It had been rather a full day for Peter.
CHAPTER XII
CONFESSION
In spite of his perplexities, Peter slept soundly and was only awakened by the jangling of the telephone bell. But Peter wanted to do a little thinking before he saw McGuire, and he wanted to ask the housekeeper a few questions, so he told McGuire that he would see him before ten o'clock. The curious part of the telephone conversation was that McGuire made no mention of the shooting. "H-m," said Peter to himself as he hung up, "going to ignore that trifling incident altogether, is he? Well, we'll see about that. It doesn't pay to be too clever, old cock." His pity for McGuire was no more. At the present moment Peter felt nothing for him except an abiding contempt which could hardly be modified by any subsequent revelations.
Peter ran down to the creek in his bath robe and took a quick plunge, then returned, shaved and dressed while his coffee boiled, thinking with a fresh mind over the events and problems of the night before. Curiously enough, he found that he considered them more and more in their relation to Beth. Perhaps it was his fear for her happiness that laid stress on the probability that Jim Coast was Ben Cameron, Beth's father. How otherwise could Mrs. Bergen's terror be accounted for? And yet why had Coast been so perturbed at the mere mention of Ben Cameron's name? That was really strange. For a moment the man had stared at Peter as though he were seeing a ghost. If he were Ben Cameron, why shouldn't he have acknowledged the fact? Here was the weak point in the armor of mystery. Peter had to admit that even while Coast was telling his story and the conviction was growing in Peter's mind that this was Beth's father, the very thought of Beth herself seemed to make the relationship grotesque. This Jim Coast, this picturesque blackguard who had told tales on the Bermudian that had brought a flush of shame even to Peter's cheeks—this degenerate, this scheming blackmailer—thief, perhaps murderer, too, the father of Beth! Incredible! The merest contact with such a man must defile, defame her. And yet if this were the fact, Coast would have a father's right to claim her, to drag her down, a prey to his vile tongue and drunken humors as she had once been when a child. Her Aunt Tillie feared this. And Aunt Tillie did not know as Peter now did of the existence of the vile secret that sealed Coast's lips and held McGuire's soul in bondage.
Instead of going directly up the lawn to the house Peter went along the edge of the woods to the garage and then up the path, as Coast must have done a few nights before. The housekeeper was in the pantry and there Peter sought her out. He noted the startled look in her eyes at the moment he entered the room and then the line of resolution into which her mouth was immediately drawn. So Peter chose a roundabout way of coming to his subject.
"I wanted to talk to you about Beth, Mrs. Bergen," he began cheerfully. She offered him a chair but Peter leaned against the windowsill looking out into the gray morning. He told her what he had discovered about her niece's voice, that he himself had been educated in music and that he thought every opportunity should be given Beth to have her voice trained.
He saw that Mrs. Bergen was disarmed for the moment as to the real purpose of his visit and he went on to tell her just what had happened at the Cabin with Shad Wells the day before, and asking her, as Beth's only guardian, for permission to carry out his plan to teach her all that he knew, after which he hoped it would be possible for her to go to New York for more advanced training.