“You are a silly slip of a girl and I have a mind to turn you out of the house at once. But,” and his eyes wandered away to his books, “your curiosity is legitimate and shall be satisfied. Only not here,” he suddenly cried, “I will tell you as we walk toward your home.”
“Or in the graveyard outside,” she murmured. “I am not afraid of the place with you near me. Indeed, I think I should like to hear my mother’s story, standing by her tomb.”
“You would!” The doctor, astonished, agitated almost, by this untoward sentiment uttered by lips he had only seen parted in laughter, rose, and leaning on the table looked over it at her, with eyes whose effect only was visible to the straining pair without. “Well, you shall have your wish. I will tell you her story, that is, as much as I know of it, standing by her grave without.” And with a grim smile, he took up his hat and stepped quickly before her toward the door. She followed him, with an eager gesture, and in a minute their two shadows could be dimly seen in the moonlight falling over the face of that very shaft behind which the stranger had taken refuge an hour or so before. The vines that swayed about the window ceased their restless rustling and seemed to cling with heavier shadow than usual to the dismal wall.
“Your father,” said the doctor, “was a man of one idea, but that idea was a valuable one and it paid its projector well. The invention which he conceived, perfected, and made practical, was an important one, suited to large governmental undertakings and meeting the wants of France especially. It was bought, as I have said, from your father for the sum of twenty thousand dollars. But this good fortune, while deserved, had not come early, and your mother, who had been overburdened in her youth, was on her deathbed when the favorable news came. It comforted her, but it almost maddened your father, if I may judge from the frenzied expressions he used in my hearing. He did not touch the money, and when she died he locked himself up in a room, from which he only emerged to attend her funeral. This I tell you that you may see that his paternal instinct was not as great as his conjugal one, or he would not have forgotten you in his grief. Did you speak?”
“No, no; but it is gloomy here, after all; let us go on into the highway.”
But the man clinging to the wall was not forced to move. The doctor did not heed her entreaty, or if he did he ignored it, for his voice went coldly and impassively on: “The night after your mother was buried, your father was seen looking from one of the windows of his house. The next morning he was missing. That is all I can tell you, Polly. No one knows any more than that.”
“But wasn’t there somebody in the house besides himself? Where was I?”
“Oh, you were there, and an old woman who had been looking after you in your mother’s illness. But you were too young to realize anything, and the woman—she has since died—had nothing to say, but that she was sure she heard your father go out.”
“And the money?”
“Went with him.”