“Ah! those ‘accursed shears’!... I wonder if... never mind, I will tell you the romance as far as it came under my notice and you or your literary adviser—or perhaps your father—but I don’t suppose that Sir Creighton would trouble himself over a miniature romance.”
“Oh, wouldn’t he just? He reads nearly every novel that comes out—especially the French ones.”
“Oh, then I need not hesitate to ask you to place before him the fragment which I acquired in the colony less than a year ago.”
“It will be a capital exercise for him—working out the close artistically. The story begins in England, of course?”
“Of course. Let me think how it does begin. Yes, it begins in England—at a seaport town. There is a shipbuilding yard. The head of it is, naturally, a close-fisted, consequently a wealthy man—one of those men who from insignificant beginnings rise by their own force of character to position of wealth and influence. He has a son and the son has a friend. The son has acquired extravagant habits and his father will not sanction them, nor will he pay his debts a second time, he declares—he has already paid them once. When the relations between the father and the son are in this way strained, the son’s friend is suddenly taken sick, and after a week or two the doctors in attendance think it their duty to tell him that he cannot possibly recover—that they cannot promise him even a month’s life. The man—he must have been a young man—resigns himself to his fate and his friend, the son of the shipbuilder comes to bid him farewell. In doing so, he confesses that in what he calls a moment of madness, he was induced to forge the name of the firm on certain documents on which he raised money, but that the discovery of the forgery cannot be avoided further than another fortnight, and that will mean ruin to him. The dying man suggests—he is actually magnanimous enough—idiotic enough—to suggest that he himself should confess that he committed the crime. That will mean that his friend will be exculpated and that he himself will go to the grave with a lie on his lips and with the stigma of a crime on his memory.”
“And the other man—he actually accepted the sacrifice? Impossible!”
“It was not impossible. The impossibility comes in later on. You see, Miss Severn, the scheme appears feasible enough. One man has only a day or two to live, the other has the chance of redeeming the past and of becoming a person of influence and importance in the world. Yes, I think the scheme sounded well, especially as the real criminal solemnly swore to amend his life. Well, the confession is made in due form; and then,—here is where Fate sometimes becomes objectionable—then—the dying man ceases to die. Whether it was that the doctors were duffers, or that a more skilful man turned up I cannot say—but the man recovered and was arrested on his own confession. The other man being a kind-hearted fellow did his best to get his father to be merciful; but he was not kind-hearted enough to take the place in the dock where his friend stood a month later to receive the judge’s sentence for the crime which he had taken on his own shoulders.”
“You mean to say that he was base enough to see his friend sentenced for the forgery which he had committed?”
“That is what happened. And to show how Fate’s jests are never half-hearted, but played out to the very end in the finest spirit of comedy, it also happened that the man who was the real criminal not only saw that his friend fulfilled his part of the compact which they had made by suffering the penalty of his confession, but he himself was determined to act up to his part in the compact, for he so rigidly kept his promise to amend his life, that when his friend was released from gaol where he had been confined for more than a year, he refused to see him; the fellow had actually come to believe that he was innocent and that the other had been properly convicted!”
“That is a touch of nature, I think. And what happened then? Surely Nemesis——”