At last he forced himself into thinking as calmly as he could, setting himself to consider all that he had to face.
Mark was dying fast. The doctors had said it, and in a few hours he would stand in the eyes of the world as, if not his murderer, the cause of his death. Next there must be that terrible public examination and the verdict—manslaughter; it could be no other, he told himself. Then there would be a magisterial examination, ending in his being committed for trial. After this, a long, weary waiting—possibly on bail—and then the trial.
He arranged all of it in his own mind, perfectly satisfied that his view was too correct, and never once stopping to think that people would calmly investigate every circumstance of the trouble, and, while making every allowance, sift out the pearl truth from the sand and bitter ashes in which it was hidden. In his then frame of mind, he could only think the very worst of everything; for always before him was that terrible scene in which he was bound to take part. He felt that he could nerve himself to stand before coroner, magistrate, even judge, if matters went so far; but he could not face the sweet-faced, sorrowing mother and the weak invalid father, who must be now hastening back to their dying son as fast as trains could bear them.
Condemn, pity, ridicule, which you will; but the fact remains. A kind of panic had attacked Richard Frayne, and he prepared for the folly he was about to commit. There were the two courses open—a frank, manly meeting of the consequences, whatever they might be, or the act of a coward.
The hours passed, and his mind was fully made up. And now everything he did was in a quiet, decisive fashion, with as much method in his madness as ever the great poet endowed his Danish hero.
He changed his clothes, putting on the quiet dark tweed suit Jerry missed, and went back into his room, to stand there in the gloom, looking round and vainly trying to make out the various objects there, every one being loved like some old friend.
But he could not look the farewell, and began slowly to go round the room, laying his hand upon each in turn—his favourite books and pictures, his piano, the violin, the cornet, and the big ’cello in its case where it stood in the corner—all such dear old friends, and it was good-bye for ever!
And as he went on, his hand at last touched the little, long morocco case lying upon the side-table.
He clutched it hard, and something like a sob struggled to his lips; for that case contained, in company with the little piccolo, the flute that was once the property of the brave old soldier whose helmet hung dented there with its drooping black horse-hair plume.
Richard’s thoughts went back into the past, and he recalled the evenings when he as a little child was enraptured listening to some operatic selection brilliantly played, while his mother sat accompanying upon the piano. Then he recollected the first lessons given him by his father upon that very flute, and years after the plaudits he listened to with burning cheeks after he had played one of his father’s favourite pieces with such skill and execution that these words followed: