“If your father didn’t do it,” he was beginning, but I took him up at the outset.
“You know he didn’t! It is a foul lie of such a man. Dr. Crackenthorpe”—my voice, despite my stubborn resolve, broke a little—“he is lying there on his deathbed, despairing, haunted with the thought that it was he who in a fit of drunken madness strangled the life in his own son. It is all hideous—monstrous—unnatural. You know more about it, I believe, than any man. You were sitting with him that night.”
“But he left me awhile.”
“You know it wasn’t in his nature to do such a thing!”
“Pardon me. I have always looked upon your father as a dangerous, reckless fellow.”
“I won’t believe it. You know more than you will say—more than you dare to tell. Oh, if that churchyard fellow had only lived I would have had the truth by now.”
“I hope so, though you do me the honor to hold me implicated with him in some absurd and criminal secret, and on the strength of a little delirious raving—not an uncommon experience in the profession, trust me.”
“I don’t appeal to your charity or your mercy. There’s a rich reward awaiting you if you tell what you know and ease the old dying man’s mind. Further than that—if you withhold the truth and let him pass in his misery, I swear that I’ll never rest till I’ve dragged you down and destroyed you.”
He bent his body in a mocking and ungainly bow.
“I really can’t afford to temporize with my conscience for any one living or dead. As it is, I have allowed myself to slip into the position of an accomplice, which is an extreme concession on my part of friendly patronage toward a family that has certainly never studied to claim my good offices.”