three had emptied that phial of poison into the old gentleman's evening gla.s.s, I would not impart my convictions. These fellows have enough to carry without my throwing the least weight into so trembling a balance."

I girded myself for the struggle.

"Wait," said I; "have I fully made clear to you Miss Meredith's position?"

"Yes, I comprehend that well enough."

"Very well, then. Which is most important; to a.s.sist this unhappy woman to escape from her anomalous position, or to prevent prejudice from being formed in my mind, when you know how impossible it would be for me to misuse it to my advantage?"

"I am not so sure of that," he retorted. "I don't know of a fellow more likely to be carried away by his convictions than yourself. If you were not a lawyer you would be doing all sorts of quixotic things; but, being hemmed in by professional conventionalities, you show some restraint, though not enough to warrant me in trusting you with my opinion on this matter--since it is only an opinion."

Naturally, I became eager to know what lay behind this break. Opinions are not formed without some show of reason, and the lightest reason might suffice to put me on the track I sought. He saw my resolution in my face, and made an effort to resist.

"I am as sorry as you are for Miss Meredith," he drawled, helping me to fresh coffee. "If I had seen her the day she gave her testimony I might be sorrier still; but I did not have that pleasure, and so am willing to leave the matter with those whose duty it is to see that justice is meted out to the guilty."

"Do you think their efforts are likely to be successful?"

"Oh, the question will be solved some day."

"Do you think so?"

At this repet.i.tion of the phrase, which I had made forcible by my intonation, he raised his eyebrows and, emptying his cup before answering, gave me an opportunity to add:

"With nothing to go upon but an accusation which, while involving all three of Mr. Gillespie's sons, specifies none, how can any official action be taken beyond that very ordinary one of submitting the whole household to a continual surveillance? Unless fresh evidence comes in, or conscience drives the guilty to confession, weeks, months, nay, years will go by, and the hand which hesitates to move now will hesitate still; justice needing something more definite to go upon than a suspicion equally divided amongst three men."

"You are right there, but what can you do to better the situation? It appears to me that you will have to wait too."

"Which contradicts your former a.s.sertion."

"Very possibly; man is full of contradictions at so early an hour as this, and with only one cup of coffee between him and the possible nightmare of the night before."

"Drink another cup, then, while I tell you what my hopes are. Guided by impressions which more than once in my life have proved infallible, I mean to run my man down till he succ.u.mbs to the pressure I will bring upon him, and confesses. This, I believe, can be done if all my force is concentrated on one man. At all events it is the only way I see of attaining the desired end. Now, will you a.s.sist me to choose the one out of these three most open to attack?"

"I don't like it; it is against all my principles, but if you must know the exact state of my feelings on this matter, come to these rooms to-night at nine sharp and I will allow you to hear from the lips of a certain acquaintance of mine a story which may serve to give you some enlightenment. He's not a man you will want to meet, so I must ask you to content yourself with an easy chair in my den. _He_ will be received in this room, and the door yonder can be left conveniently open. Do you object to this arrangement? It smacks of conspiracy and other things not altogether agreeable; but it's the best I can do for you at this time, and poor Yox won't care; it's your feelings I am mainly considering."