One of My Sons

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 circumspect; 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 passion 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 passed my lips, saw it even before she gave utterance to the low cry with which she fell at my feet in an attitude 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 passionate 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 assured 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 passionately.

"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. The life lived under your eye is not the one really led by the melancholy 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 to her feet and eyed me with a manifest sense of outrage. "You speak as if you meant something I should not hear. He! Claire's father – "

It was a difficult task. Surely my lines had fallen in untoward places. But there was no doubt about my duty. If her fresh, unspoiled heart had made its home in a nest of serpents, it was well she should know her mistake before the shame of the discovery should overwhelm her.

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

"Miss Meredith," said I, "when I undertook to sift this matter, and if possible bring to light some fact capable of settling the doubt that is wearing away your life, I hoped to relieve your heart and restore your faith in the one cousin most congenial to you. That I have failed in this and find myself called upon to inflict suffering rather than to bring peace to your agitated heart is a source of regret to myself which you can never measure. But it cannot be helped. I dare not keep back the truth. Leighton Gillespie is unworthy your regard, Miss Meredith, not only because he lies under suspicion of having committed the worst sin in the calendar, but because he has deceived you as to the state of his own affections. He – "

"Wait!" Her voice was peremptory; her manner noble. "I wish to say right here, Mr. Outhwaite, that Leighton Gillespie has never deceived me in this regard. I have cared for him because – because I could not help it. But he has never led me into doing so by any show of peculiar interest in myself. George has courted me and Alfred nearly has, but not Leighton; yet to him my whole heart went out, and if it is a shame to own it I must endure that shame rather than injure his cause by leaving you under the influence of a prejudice which has no foundation in fact."

Before the generosity of this self-betrayal I bowed my head. Her beauty, 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 which she exonerated this man from the one fault of which she knew him to be innocent. It gave me a new respect for her and a shade more of forbearance for him, so that my voice softened as I replied:

"Well, well, we will not charge him with deliberate falsehood towards you, only with the madness which leads a man to sacrifice honour and reputation to the fancied charms of an irresponsible woman. He is under a spell, Miss Meredith, which I will not attempt to name. The object of it I have myself seen, and it was from her hand (possibly without her understanding the purpose for which he wanted it, as she has no appearance of being a really wicked woman) that he obtained the poison which did such deadly work in your uncle's house."

The worst was said; and the silence that followed was one never to be forgotten by her or by me. When it was broken, it was by Hope, and in words which came in such starts and with such pauses, I could only guess their meaning through my own identification with her shame and grief.

"Calumny! – it cannot be! – so good – so thoughtful in his bringing up of Claire – that day he pulled her aside lest she should stumble against the 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 evil spirit that sometimes possesses him. Leighton Gillespie in his true hours 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 the great loneliness which an overwhelming catastrophe creates. She did not even remember my presence, and I did not dare recall it to her. I simply let her lose herself in her own grief, while I fought my own battle, and, as I hope, won my own victory. But this could not last; she suddenly awoke to the nearness of listening ears, and, flushing deeply, ceased the broken flow of words which had so worn upon my heart, and, regaining some of her lost composure, forcibly declared:

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

"Alas!" was my short but suggestive reply.

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

"Tell me the whole story. I have a reason for hearing it, a reason which 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 general allusion to him calculated to prepare the mind for some great disclosure to-morrow – " And her hand tightened upon the sheet which I now discovered to be the one morning journal I had failed to see. "You will pay no attention to my feelings – I have none – we are sitting in court – let me hear."

Respecting her emotion, respecting the attitude in which she had placed 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 had discovered there. Then I related what we had learned from Rosenthal. The narrative was long, and gave me ample opportunity for studying its effect 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, she sat listening so intently that all her other faculties seemed to have been suspended for this purpose; only, as I approached the end, I noticed that the grey shadow which had hung over her from the first had deepened to a pall beneath which the last vestige of her abounding youth had vanished.

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

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

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

"I knew my uncle well. He was a just man, and, in times of great danger, a cool one. He would never have written for my eyes those four words – 'one of my sons' – unless some new fact had added certainty to his former conviction. The drug was in the wine handed him by Leighton; we must accept that fact whatever it may cost us."

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

But suddenly her old horror returned with the recurrence of some old memory. "Then it was his hand that stole towards my uncle's glass in the dark!" she cried; "that murderous, creeping hand, the vision of which 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 the arch-fiend. Poor Leighton! poor Leighton!" she cried in her agony.

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

"I think I comprehend it all now," she finally whispered, half to herself and half to me. "I have had the thought before; it has come when that bewildering look of mad uneasiness has crossed his face and he has left us to be gone days, sometimes weeks, without notice or explanation. 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 all of my cousins seem to lack the inherent baseness. Dare I breathe it to you? It may be the saving of Leighton, if true; God knows it is my only excuse for clinging to him still."

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

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

"I cannot help doing so," she murmured. "He will soon need my aid, if not my comfort; for I know what these horrible contradictions mean. I understand them, understand him, and even the revolting crime of which he may have been guilty. Hypocrisy does not explain it; depravity does not explain it; his good acts are too real, the nobility of his nature too unmistakable. Disease alone can account for it. He is the victim of double consciousness, and he leads two lives – your own expression – because the two hemispheres of his brain do not act in unison. Wickedness is not his normal condition. His normal condition is a noble one. By nature he is a God-fearing man, devoted to good works and high thoughts. When he goes astray it is because the balance of his faculties has been disturbed. This is no new thing to the psychologist. You yourself have heard of men so afflicted. Leighton Gillespie is one."

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

"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 the romancer in their judgment of criminals."

The sarcasm passed unheeded. Growing more and more beautiful as her earnestness 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 instincts have always been good. Ask why this devoted father, this kind son, suddenly loses himself, it may be at table, it may be while sitting with his own child by the fire, and, deaf to all remonstrance, blind to the most touching appeals of those about him, goes suddenly out and does not come back till he can be himself again in the presence of his family and under the eye of his friends. Previous to that awful morning when my uncle unsealed to my eyes the horrible secret that rested like a cloud over the household, I used to give another explanation to these varying moods, and see in them a promise of more personal hopes and an augury of my own future happiness; so easy is it for a woman to deceive herself when she worships a man without fully comprehending him. I thought – " Here her calm candour grew almost heroic in the effort she made to impress me with the reasons she cherished for her belief, "I thought he was jealous of George or angry with Alfred, and was driven away by his fears of self-betrayal or his dread of being led into making unworthy reprisals. But now I see that it was his abnormal nature which had come into play, a nature of which he may be ignorant when in full health, and for the manifestations of which he may be no more responsible than we are for the vagaries we commit 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 natural instinct. But I do not want to be cruel, Miss Meredith. I am too sincere in my desire to save you unnecessary pain and heartache. Since you 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 of this 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 that made me realise how small was my influence in face of her overpowering love for this man, "God's will be done! I shall believe in what I have said till he whom I have trusted is proved the heinous malefactor you consider him. When that hour comes, I perish, killed by the greatest shame that can overwhelm a woman. To love one who has never sought your affection may cause the cheek to burn and the heart to recoil upon itself; but to have given all one's youth and the most cherished impulses of the heart to a man who is no more than a whited sepulchre of deceit and revolting crime – that would be to sap life at its spring and tear up the heart by its roots. Oh, Mr. Outhwaite, forgetting all womanly delicacy, forgetting everything but your forbearance and the confidence with which you inspire me, I have poured out my soul before you. Prove to me that this man is good – moral in his instincts, I mean, except when the evil spirit has a grip upon him – and I will bless 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 she could expect, still less how I could perform, such a miracle. But I could not see her depart without some gleam of encouragement, and so I told her that if the tide turned so as to free Alfred from suspicion and land Leighton in the courts, I would embrace the opportunity thus offered 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 to take up, with what courage I could, my own broken and disjointed life.

XXIV

AN OLD CATASTROPHE IS RECALLED

This idea as advanced by Hope was fantastical to a degree; yet it made its impression upon me and was still in my mind when I opened the evening paper for the latest news concerning the Gillespie murder. The first paragraph I encountered proved that I had not warned her an hour too soon of Leighton Gillespie's position.

"Fresh disclosures in the Gillespie Poisoning Case. Leighton Gillespie, long regarded as the most respectable and hitherto best-esteemed son of the murdered man, discovered to have been for years the owner, and at times the occupant, of a little house in one of the Oranges, where, unknown to the world at large – "

Here followed some open allusions to Mille-fleurs.

Other statements were added to this, among them a résumé of the facts advanced to me the evening before by Rosenthal. At the end were these lines:

"The District Attorney has the whole matter in charge, and the public is promised some decided action to-morrow."

I folded the paper, put it in my pocket, and went directly to Dr. Bennett's office.

I had not seen the good physician since the inquest, and naturally the sight of his face recalled the strange and moving incidents which had first brought us together. But I made no allusion to these past experiences, and his first remark was wholly professional.

"I hope it is not as a patient I see you, Mr. Outhwaite?"

With a shake of the head I took out the newspaper I had been careful to bring with me, and pointed out the paragraph concerning Leighton and Mille-fleurs.

"Is this news to you?" I asked. "I make the inquiry solely in the interests of Miss Meredith, who has hitherto had unbounded confidence in this cousin."

He glanced at the lines, frowned, and then with a pained look, replied:

"I do not believe this of Leighton. He of all Mr. Gillespie's sons is the furthest removed from the suspicion connecting them with the crime which has wrecked their good name. He is incapable of any serious wrong-doing; incapable even of what these lines suggest. I have known him from his birth."

I would gladly have left this kind-hearted physician in undisturbed possession of this confidence, but the situation was too serious to trifle with.

"He enjoys a good name," I allowed, "and has even been known to exert himself in many acts of benevolence towards the unfortunate and the suffering. But some natures, and they are frequently those from which most is to be expected, have a reverse side, which will not bear the scrutiny either of their friends or the world at large. Leighton Gillespie has one of these natures. This story of the little house is true."

The doctor, who was evidently heart and soul with this family, showed a distress at this avowal which spoke well for the hold which this especial member of it had upon his affections.

Seeing that, while not ready to question my word, he was anxious to know the sources of my information, I was about to enter upon the necessary explanations, when he forestalled me by saying:

"There have always been unexplained traits in this man. He stands alone among the other members of the family. He has neither the social qualities of George nor the luxurious tastes of Alfred. Nor is he like his father. I, who knew his mother well, have no difficulty in attributing to their correct source the religious tendencies which form so distinct a part of his character. But the melancholy which pervades his life is not an inheritance, but the result of nervous shock incident upon an extreme grief in early life, and while I do not profess to understand him or the many peculiarities to which his father rightfully raised objection, I am positive that he will never be found guilty of a depraved act. I am ready to stake my reputation on it."

"You should talk with Miss Meredith," I suggested. "She believes, or endeavours to believe, in him also. But even she finds herself forced to accept the truth of this report. The facts favouring it are too unmistakable. I can myself supply evidence enough to make his guilt in this regard quite sure."

And, without preamble, I entered upon a detailed account of the discoveries made by me at Mother Merry's. They were, as you well know, convincing in their nature, and allowed but two conclusions to be drawn. Either Leighton Gillespie was a monster of hypocrisy or he was the victim of the mental derangement so fondly suggested by Hope.

This last explanation I left to the perspicacity of the trained physician. Would he seize upon it as she did? Or would he fail to see in these results any symptoms of the strange mental malady alluded to by Hope? I watched him anxiously. Evidently no such explanation was likely to suggest itself to him unaided. Indeed, his next words proved how far any such conclusion was from his mind.