Agatha Webb (20 page)

Amabel's excuse for handling the treasure, and for her reburial of
the same, comes now within the bounds of possibility. She hoped to
share this money some day, and her greed was too great for her to
let such an amount lie there untouched, while her caution led her
to bury it deeper, even at the risk of the discovery she was too
inexperienced to fear.

That she should forget to feign surprise when the alarm of murder
was raised was very natural, and so was the fact that a woman with
a soul so blunted to all delicate instincts, and with a mind so
intent upon perfecting the scheme entered into by the murderer of
throwing the blame upon the man whose dagger had been made use of,
should persist in visiting the scene of crime and calling
attention to the spot where that dagger had fallen. And so with
her manner before her examiners. Baffling as that manner was, it
still showed streaks of consistency, when you thought of it as the
cloak of a subtle, unprincipled woman, who sees amongst her
interlocutors the guilty man whom by a word she can destroy, but
whom she exerts herself to save, even at the cost of a series of
bizarre explanations. She was playing with a life, a life she
loved, but not with sincerity sufficient to rob the game of a
certain delicate, if inconceivable, intellectual enjoyment.
[1]

And Frederick? Had there been anything in his former life or in
his conduct since the murder to give the lie to these heavy doubts
against him? On the contrary. Though Sweetwater knew little of the
dark record which had made this young man the disgrace of his
family, what he did know was so much against him that he could
well see that the distance usually existing between simple
dissipation and desperate crime might be easily bridged by some
great necessity for money. Had there been such a necessity?
Sweetwater found it easy to believe so. And Frederick's manner?
Was it that of an honest man simply shocked by the suspicions
which had fallen upon the woman he loved? Had he, Sweetwater, not
observed certain telltale moments in his late behaviour that
required a deeper explanation even than this?

The cry, for instance, with which he had rushed from the empty
ballroom into the woods on the opposite side of the road! Was it a
natural cry or an easily explainable one? "Thank God! this
terrible night is over!" Strange language to be uttered by this
man at such a time and in such a place, if he did not already know
what was to make this night of nights memorable through all this
region. He did know, and this cry which had struck Sweetwater
strangely at the time and still more strangely when he regarded it
simply as a coincidence, now took on all the force of a revelation
and the irresistible bubbling up in Frederick's breast of that
remorse which had just found its full expression on Agatha's
grave.

To some that remorse and all his other signs of suffering might be
explained by his passion for the real criminal. But to Sweetwater
it was only too evident that an egotist like Frederick Sutherland
cannot suffer for another to such an extent as this, and that a
personal explanation must be given for so personal a grief, even
if that explanation involves the dreadful charge of murder.

It was when Sweetwater reached this point in his reasoning that
Frederick disappeared beneath Mr. Halliday's porch, and Mr.
Sutherland came up behind him. After the short conversation in
which Sweetwater saw his own doubts more than reflected in the
uneasy consciousness of this stricken father, he went home and the
struggle of his life began.

Sweetwater had promised Mr. Sutherland that he would keep counsel
in regard to his present convictions concerning Frederick's guilt;
but this he knew he could not do if he remained in Sutherlandtown
and fell under the pitiless examination of Mr. Courtney, the
shrewd and able prosecuting attorney of the district. He was too
young, too honest, and had made himself too conspicuous in this
affair to succeed in an undertaking requiring so much
dissimulation, if not actual falsehood. Indeed, he was not sure
that in his present state of mind he could hear Frederick's name
mentioned without flushing, and slight as such a hint might be, it
would be enough to direct attention to Frederick, which once done
could but lead to discovery and permanent disgrace to all who bore
the name of Sutherland.

What was he to do then? How avoid a consequence he found himself
absolutely unable to face? It was a problem which this night must
solve for him. But how? As I have said, he went down to his house
to think.

Sweetwater was not a man of absolute rectitude. He was not so much
high-minded as large-hearted. He had, besides, certain foibles. In
the first place, he was vain, and vanity in a very plain man is
all the more acute since it centres in his capabilities, rather
than in his appearance. Had Sweetwater been handsome, or even
passably attractive, he might have been satisfied with the
approbation of demure maidens and a comradeship with his fellows.
But being one who could hope for nothing of this kind, not even
for a decent return to the unreasoning heart-worship he felt
himself capable of paying, and which he had once paid for a few
short days till warned of his presumption by the insolence of the
recipient, he had fixed his hope and his ambition on doing
something which would rouse the admiration of those about him and
bring him into that prominence to which he felt himself entitled.
That he, a skilful musician, should desire to be known as a
brilliant detective, is only one of the anomalies of human nature
which it would be folly and a waste of time on our part to
endeavour to explain. That, having chosen to exercise his wits in
this way, he should so well succeed that he dared not for his life
continue in the work he had so publicly undertaken, occasioned in
him a pang of disappointment almost as insufferable as that
brought by the realisation of what his efforts were likely to
bring upon the man to whose benevolence he owed his very life.
Hence his struggle, which must be measured by the extent of his
desires and the limitations which had been set to his nature by
his surroundings and the circumstances of his life and daily
history.

If we enter with him into the humble cottage where he was born and
from which he had hardly strayed more than a dozen miles in the
twenty-two years of his circumscribed life, we may be able to
understand him better.

It was an unpainted house perched on an arid hillside, with
nothing before it but the limitless sea. He had found his way to
it mechanically, but as he approached the narrow doorway he paused
and turned his face towards the stretch of heaving waters, whose
low or loud booming had been first his cradle song and then the
ceaseless accompaniment of his later thoughts and aspirations. It
was heaving yet, ceaselessly heaving, and in its loud complaint
there was a sound of moaning not always to be found there, or so
it seemed to Sweetwater in his present troubled mood.

Sighing as this sound reached his ear, and shuddering as its
meaning touched his heart, Sweetwater pushed open the door of his
small house, and entered.

"It is I, mamsie!" he shouted, in what he meant to be his usual
voice; but to a sensitive ear—and what ear is so sensitive as a
mother's?—there was a tremble in it that was not wholly natural.

"Is anything the matter, dear?" called out that mother, in reply.

The question made him start, though he replied quickly enough, and
in more guarded tones:

"No, mamsie. Go to sleep. I'm tired, that's all."

Would to God that was all! He recalled with envy the days when he
dragged himself into the house at sundown, after twelve long hours
of work on the docks. As he paused in the dark hallway and
listened till he heard the breathing of her who had called him
DEAR—the only one in the world who ever had or ever would call
him DEAR—he had glimpses of that old self which made him question
if his self-tutoring on the violin, and the restless ambition
which had driven him out of the ways of his ancestors into strange
attempts for which he was not prepared by any previous discipline,
had brought him happiness or improved his manhood. He was forced
to acknowledge that the sleep of those far-distant nights of his
busy boyhood was sweeter than the wakefulness of these later days,
and that it would have been better for him, and infinitely better
for her, if he had remained at the carpenter's bench and been
satisfied with a repetition of his father's existence.

His mother was the only person sharing that small house with him,
and once assured that she was asleep, he lighted a lamp in the
empty kitchen and sat down.

It was just twelve o'clock. This, to anyone accustomed to this
peculiar young man's habits, had nothing unusual in it. He was
accustomed to come home late and sit thus by himself for a short
time before going up-stairs. But, to one capable of reading his
sharp and none too mobile countenance, there was a change in the
character of the brooding into which he now sank, which, had that
mother been awake to watch him, would have made every turn of his
eye and movement of his hand interesting and important.

In the first place, the careless attitude into which he had fallen
was totally at variance with the restless glance which took in
every object in that well-known room so associated with his mother
and her daily work that he could not imagine her in any other
surroundings, and wondered sometimes if she would seem any longer
his mother if transplanted to other scenes and engaged in other
tasks.

Little things, petty objects of household use or ornament, which
he had seen all his life without specially noticing them, seemed
under the stress of his present mood to acquire a sudden
importance and fix themselves indelibly in his memory. There, on a
nail driven long before he was born, hung the little round lid-
holder he had pieced together in his earliest years and presented
to his mother in a gush of pride greater than any he had since
experienced. She had never used it, but it always hung upon the
one nail in the one place, as a symbol of his love and of hers.
And there, higher up on the end of the shelf barren enough of
ornaments, God wot, were a broken toy and a much-defaced primer,
mementos likewise of his childhood; and farther along the wall, on
a sort of raised bench, a keg, the spigot of which he was once
guilty of turning on in his infantile longing for sweets, only to
find he could not turn it back again until all the floor was
covered with molasses, and his appetite for the forbidden
gratified to the full. And yonder, dangling from a peg, never
devoted to any other use, hung his father's old hat, just where he
had placed it on the fatal morning when he came in and lay down on
the sitting-room lounge for the last time; and close to it,
lovingly close to it, Sweetwater thought, his mother's apron, the
apron he had seen her wear at supper, and which he would see her
wear at breakfast, with all its suggestions of ceaseless work and
patient every-day thrift.

Somehow, he could not bear the sight of that apron. With the
expectation now forming in his mind, of leaving this home and
leaving this mother, this symbol of humble toil became an
intolerable grief to him. Jumping up, he turned in another
direction; but now another group of objects equally eloquent came
under his eye. It was his mother's work-basket he saw, with a
piece of sewing in it intended for him, and as if this were not
enough, the table set for two, and at his place a little covered
dish which held the one sweetmeat he craved for breakfast. The
spectacles lying beside her plate told him how old she was, and as
he thought of her failing strength and enfeebled ways, he jumped
up again and sought another corner. But here his glances fell on
his violin, and a new series of emotions awakened within him. He
loved the instrument and played as much from natural intuition as
acquired knowledge, but in the plan of action he had laid out for
himself his violin could have no part. He would have to leave it
behind. Feeling that his regrets were fast becoming too much for
him, he left the humble kitchen and went up-stairs. But not to
sleep. Locking the door (something he never remembered doing
before in all his life), he began to handle over his clothes and
other trivial belongings. Choosing out a certain strong suit, he
laid it out on the bed and then went to a bureau drawer and drew
out an old-fashioned wallet. This he opened, but after he had
counted the few bills it contained he shook his head and put them
all back, only retaining a little silver, which he slipped into
one of the pockets of the suit he had chosen. Then he searched for
and found a little Bible which his mother had once given him. He
was about to thrust that into another pocket, but he seemed to
think better of this, too, for he ended by putting it back into
the drawer and taking instead a bit from one of his mother's old
aprons which he had chanced upon on the stairway. This he placed
as carefully in his watch pocket as if it had been the picture of
a girl he loved. Then he undressed and went to bed.

Mrs. Sweetwater said afterwards that she never knew Caleb to talk
so much and eat so little as he did that next morning at
breakfast. Such plans as he detailed for unmasking the murderer of
Mrs. Webb! Such business for the day! So many people to see! It
made her quite dizzy, she said. And, indeed, Sweetwater was more
than usually voluble that morning,—perhaps because he could not
bear his mother's satisfied smile; and when he went out of the
house it was with a laugh and a cheery "Good-bye, mamsie" that was
in spiking contrast to the irrepressible exclamation of grief
which escaped him when the door was closed between them. Ah, when
should he enter those four walls again, and when should he see the
old mother?