Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

This was actually the direction which was taken by her self-reproaches as she lay in her tears with no hope of sleep for her that night.

She felt, however, that though she had been to blame in some measure for the catastrophe which had come about, she could not in the supreme moment have acted otherwise than she had done.

Claude had said truly that the girl at least was innocent. He who a few weeks before had attempted to justify his thirst for revenge by quoting the awful curse “unto the third and fourth generation” had, when it suited him, talked about the innocence of the girl—about the injustice of visiting upon her head the sins of her father. But Agnes knew that she had done what was right in refusing to allow him to see Clare again unless to tell her the truth about her father.

The way he had shrunk from her at the moment of her entering the room, not daring even to glance at her—the way he had cried those words, “Take her away, take her away,” convinced Agnes that she had acted rightly and that she had saved Clare from a lifetime of sorrow. Before the end of a month he would have come to look at her with horror. He would seem to see in her features those of her father—the man who had crept behind Dick Westwood in the dark and shot him dead.

But then she began to ask herself if she had been equally right in telling Claude Westwood what was the true name of Clare. She reflected upon the fact that only she knew that Clare was the daughter of the man Standish, who was undergoing his life-sentence of penal servitude for the murder of Dick Westwood. If she had kept that dreadful secret to herself, Claude would have married the girl, and they might have lived happily in ignorance of all that she, Agnes, knew.

Yes, but how was she to be certain that no one else in the world shared her secret? How was she to know that the unhappy woman who had been married to Carton Standish, and had in consequence become estranged from all her friends in England—for the man, though of a good family, had been from the first an unscrupulous scamp—was right when she had told her in the letter, which Clare had delivered with her own hand, that no one knew the secret?

Perhaps a dozen people had recognised in Carton Standish the man with whom the Clare Tristram of twenty-two years before had run away, although no one had come forward to state that the man who had been found guilty of the murder of Mr. Westwood was the same person. Agnes knew enough of the world to be well aware of the fact that not only in Brackenshire but in every county in England the question “Who is she?” would be asked, so soon as it became known that Claude Westwood had got married.

Claude Westwood, the African explorer, was the man on whom all eyes had been turned for some months, and he could not hope to keep his marriage a secret even if he desired to do so. It would be outside the bounds of possibility that no one should recognise in the name Clare Tristram the name of the girl who, twenty-two years before, had married a man named Carton Standish; so that even if Agnes had kept her secret it would eventually have been revealed to Claude, when it would be too late to prevent a catastrophe.

“If I had wished to be revenged I would have let him marry and find out afterwards that she was the daughter of Carton Standish,” cried Agnes, as she lay awake through the hours of that long night. She felt that she had some reason for self-reproach, but not because she had sought to be revenged upon the man who had so cruelly treated her. Only for an hour had the thought of revenge been in her heart, and it had not been sweet to her, but bitter.

Once she rose from her bed and stole softly into Clare's room. The girl was lying asleep; and the light in the room was not too dim to allow of Agnes's seeing that her pillow was wet with tears. Still, she was now asleep and unconscious of any trouble. It was Agnes who had been unable to find comfort in the oblivion of sleep, and she returned to her bed to lie waiting for the dawn.