It was a strange power. To his excited imagination the thought dawned like the beginning of retribution. How many chances were there not against its thus coming into his possession! Had justice so guided it that he, of all others, should be the one to whose care it was delivered? Had Anthony’s absence and Miss Philippa’s fancies all worked for this end? He looked at the letter as if there, hidden only by a slender cover, lay the means of confounding his enemies, at first with a kind of angry triumph that so much at least had been gained. The letter was in his hands, and that was the first step.
After all, however, he became soon aware that it was only a step. To himself it might be conclusive proof, but that was not sufficient, and he felt irritated and baffled. In what shape did the danger threaten, and would it be yet impossible for him to turn its tide? He had thought of giving Anthony Miles the letter, and so openly accusing him as to force from him a confession of his shamelessness; but, with a passionate impotence, he acknowledged this to be a vain manner of confronting the blow. He was not in the position to make good his claim. He must meet his enemy with all the subtlety of self-defence. But what had he to meet? How should he know what lay before him, from which side the thrusts should be parried, in what shape grew the threat? The questions beat in his brain with recurrent strokes, as if a hammer were smiting dull iron. All the keenness of suspicion could do no more than bring a shadowy uncertainty before him; nothing could solve the problem except the letter, with its poor feeble failing writing, which he held in his hand.
For there, to be sure, lay the certainty; there was hid the proof or the acquittal, as the case might be. He began to look at it as though Anthony were the prisoner on trial before him, while he himself was the person who possessed the clew, and could determine the guilt. To his distorted reasoning it became almost a sin against Anthony not at once to decide the question, when, after all, he might be innocent, and surely it would be better that this innocence should be placed beyond the power of doubt, than that so cruel a suspicion should divide two friends. For Anthony’s own sake it seemed to Marmaduke a duty to determine the truth forever. The letter had been given to him for some purpose, he argued, as a man will argue, himself clothing the temptation in the strong armour with which it comes to meet him at last, mighty and irresistible. It needed only one look to convince himself, a look which could not harm Anthony Miles in any way, only put Marmaduke on his guard, and show him how to defend his rights. One look—nothing more—at the letter which was in his hands.
He opened it. And as he did so, out of some background of old associations, there rushed upon him such an intolerable loathing for his own action that for a few moments his eyes refused to see its contents. The false pleading with which he had covered it was no longer to be called up, could never any more be called up. It was with a sense of desperate degradation that he forced himself to master the writing, pathetic in its feebleness, confused and indistinct. “I think it is all coming to an end at last,” it said, with a forlornness which might have touched him at another time, “and that my successor will soon be free of my shoes, such as they are. I don’t talk about repenting, but somehow my girl’s face comes before me night and day,—I might have been more patient with her, though I did no more than I told her to look for. Your father seems a just man; people call me a hard old fellow, but I have still a feeble belief in human nature, and I believe in him. If you choose you may place a decision in his hands, and if he tells me the thing should be done, I will make an alteration in my will, half the money shall go as it is now settled, and half to Ellen Harford, Margaret’s child. But should he think the change unnecessary, I do not wish to be pestered by replies or arguments. Silence will answer me fully. I shall understand that he thinks my proposal unadvisable, and I shall never break it by an allusion.”
And this was the letter which Marmaduke must deliver.
For a quarter of an hour he stood motionless with it in his hand. Over his head was the sweet changeable April sky, and on either side of the road a little green copse in which the birds were chirping and twittering. He looked up at last, with a fierce gesture of impatience at their glad piping, at the tender sunshine; a sudden storm, a wild rending of all these pretty gentle things, would have been more congenial to him just then than the burden of their joy. Two men jogged by him in a cart, and looked at him curiously as he stood by the roadside. It raised a quick fear that they might discover his secret, and he began to walk slowly on again, reading and rereading the letter in obedience to some mechanical impulse, for the first sight had burned the words into his brain. It was remarkable that he had no longer any fear of Anthony as a rival, probably from his own frame of mind being such that it was impossible for him to realise a sane man putting such a choice into the hands of his heir, and conceiving the idea of his exercising it in any way but one. It was only a robbery of himself which was revealed to him; an iniquitous deprival of half of his inheritance. For he needed no assurance of what Mr Miles’s decision would be. He had a half-uncomfortable, half-slighting contempt for the Vicar’s notions, which he classed with other antiquated forms of thought belonging to the old world. Anthony’s words came back to him with a sting which they had not at the time they were spoken, when he believed them to be powerless, and he knew that half of those good things on which he had so long counted would go out of his grasp forever as soon as this letter was delivered. As soon as it was delivered,—but the question immediately forced itself on his thought of why such a letter should exist at all to harrow them with its sentence of deprivation. Was not the Vicar himself concerned, Marion’s interests being equally involved with his own? And it was for the sake of a girl who knew nothing, hoped nothing, and whose father was as equally averse to a reconciliation as Mr Tregennas had been. Then he thought angrily that the decision, if there were one, should have been offered to himself. Indeed, fate said the same thing, and, resenting the injustice, gave him the needed opportunity. If he did not embrace it, he was yielding his own property, and sealing a gross injustice. The thought grew, it rang in his brain as he walked along,—alas, no song of birds could drown it!
He tore the letter across and across without a renewal of those accusing feelings which had rushed upon him when first he opened it, having wrought himself into a condition in which right and wrong became mere accidents dependent on his own will. He set his teeth and tore it into a hundred fragments, dropping them, as he walked, upon the grass by the side of the lane, and almost taking a pleasure, as it seemed, in their symmetrical destruction. No sense of pity touched him for the failing life that had there made its last vain effort, and the notion that he was baffling an act of injustice he was able by a strong and concentrated pressure of conscience to keep uppermost in the place it had usurped.
A little farther along the lane he once more met David Stephens, letting him pass this time without comment, and congratulating himself that the man had not timed his return earlier. It was, however, noticeable that, having delivered himself from his previous haunting suspicions of Anthony’s rivalship, he should, nevertheless, immediately decide that he would in some hidden manner assist Stephens, thinking that the fortune which was to come into his hands would enable him to do this, and siding more strongly than even an hour ago with any attempt to oppose Anthony’s influence.
David himself, accustomed to observe keenly, was aware of some disturbance in Marmaduke’s face as he passed him, wondering, too, at his having gone so short a distance since they parted. It is possible that the surprise made him quick to notice trifles, for the tiny atoms which had fluttered on the grass would naturally have escaped his observation. As it was, he stooped and gathered some of them into his hand. They were torn so closely as to make it almost a matter of impossibility to fit one piece with another, unless he had bestowed long attention upon the work, and no impulse moved him to do this. But a scrap of the envelope, which Marmaduke had destroyed with less care, showed enough of the postmark for Polmear to be distinguishable, and Polmear had been stamped on the letter which Stephens had handed to Mr Lee. One or two other half-words there were, which, his curiosity being a little excited, he tried to put together as he went along, but for the most part they were illegible. Something, however, gave him an uneasy feeling as he hurried on to the post-office to hear whether his application had been successful.