Dorothy Harcourt's secret

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

When his office duties were not pressing he was expected to join in any amusement in which he might assist, and he was delighted to do so.

For courtesy, he would take a hand at a game of cards where one was wanted to make up a party; for courtesy, he would take a glass of champagne when invited to do so, and he never dreamed of danger until destruction overtook him; never dreamed of wrong or danger until that fatal night in September when he fell into the trap of a professional gambler, and played and drank and drank and played, and drank again, until he lost his reason, and staked money that was not his own, and lost it to the gambler, who had been scheming for that very sum from first to last of the game.

Was not that destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny?

So it seemed to the wretched youth, as, leaning over the steamer’s side, gazing into the dark water of the bay, he reviewed the story.

And then he remembered his vain pleadings, with groans and tears, to the obdurate gamester to return the embezzled money, if not as a restitution, then as a loan, to be repaid with usurious interest, if it took the loser’s whole life to do it.

Then, when all his prayers had been denied and derided, and the swindler had left him alone with his anguish and despair, came the mad desperation that seized him, and fired him with the thought that it would be right to try the only means in his power to recover the embezzled money—to take his pass-key and go to the swindler’s room in the dead of the night, and withdraw the stolen sum from the thief’s possession. And he recalled how he went on this perilous venture, and succeeded in getting back the money, when a slight noise caused him to look around, and he saw the gambler sitting up in bed and leveling a pistol at his head; how instinctively he sprang upon the would-be murderer and seized and turned his hand; how the pistol went off and shot the gambler dead!

Was not this destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny? So it seemed now to poor Harcourt in his unutterable misery.

Then passed before his mental vision his swift, instinctive action of closing up the room within and escaping through the window, which shut with a spring; the night alarm; the breaking into the room; the discovery of the dead man, with his brains blown out, and the discharged pistol in his stiffened hand; circumstantial evidence that convinced the spectators then, and the coroner’s jury afterward, that the death of Yelverton had been suicide. And then, when all seemed over, and the secret of that tragedy buried in the conscience-stricken soul of Harcourt only, came the accusation from the hidden witness, Hanson, who had seen the whole drama through a knothole in a wooden partition that divided his room from Yelverton’s.

Was not this destiny? Forewritten, unforeseen, irresistible destiny? So it seemed to the doomed youth who reviewed the story.

And Hanson had demanded, as the price of his secrecy, nothing less than the hand of Harcourt’s betrothed bride, and the connivance and assistance of Harcourt in obtaining it by a treacherous plot; and threatened that, in case these conditions should not be accepted, to denounce the wretched clerk as the midnight robber and murderer, to bring him to the gallows or to the State prison for life, and so to wreck the lives of the two innocent and honorable women whom he loved best on earth.