“Roland, tell me what it is. Tell me, darling, and let me share it with you,” urges Olive pleadingly. “What cruel thing does she say?”
His hand is trembling as it heavily lies upon the open paper, as if to blot out the accusing words.
“Nothing but what is evil and ill-conditioned,” he answers hoarsely. “See what comes of doing the right thing. It’s only her reply to that letter of mine offering to make a settlement upon her. This is the fifth time I’ve done it, and each time I get more abused than before. One’s mother!”
Oh, the biting satire in the last two words. Roland Dorrien has never seen his mother since the day he passed her in anger on the stairs. There had been no affection between them at any time, and now he would not pretend to any. But he had his code of honour, and under this he would willingly have made a liberal settlement upon her out of the estate. Mrs Dorrien, however, refused to touch a penny—and went further. She rejected his overtures with scorn and even reproach. An idea had rooted itself in her mind that he was responsible for his younger brother’s death—that he had made away with him, in short, for his own advantage. It was the merest fancy, wholly destitute of the slightest clue, but it took firmer and firmer hold upon her till she was convinced of its truth, as though she had beheld with her own eyes that terrible scene on the cliff. But she had never gone so far as to put her suspicion into words until now, when, in an access of fierce grief for the lost, and fury against those who had benefited by her bereavement, she had penned those fearful words.
“I won’t let you leave me while you are like this,” pleads Olive tenderly, with her arm on his shoulder. He had been gathering up his letters to go, a move which she was determined to circumvent. “Whatever it is, remember nothing can separate us now.”
He almost shudders at her words. Can it not? he thinks. Yes, but it can—and in a manner so grisly and awful as she would never dream of suspecting. His brain is in a whirl. What could have set his mother’s suspicions to work? Even though they could have no foundation to go upon, a fixed idea like that, in such a mind as hers, might be in the highest degree dangerous.
“I must go,” he answers. “But, my darling, I promise to come back to you here in half an hour. Will that do?”
She is satisfied. A clinging kiss, and then she stands gazing after the tall, fine figure in its shooting-suit of light homespun. She sees him enter the study—his father’s study that was—and hears the snap of the key in the lock, then, turning to the window, she stands looking thoughtfully and with a troubled expression out upon the whirling snowflakes and the white, cold earth, in contrast whereto the dark trunks and gaunt limbs of the trees in the park show out like starved spectres, and the dismal howling of the wintry blast is as the warning voice of impending woe.
Amid the joys which encompass Olive Dorrien’s married life there is yet room for one great sorrow. Over her husband’s peace there hangs some dark and terrible secret, the weight of which he must bear alone.