Agatha Webb (19 page)

"No!" cried Frederick, his eyes glued to the paper, his whole face
and form expressing something more akin to terror than surprise.
"Has she done this? Why should she? I hardly knew her."

"No, you hardly knew her. And she? She hardly knew you; if she had
she would have abhorred rather than enriched you. Frederick, I had
rather see you dead than stand before me the inheritor of Philemon
and Agatha Webb's hard-earned savings."

"You are right; it would be better," murmured Frederick, hardly
heeding what he said. Then, as he encountered his father's eye
resting upon him with implacable scrutiny, he added, in weak
repetition: "Why should she give her money to me? What was I to
her that she should will me her fortune?"

The father's finger trembled to a certain line in the document,
which seemed to offer some explanation of this; but Frederick did
not follow it. He had seen that his father was expecting a reply
to the question he had previously put, and he was casting about in
his mind how to answer it.

"When did you know of this will?" Mr. Sutherland now repeated.
"For know of it you did before you came to me for money."

Frederick summoned up his full courage and confronted his father
resolutely.

"No," said he, "I did not know of it. It is as much of a surprise
to me as it is to you."

He lied. Mr. Sutherland knew that he lied and Frederick knew that
he knew it. A shadow fell between them, which the older, with that
unspeakable fear upon him roused by Sweetwater's whispered
suspicions, dared no longer attempt to lift.

After a few minutes in which Frederick seemed to see his father
age before his eyes, Mr. Sutherland coldly remarked:

"Dr. Talbot must know of this will. It has been sent here to me
from Boston by a lawyer who drew it up two years ago. The coroner
may not as yet have heard of it. Will you accompany me to his
office to-morrow? I should like to have him see that we wish to be
open with him in an affair of such importance."

"I will accompany you gladly," said Frederick, and seeing that his
father neither wished nor was able to say anything further, he
bowed with distant ceremony as to a stranger and quietly withdrew.
But when the door had closed between them and only the memory of
his father's changed countenance remained to trouble him, he
paused and laid his hand again on the knob, as if tempted to
return. But he left without doing so, only to turn again at the
end of the hall and gaze wistfully back. Yet he went on.

As he opened his own door and disappeared within, he said half
audibly:

"Easy to destroy me now, Amabel. One word and I am lost!"

And what of Sweetwater, in whose thoughts and actions the interest
now centres?

When he left Mr. Sutherland it was with feelings such as few who
knew him supposed him capable of experiencing. Unattractive as he
was in every way, ungainly in figure and unprepossessing of
countenance, this butt of the more favoured youth in town had a
heart whose secret fires were all the warmer for being so
persistently covered, and this heart was wrung with trouble and
heavy with a struggle that bade fair to leave him without rest
that night, if not for many nights to come. Why? One word will
explain. Unknown to the world at large and almost unknown to
himself, his best affections were fixed upon the man whose
happiness he thus unexpectedly saw himself destined to destroy. He
loved Mr. Sutherland.

The suspicion which he now found transferred in his own mind from
the young girl whose blood-stained slippers he had purloined
during the excitement of the first alarm, to the unprincipled but
only son of his one benefactor, had not been lightly embraced or
thoughtlessly expressed. He had had time to think it out in all
its bearings. During that long walk from Portchester churchyard to
Mr. Halliday's door, he had been turning over in his mind
everything that he had heard and seen in connection with this
matter, till the dim vision of Frederick's figure going on before
him was not more apparent to his sight than was the guilt he so
deplored to his inward understanding.

He could not help but recognise him as the active party in the
crime he had hitherto charged Amabel with. With the clew offered
by Frederick's secret anguish at the grave of Agatha, he could
read the whole story of this detestable crime as plainly as if it
had been written in letters of fire on the circle of the
surrounding darkness. Such anguish under such circumstances on the
part of such a man could mean but one thing—remorse; and remorse
in the breast of one so proverbially careless and corrupt, over
the death of a woman who was neither relative nor friend, could
have but one interpretation, and that was guilt.

No other explanation was possible. Could one be given, or if any
evidence could be adduced in contradiction of this assumption, he
would have dismissed his new suspicion with more heartiness even
than he had embraced his former one. He did not wish to believe
Frederick guilty. He would have purchased an inner conviction of
his innocence almost at the price of his own life, not because of
any latent interest in the young man himself, but because he was
Charles Sutherland's son, and the dear, if unworthy, centre of all
that noble man's hopes, aims, and happiness. But he could come
upon no fact capable of shaking his present belief. Taking for
truth Amabel's account of what she had seen and done on that fatal
night—something which he had hesitated over the previous day, but
which he now found himself forced to accept or do violence to his
own secret convictions—and adding to it such facts as had come to
his own knowledge in his self-imposed role of detective, he had
but to test the events of that night by his present theory of
Frederick's guilt, to find them hang together in a way too
complete for mistake.

For what had been his reasons for charging Amabel herself with the
guilt of a crime she only professed to have been a partial witness
to?

They were many.

First—The forced nature of her explanations in regard to her
motive for leaving a merry ball and betaking herself to the
midnight road in her party dress and slippers. A woman of her
well-known unsympathetic nature might use the misery of the Zabels
as a pretext for slipping into town at night, but never would be
influenced by it as a motive.

Second—The equally unsatisfactory nature of the reasons she gave
for leaving the course she had marked out for herself and entering
upon the pursuit of an unknown man into a house in which she had
no personal interest and from which she had just seen a bloody
dagger thrown out. The most callous of women would have shrunk
from letting her curiosity carry her thus far.

Third—The poverty of her plea that, after having braved so much
in her desire to identify this criminal, she was so frightened at
his near approach as to fail to lift her head when the opportunity
was given her to recognise him.

Fourth—Her professed inability to account for the presence of the
orchid from her hair being found in the room with Batsy.

Fifth—Her evident attempt to throw the onus of the crime on an
old man manifestly incapable from physical causes of committing
it.

Sixth—The improbability, which she herself should have
recognised, of this old man, in his extremely weak condition,
ignoring the hiding-places offered by the woods back of his own
house, for the sake of one not only involving a long walk, but
situated close to a much-frequented road, and almost in view of
the Sutherland mansion.

Seventh—The transparent excuse of sympathy for the old man and
her desire to save him from the consequences of his crime, which
she offered in extenuation of her own criminal avowal of having
first found and then reburied the ill-gotten gains she had come
upon in her persistent pursuit of the flying criminal. So
impulsive an act might be consistent with the blind compassion of
some weak-headed but warm-hearted woman, but not with her self-
interested nature, incapable of performing any heroic deed save
from personal motives or the most headlong passion.

Lastly—The weakness of her explanation in regard to the cause
which led her to peer into the Zabel cottage through a hole made
in the window-shade. Curiosity has its limits even in a woman's
breast, and unless she hoped to see more than was indicated by her
words, her action was but the precursor of a personal entrance
into a room where we have every reason to believe the twenty-
dollar bill was left.

A telling record and sufficient to favour the theory of her
personal guilt if, after due thought, certain facts in
contradiction to this assumption had not offered themselves to his
mind even before he thought of Frederick as the unknown man she
had followed down the hillside, as, for instance:

This crime, if committed by her, was done deliberately and with a
premeditation antedating her departure from the ballroom. Yet she
went upon this errand in slippers, white slippers at that,
something which so cool and calculating a woman would have
avoided, however careless she might have shown herself in other
regards.

Again, guilt awakens cunning, even in the dullest breast; but she,
keen beyond most men even, and so self-poised that the most
searching examination could not shake her self-control, betrayed
an utter carelessness as to what she did with these slippers on
her return, thrusting them into a place easily accessible to the
most casual search. Had she been conscious of guilt and thus
amenable to law, the sight of blood and mud-stains on those
slippers would have appalled her, and she would have made some
attempt to destroy them, and not put them behind a picture and
forgotten them.

Again, would she have been so careless with a flower she knew to
be identified with herself? A woman who deliberately involves
herself in crime has quick eyes; she would have seen that flower
fall. At all events, if she had been immediately responsible for
its being on the scene of crime she would, with her quick wit,
have found some excuse or explanation for it, instead of defying
her examiners with some such words as these: "It is a fact for you
to explain. I only know that I did not carry this flower into that
room of death."

Again, had she been actuated in her attempt to fix the crime on
old James Zabel by a personal consciousness of guilt and a
personal dread, she would not have stopped at suggestion in her
allusions to the person she watched burying the treasure in the
woods. Instead of speaking of him as a shadow whose flight she had
followed at a distance, she would have described his figure as
that of the same old man she had seen enter the Zabel cottage a
few minutes before, there being no reason for indefiniteness on
this point, her conscience being sufficiently elastic for any
falsehood that would further her ends. And lastly, her manner,
under the examination to which she had been subjected, was not
that of one who felt herself under a personal attack. It was a
strange, suggestive, hesitating manner, baffling alike to him who
had more or less sounded her strange nature and to those who had
no previous knowledge of her freaks and subtle intellectual power,
and only reaching its height of hateful charm and mysterious
daring when Frederick appeared on the scene and joined, or seemed
to join, himself to the number of her examiners.

Now, let all suspicion of her as an active agent in this crime be
dropped, assume Frederick to be the culprit and she the simple
accessory after the fact, and see how inconsistencies vanish, and
how much more natural the whole conduct of this mysterious woman
appears.

Amabel Page left a merry dance at midnight and stole away into the
Sutherland garden in her party dress and slippers—why? Not to
fulfil an errand which anyone who knows her cold and unsympathetic
nature can but regard as a pretext, but because she felt it
imperative to see if her lover (with whose character, temptations,
and necessities she was fully acquainted, and in whose excited and
preoccupied manner she had probably discovered signs of a secretly
growing purpose) meant indeed to elude his guests and slip away to
town on the dangerous and unholy enterprise suggested by their
mutual knowledge of the money to be obtained there by one daring
enough to enter a certain house open like their own to midnight
visitors.

She followed at such an hour and into such a place, not an unknown
man casually come upon, but her lover, whom she had tracked from
the garden of his father's house, where she had lain in wait for
him. It took courage to do this, but a courage no longer beyond
the limit of feminine daring, for her fate was bound up in his and
she could not but feel the impulse to save him from the
consequences of crime, if not from the crime itself.

As for the aforementioned flower, what more natural than that
Frederick should have transferred it from her hair to his
buttonhole during some of their interviews at the ball, and that
it should have fallen from its place to the floor in the midst of
his possible struggle with Batsy?

And with this assumption of her perfect knowledge as to who the
man was who had entered Mrs. Webb's house, how much easier it is
to understand why she did not lift her head when she heard him
descend the stairs! No woman, even one so depraved as she, would
wish to see the handsome face of her lover in the glare of a
freshly committed crime, and besides she might very easily be
afraid of him, for a man has but a blow for the suddenly detected
witness of his crime unless that witness is his confidant, which
from every indication Sweetwater felt bound to believe Amabel was
not.

Her flight to the Zabel cottage, after an experience which would
madden most women, can now be understood. She was still following
her lover. The plan of making Agatha's old and wretched friend
amenable for her death originated with Frederick and not with
Amabel. It was he who first started for the Zabel cottage. It was
he who left the bank bill there. This is all clear, and even the
one contradictory fact of the dagger having been seen in the old
man's hand was not a stumbling-block to Sweetwater. With the
audacity of one confident of his own insight, he explained it to
himself thus: The dagger thrown from the window by the assassin,
possibly because he knew of Zabel's expected visit there that
night, fell on the grass and was picked up by Amabel, only to be
flung down again in the brightest part of the lawn. It was lying
there then, when, a few minutes later and before either Frederick
or Amabel had left the house, the old man entered the yard in a
state of misery bordering on frenzy. He and his brother were
starving, had been starving for days. He was too proud to own his
want, and too loyal to his brother to leave him for the sake of
the food prepared for them both at Agatha's house, and this was
why he had hesitated over his duty till this late hour, when his
own secret misery or, perhaps, the hope of relieving his brother
drove him to enter the gate he had been accustomed to see open
before him in glad hospitality. He finds the lights burning in the
house above and below, and encouraged by the welcome they seem to
hold out, he staggers up the path, ignorant of the tragedy which
was at that very moment being enacted behind those lighted
windows. But half-way toward the house he stops, the courage which
has brought him so far suddenly fails, and in one of those quick
visions which sometimes visit men in extremity, he foresees the
astonishment which his emaciated figure is likely to cause in
these two old friends, and burying his face in his hands he stops
and bitterly communes with himself before venturing farther. Fatal
stop! fatal communing! for as he stands there he sees a dagger,
his own old dagger, how lost or how found he probably did not stop
to ask, lying on the grass and offering in its dumb way
suggestions as to how he might end this struggle without any
further suffering. Dizzy with the new hope, preferring death to
the humiliation he saw before him in Agatha's cottage, he dashes
out of the yard, almost upsetting Mr. Crane, who was passing by on
his homeward way from an errand of mercy. A little while later
Amabel comes upon him lying across his own doorstep. He has made
an effort to enter, but his long walk and the excitement of this
last bitter hour have been too much for him. As she watches him he
gains strength and struggles to his feet, while she, aghast at the
sight of the dagger she had herself flung down in Agatha's yard,
and dreading the encounter between this old man and the lover she
had been following to this place, creeps around the house and
looks into the first window she finds open. What does she expect
to see? Frederick brought face to face with this desperate figure
with its uplifted knife. But instead of that she beholds another
old man seated at a table and—Amabel had paused when she reached
that AND—and Sweetwater had not then seen how important this
pause was, but now he understood it. Now he saw that if she had
not had a subtle purpose in view, that if she had wished to tell
the truth rather than produce false inferences in the minds of
those about her calculated to save the criminal as she called him,
she would have completed her sentence thus: "I saw an old man
seated at a table and Frederick Sutherland standing over him." For
Sweetwater had no longer a doubt that Frederick was in that room
at that moment. What further she saw, whether she was witness to
an encounter between this intruder and James, or whether by some
lingering on the latter's part Frederick was able to leave the
house without running across him, was a matter of comparative
unimportance. What is of importance is that he did leave it and
that Amabel, knowing it was Frederick, strove to make her auditors
believe it was Zabel, who carried the remainder of the money into
the woods. Yet she did not say so, and if her words on this
subject could be carefully recalled, one would see that it was
still her lover she was following and no old man, tottering on the
verge of the grave and only surviving because of the task he was
bent on performing.