“Oh, where?” said the again agonised Mrs Causand. “Ralph, much mischief was done in that absence—my boy, my lost William: he, whom you know as Joshua Daunton, broke into his mother’s house, rifled my escritoir, and carried off some of my most important documents—that unread letter among the number.”
“But how know you its contents?” said I, breathless with agitation.
“By the tenor of these succeeding ones from Sir Reginald and his priest.”
She opened her desk, and gave me two letters from my father to her. They were, as she described them, repentant, and spoke most honourably and most fondly of my deceased mother—praying Mrs Causand most earnestly to tell him of the happiness and the whereabouts of his wife.
“And you did, of course.”
“No, Ralph, I did not—look at the dates. It was a fortnight after these arrived before I returned home. I weep even now when I think of it—three days before I returned your mother had died, almost suddenly.”
“Ah, true, true!” said I, mournfully. But, a sudden pang of agony seizing my inmost heart, I suddenly started up, and, seizing her roughly by the hand, I said, sternly:
“Look me in the face, Madam—do you see any resemblance there to my poor, poor mother?”
“Oh, very, very great—but why this violence?”
“Because I now understand the villainy that caused her death. Your son murdered her—see in me her reproachful countenance—oh, Mrs Causand, you and yours have been the bane, the ruin of me and mine.”