“‘I suppose so,’ she answered heavily. ‘Well, I’d best be off; but you needn’t have been so ready to believe things. Will you look after the child if anything happens to me, George? She’s a pretty babe, and I’ve taught her to say Daddy to nothing.’
“I told your mother not to talk in that strain, and asked her where she was going to spend the night, saying that I would see her again on the morrow. She answered, at her sister’s, Mrs. Gillingwater, and held you up for me to kiss. Then she walked away, and that was the last time that I saw her alive.
“It seems that she went to the Crown and Mitre, and made herself known to your aunt, telling her that she had been abroad to America, where she had come to trouble, but that she had money, in proof of which she gave her notes for fifty pounds to put into a safe place. Also she said that I was the agent for people who knew about her in the States, and was paid to look after her child. Then she ate some supper, and saying that she would like to take a walk and look at the old place, as she might have to go up to London on the morrow, she went out. Next morning she was found dead beneath the cliff, though how she came there, there was nothing to show.
“That, Joan, is the story of your mother’s life and death.”
“You mean the story of my mother’s life and murder,” she answered. “Had you not told her that lie she would never have committed suicide.”
“You are hard upon me, Joan. She was more to blame than I was. Moreover, I do not believe that she killed herself. It was not like her to have done so. At the place where she fell over the cliff there stood a paling, of which the top rail, that was quite rotten, was found to have been broken. I think that my poor wife, being very unhappy, walked along the cliff and leaned upon this rail wondering what she should do, when suddenly it broke and she was killed, for I am sure that she had no idea of making away with herself.
“After her death Mrs. Gillingwater came to me and repeated the tale which her sister had told her, as to my having been appointed agent to some person unknown in America. Here was a way out of my trouble, and I took it, saying that what she had heard was true. This was the greatest of my sins; but the temptation was too strong for me, for had the truth come out I should have been utterly destroyed, my wife would have been no wife, her child would have been a bastard, I should have been liable to a prosecution for bigamy, and, worst of all, my daughter’s heritage might possibly have passed from her to you.”
“To me?” said Joan.
“Yes, to you; for under my father-in-law’s will all his property is strictly settled first upon his daughter, my late wife, with a life interest to myself, and then upon my lawful issue. You are my only lawful issue, Joan; and it would seem, therefore, that you are legally entitled to your half-sister’s possessions, though of course, did you take them, it would be an act of robbery, seeing that the man who bequeathed them certainly desired to endow his own descendants and no one else, the difficulty arising from the fact of my marriage with his daughter being an illegal one. I have taken the opinions of four leading lawyers upon the case, giving false names to the parties concerned. Of these, two have advised that you would be entitled to the property, since the law is always strained against illegitimate issue, and two that equity would intervene and declare that her grandfather’s inheritance must come to Emma, as he doubtless intended, although there was an accidental irregularity in the marriage of the mother.
“I have told you all this, Joan, as I am telling you everything, because I wish to keep nothing back; but I trust that your generosity and sense of right will never allow you to raise the question, for this money belongs to Emma and to her alone. For you I have done my best out of my savings, and in some few days or weeks you will inherit about four thousand pounds, which will give you a competence independent of your husband.”