And, being true, what possibilities might it not develop? Mrs. Shackleton knew it, too—that this penniless girl was the bonanza king’s eldest and only legitimate child, with power, if not entirely to dispossess her own children, at least to claim the lion’s share of the vast fortune. If Mariposa had proof of her mother’s marriage to Shackleton and of her own identity as the child of that marriage, she could rise and claim her heritage—her part of the twenty millions!
The thought, and what it opened before him, dizzied him. He drank some of the diluted whisky in the glass beside him and sat on motionless. It was evident Mariposa did not know. She had been brought up in ignorance of the whole extraordinary story. The man and woman she had been taught to regard as her parents had committed an offense against the law, which they had hidden from her, secure in the thought that the other participants in the strange proceeding would never dare to confess.
The minutes and hours ticked by and Essex still sat thinking, while the drunkard breathed stertorously in his heavy sleep, and the coals dropped softly in the grate as the fire sank into clinkers and ashes.
CHAPTER XIII
THE SEED OF BANQUO
“What says the married woman?”
—Shakespeare.
As soon as Mrs. Shackleton was sufficiently recovered, the family had moved from Menlo Park to their town house.
The long work of settling up the great estate which had been left to the widow and her children, required their presence in the city, and the shock which Bessie had suffered in finding her husband dead, had rendered the country place unbearable to her.
The day after the funeral the women had moved to town. Win, however, remained at Menlo Park, to go over such documents of his father’s as had been left there. Shackleton had lived so much at his country place for the last two or three years that many of his papers and letters were kept in the library, which had been his especial sanctum.
Among these, the son had come upon a small package of letters, which, fastened together with an elastic, and bearing a note of their contents on one end, had roused his interest. They were the letters exchanged between his father and the chief of the detective bureau when the latter had been commissioned to locate the widow and daughter of Daniel Moreau.