“Some day I will read my old doctor’s letters to you––I have kept them all!”
Northrup looked up. Almost he believed Jan-an had voiced the words, but they had been spoken days ago by Mary-Clare during one of those illuminating talks of theirs and here were some old letters of the doctor’s. Were these Mary-Clare’s letters? Why were they here and in this state?
Suddenly Northrup’s face stiffened. The old, yellowed letters were, apparently, from Doctor Rivers to his son! But there were other letters on bits of fresh paper, the handwriting identical, or nearly so. Northrup’s more intelligent eye saw differences. The more recent letters were, evidently, exercises; one improved on the other; in some cases parts of the letters were repeated. All these Northrup sorted and laid in neat piles.
“She set a store by them old letters,” Jan-an was rambling along. “I’d have taken them back to her, but I ’clar, ’fore God, I don’t know which is which, I’m that cluttered. Why did he want to pest her by taking them and then making more and more?”
“I’m trying to find out.” Northrup spoke almost harshly. He wanted to quiet the girl.
The last scrap of paper had been torn from an old, greasy bag and bore clever imitation. It was the last copy, Northrup believed, of what Jan-an said he had just carried away with him.
Northrup grew hot and cold. He read the words and his brain reeled. It was an appeal, or supposed to be one, from a dead man to one whom he trusted in a last emergency.
“So he’s this kind of a scoundrel!” muttered Northrup, dazed by the blinding shock of the fear that became, moment by moment, more definite. “And he’s taken the thing to her in order to get money.”
Northrup could grope along, but he could not see clearly. By temperament and training he had evolved a peculiar sensitiveness in relation to inanimate things. If he became receptive and passive, articles which he handled or fixed his eyes upon often transmitted messages for him.