“I don’t know, but there he was sitting by the lady’s side and looking as happy as he used to look when he was courting me; and he saw me too, and turned as white as death at the sight. Perhaps he thought I should die in prison for want of drink, and so married again without waiting to see. I thought of going to his mother’s and asking if he was really dead; but then I changed my mind, and came here. It would be better for you to go; you know better how to get at the truth.”
“You charge him with deserting you and marrying another woman?” I said, scarcely able to restrain myself.
To this she replied with a wavering affirmative, and then she produced the certificates of her marriage and of the birth of her child, and gave me the address of her mother-in law. She then described minutely the place and circumstances of the meeting with her husband’s counterpart, and left the Office. She left her own address also, but I had no expectation of ever needing that. It seemed to me that the supposed fraud, forgery, and bigamy were entirely the offspring of her own drink-sodden brain, and that to ascertain that her husband was dead and buried would be so simple a matter that there was not the slightest occasion for her putting the task upon us. Still I remember thinking—“If the man is really alive, I hope he will really be nimble enough to escape me. It would be an actual blessing to such a man if the jade fell downstairs and broke her neck.”
In the afternoon I went to the address of the mother. The house was a small one in Greenside, but the woman appeared a respectable widow, and I found her quietly preparing the supper of her sons, two of whom supported her. She seemed a superior person to be in such a situation; and noting that fact I guessed that her son, though a poor worker, must have had some natural refinement. I told her I had called to make some inquiries about her son, and she probably thought I meant one of the younger members of her family, for she smiled brightly, and invited me to enter. While I accepted the offer I studied her quiet and somewhat shadowed features, and quickly decided that I had before me a woman who, if she had occasion, could throw as many obstacles in my way as any one who ever hampered a detective.
“It is your son Richard, I mean,” I quietly continued, as I sat down at the clean little fireplace.
The mother gave a great start, and I saw the hands busy at the supper grow suddenly tremulous. She looked at me, too, but it was not so much a look of surprise as of searching inquiry or suspicion.
“What about him?” she cautiously returned, when she had recovered somewhat.
“I want to know where he lives, what he does, and all about him,” I quickly answered. I fully expected her to blurt out, possibly with tears, that her son was dead, but no such words rose to her lips. She stared at me keenly for a moment or two, as if trying to discover from my appearance what was the nature of my occupation, and then she said—
“What are you? a sheriff-officer or something of that kind?”
“Something of that kind,” I lightly returned. “Now, about your son Richard. Is it true that he is dead?”