Was he still acting? Was it ever possible to understand him? Perhaps even now he was turning the situation into a jest, and smiling to himself as he watched me. And yet somehow I had ceased to hate him.
"Do you mean," I asked "that you never took it?"
Slowly my father's body straightened in his chair, and his lips, drawn tight together, seemed to repress an exclamation.
"So he told you that," he said. "He told you that I made off with her fortune? Gad! but he was clever, very, very clever."
He paused, and refilled his glass, and held it steadily before him. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle, and, like his face, strung taut with pain.
"No wonder she never sent me word," he murmured.
"Do you mean," I asked, "that you never took it?"
For a second he did not reply—only looked thoughtfully before him, as if he saw something that we would never see.
"Why go into a painful matter now?" said my father at length. "Brutus, call in Mr. Aiken."
He lurched into the cabin a half a minute later. His sea cloak was gone. His shirt, none too white the previous afternoon, was torn and scraped as though it had scrubbed the deck, and he had transferred his red handkerchief from his neck to his head, so that his tangled hair waved around it like some wild halo. His heavy hands, bruised and scarred, were working restlessly at his sides. He glanced at my father's bandaged arm, and his jaw thrust forward.