CHAPTER XV
MURDER WILL OUT
“Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.”
Shakespeare.
Henry Carleton and his daughter sat in the library at The Birches, Carleton writing at the long table, Rose, with easy chair drawn up in front of the fire, busied with her embroidery. Presently Henry Carleton laid aside his pen, and rising, walked over to the bookcase; where he found the volume and verified the quotation which he sought; then, with a smile of satisfaction, he walked back to the table again, and for an instant stood there, glancing down contentedly at the orderly arrangement of papers and documents now completed and laid aside, awaiting the morrow.
The expression of his face was serene and benevolent. His very attitude—even, indeed, something about the atmosphere of the room itself—breathed of the man at peace with himself and with the world. And such a man, at the moment, in very truth Henry Carleton was, and with every reason therefor besides. The routine of his well-ordered day was drawing to a close. From the dinner table he had gone direct to his evening paper—from the paper to his desk. The little white heap of envelopes that stood ready for the morrow’s mailing bore witness to his labors there. The big check book at their side was closed—modestly and becomingly closed—but if the observer’s eye had been able to penetrate the cover, and for a moment to look at the stubs within, his admiration for Henry Carleton could but have been increased by what he would there have seen. One check, made payable to the Cripples’ Home, was for five hundred dollars; there were a half dozen more, payable to other charities, for a hundred each; there was one for twenty-five drawn to the order of a poor veteran in Eversley village. Surely witnesses better than these no man could well desire. What wonder that Henry Carleton was content.
And now, with business out of the way, with his household and his private affairs all in order, this man of so many talents and virtues had turned to his pet avocation—literature—and was forging busily ahead on his scholarly essay, Character Drawing in the Early English Novel. Glancing over what he had written, at once he spoke aloud, half to his daughter, half—the most important half—to himself. This thinking aloud over his literary work was a favorite method with him. He liked to get Rose’s ideas and criticisms—sometimes, to his surprise, they appeared upon reflection to contain much of good sense—and apart from this, he believed that it was in this way he could pass the fairest and the most searching judgment upon his labors. And after all, the question of benefit apart, the sound of his own voice was in nowise distasteful to him. Nor could he well be blamed. It was a pleasant voice and well-modulated, and through its medium he liked to think around his subject, to get the swing and cadence of each varying phrase, before at length he came to make his last “fair copy,” and thus to transmit his ideas to paper in final form.
“‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ Rose,” he read, “‘is beyond question most skilfully drawn, with all the author’s great command of those quiet little strokes and touches, one superimposed on the other, which at last give us the portrait of the man, standing forth from the canvas in all the seeming reality of flesh and blood.’ How does that strike you, Rose?”