[A]It was at this moment probably, and not till this moment, that Mr. Gillespie recognized his real murderer. Of the tumult thus awakened in heart and brain, who can judge!
[A]It was at this moment probably, and not till this moment, that Mr. Gillespie recognized his real murderer. Of the tumult thus awakened in heart and brain, who can judge!
As he had no wish to watch his sufferings, he made another journey downstairs and showed himself in the servants' hall just as little Claire broke away from her nurse and rushed, laughing loudly, up to her grandfather.
This convinced him that his own comings and goings had been so natural that they had not even been noticed by his fellow-servants. He saw that they had been playing a merry game with the child, and that not one of them had had an eye for him or his unaccustomed nervousness. This gave him courage, and soon, very soon now, they all had reason for nervousness. The long-delayed alarm was heard at last; strangers came into the house; the police followed, and this old reprobate, who had remained serene amidst all the turmoil, realised that there was more to fear in the matter than had ever struck his mind. With this fear came not only a desire to hide his own guilt, but the requisite cunning for doing so. He realised that he must get rid of the phial before he was searched, and, being left a minute to himself in the dining-room, he took it out of his side vest-pocket, and, shaking out the pencil which had slipped into it, he thrust it under the clock as being the one article not likely to be moved. It was a heavy lift for his old arms, and his elbowsshook as he guided it back into place. The consequence was that he knocked over the glass which Mr. Gillespie had set down on the mantel-shelf a few minutes before; but though the clatter which it made attracted attention and the broken pieces of this glass were carefully examined, nothing was discovered from them, the glass having held nothing but sherry. Not so with poor Alfred's pencil, the end of which had rested in the last drop of poison remaining in the phial. The odour of prussic acid thus communicated to it came near bringing his favourite young master into jeopardy. But something, Hewson hardly knew what, intervened to save him, and all was going on well, or as well as could be expected after the suspicions expressed by Mr. Gillespie against his sons, when this young demon in the shape of a detective flung himself at the old butler's throat and, without telling him why or by what means he had learned it, accused him of being his master's poisoner.
"It was the shock! the shock!" the miserable wretch wailed out. "Had I had more time to think, I would have known that he had no proof against me; that it was all guess-work, and that I would be a fool to fear that. But it is too late now. I have said it, and I stand by it. Only I wish I could have seen the thousand dollars for which I killed my master lying for one instant in my hand. I would willingly go without the cottage, go without the evening pipe in the sight of hills and meadows, just to realise the sensation of holding all that money and knowing that it wasmine."
O
ne more scene, and this narration of my life's most stirring episode will have reached its conclusion.
It was a memorable scene to me. It took place in the parlours of the little cottage in New Jersey on the day we laid Mille-fleurs away to rest.
The burial had taken place, the guests had departed, and only the members of the family remained to close up the cottage, now more than ever precious in Leighton's eyes. George and Alfred, with an assumption of brotherly feeling they probably thought due the occasion, had stepped out together to see that everything was ready for Hope's departure, and, from the window where I stood, I could see—arrant spy that I was—the nonchalant air with which either turned a wary eye upon the other as Hope's voice was heard above, speaking to little Claire. They evidently still looked upon each other as the possible object of her preference, no suspicion having reached them of the tragic secret which had made this young girl's heart inaccessible to them both. I, who knew it, and had my own place in the tragedy to which they had been blind, did not watch them long, Leighton being the more interestingfigure at that moment, as, standing on his desolate hearthstone, he allowed his eyes to wander for the last time, perhaps, over the beauties of the bijou dwelling which, exquisite as it was, had been as powerless as his love to hold his roving wife in check.
He was waiting for Hope, and as this thought, with its suggestion of another and longer waiting struck my mind, a pang seized me which it took all my self-possession to hide. Waiting for—Hope! Hope, who had sat that day with his child crushed close against her breast, and a look on her face which angels might view with pity, but which I——
Ah! she was coming! I turned my face away, not that I had anything to dread from this meeting, but that I felt as if I could not bear at this moment to see the shadow veiling his melancholy countenance lift, were it ever so lightly, at the sound of the step that was shaking my own heart. But I immediately glanced back; uncertainty was worse than knowledge; and, glancing back, saw Hope, and Hope only.
She was standing in the open doorway with her arms full of roses—roses which she had brought from New York, and which she now held out towards Leighton, with a smile I hardly think he saw, so much was his attention fixed upon the flowers.
"What are these for?" he asked, advancing towards her and touching the great roses with a trembling hand.
"They are for her," said Hope, in a low tone; "for my cousin Millicent. I could not bear to have herlie with only her husband's tokens on her breast, as if she had no—no——"
He caught her to his heart. Moved to the very soul, he kissed her on the lips; then he took the flowers.
As he passed out, she tottered pale and almost swooning to where I stood trembling with my own emotions. Lifting her face, with its candid eyes and quivering lips, she faltered between her sobs:
"Have patience with me! I see now that he has never loved me and never will. Had so much as the possibility been in his breast, he could not have kissed me like that to-day."
It was not on George's arm, or Alfred's, or even Leighton's that she passed out of that little house into the new life she was to share some day with me.
A long time after those flowers had withered on Mille-fleurs' peaceful breast, Leighton said to me, with his hand on the head of his child:
"I shall never marry again, Outhwaite. To train this child up to be my pride as she is now my joy, will fill my life as full of happiness as is necessary to me now. And, Outhwaite, she is a quiet child,—" he stopped—I knew what thought had stayed him,—"a quiet and a loving child. Yesterday she sat for a full hour with her arms about my neck and her cheek pressed to mine, listening while I talked to her of things a child usually cares but little about. This is balm for many a hurt, Outhwaite, and if it is given to her mother to look down upon us two——"
A smile, the rarest I had ever seen, finished the sentence. Seeing it, and noting how it irradiated features which once bore the stamp of deepest melancholy, I could never again look upon Leighton Gillespie as an unhappy man.
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