This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod;
. . . . . . some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
—THE TEMPEST.
CHAPTER I
MISS CHARLOTTE WAITS IN THE HALL
Somewhat more than a score of years before the opening of this story, Richard Fairchild, after quietly contemplating the parcelling of his once fair estate among a horde of clamoring, quarrelling creditors, chief of whom was his erstwhile overseer, William Slade, the elder,—strolled leisurely into the country, as quietly placed a pistol to his head and blew out his brains. He did not leave behind property of sufficient value to defray his modest burial expenses.
This succession of disasters at one stroke transformed the wife from a famous and envied beauty into a broken invalid, petulant, querulous, and exacting, living only in the memory of her days of happiness, and made of her daughter Charlotte a strangely quiet and sedate woman, bound to her helpless mother's side as with hoops of steel. Clay was then but a babe.
The tiny cottage that received the invalid mother, the dark-eyed daughter, and the infant son was part of a slender legacy bequeathed Charlotte by a maiden aunt; and with the passing years the old homestead became merely a melancholy ruin, half hidden by weeds and underbrush, infested by owls and bats, and an occasion for wonder at the probable motives which prompted the present Slade so to neglect it. Nothing stirred now beneath the crumbling roof-tree but rats and mice—and shadows.
If those persons who marvelled at Slade's parsimony or queer ideas of economy could have been present at a scene which occurred at the cottage on the evening of the night General Westbrook was assassinated, they might have found an answer to their mental queries. Yet we may only know what Miss Charlotte herself saw and heard.
To begin with, she was startled by a sound of unfamiliar footsteps on the front porch, an uncertain movement toward the door, and finally by a knocking upon the door itself.
She took up a lamp and advanced down the narrow hall to the small reception-hall. Without any hesitation she unlocked the door and opened it wide at once; and it is probable that no apparition of any person, dead or living, could have affected her so profoundly as what she then beheld in the light of the lamp. She was so astonished at sight of the crusty abstracter that she stood quite speechless. On the other hand, it is noteworthy in estimating Mr. Slade's character that he snatched off his hat and ducked his head, much as he might have done in the old days when he stepped aside from the road to allow the family coach to roll by. Plainly, he was uneasy, out of his element, and the shallow, jet-like eyes at once became shifty before the unfathomable ones which regarded him with such frank surprise and displeasure.
But her expression rapidly altered: her eyes darkened, their light hardened—if the expression is permissible—and her lips compressed; never before had a Slade stood in the doorway of the cottage. The brightly glowing flame of hospitality was extinguished before this unexpected blast.
This silence was something more than Slade could endure. Nervously, he emitted a dry, deprecatory cough behind his knuckly fingers.