“It isn’t worth while going into all the times he met and threatened me. I was to marry him or he would expose me. He would never allow me to marry anyone else. And then finally he turned round and said that he didn’t really want to marry me at all; he only wanted to force father’s consent to start mining and this had seemed the easiest way.”
“That is what is called blackmail, Miss Whitmarsh; a word you don’t seem to have applied to him. The punishment ranges up to penal servitude for life in extreme cases.”
“Yes, that is what it really was. He came on Thursday with the letters in his pocket. That was his last threat when he could not move me. I can guess what happened. He read the letters and proposed a bargain. And my father, who was a very passionate man, and very proud in certain ways, shot him as he thought, and then, in shame and in the madness of despair, took his own life.... Now, Mr Carrados, you were to be my judge.”
“I think,” said the blind man, with a great pity in his voice, “that it will be sufficient for you to come up for Judgment when called upon.”
Three weeks later a registered letter bearing the Liverpool postmark was delivered at The Turrets. After he had read it Carrados put it away in a special drawer of his desk, and once or twice in after years, when his work seemed rather barren, he took it out and read it. This is what it contained:
“Dear Mr Carrados,—Some time after you had left me that Sunday afternoon, a man came in the dark to the door and asked for me. I did not see his face for he kept in the shade, but his figure was not very unlike that of your servant Parkinson. A packet was put into my hands and he was gone without a word. From this I imagine that perhaps you did not leave quite as soon as you had intended.
“Thank you very much indeed for the letters. I was glad to have the miserable things, to drop them into the fire, and to see them pass utterly out of my own and everybody else’s life. I wonder who else in the world would have done so much for a forlorn creature who just flashed across a few days of his busy life? and then I wonder who else could.
“But there is something else for which I thank you now far, far more, and that is for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly. When I look back on the abyss of meanness, treachery and guilt into which I would have wilfully cast myself, and been condemned to live in all my life, I can scarcely trust myself to write.
“I will not say that I do not suffer now. I think I shall for many years to come, but all the bitterness and I think all the hardness have been drawn out.