He spoke so earnestly that he filled me with vague alarm.
“Dr. Marten,” I said solemnly, “answer me just one question. Do you know who was the murderer?”
“No, no!” he exclaimed, starting once more. “Thank heaven, I can’t tell you that! I don’t know. I know nothing. Nobody on earth knows but the two who were present on the night of the murder, I feel sure. And of those two, one’s unknown, and the other has forgotten.”
“But you suspect who he is?” I put in, probing the secret curiously.
He trembled visibly.
“I suspect who he is,” he replied, after a moment’s hesitation. “But I have never communicated, and will never communicate, my suspicions to anybody, not even to you. I will only say this: the person whom I suspect is one with whom you may now have forgotten all your past relations, but whom you would be sorry to punish if you recovered your memory. I formed a strong opinion at the time who that person was. I formed it from the nature and disposition of the wound, and the arrangement of the objects in the room when I was called in to see your father’s body.”
“And you never said so at the inquest!” I cried, indignant.
He looked at me hard again. Then he spoke in a very slow and earnest voice:
“For your sake, Una, and for the sake of your affections, I held my peace,” he said. “My dear, the suspicion was but a very slender one: I had nothing to go upon. And why should I have tried to destroy your happiness?”
That horrible article in the penny Society paper came back to my mind once more with hideous suggestiveness. I turned to him almost fiercely.