"He told me he would be hanged if I did not keep quite quiet. I could not believe that they were dead. I went into the room, but I couldn't stop an instant. The sight of that poor body, disfigured past all recognition, even the clothes stained beyond recognition, made me almost insensible. I saw that no doctor could be of any use.
"My father was very quick. He shaved himself, and colored his face with his paints, and put on the boy's clothes. He told me he would go to Mrs. Durgan, who would get him away. He told me to call the police at once, and tell them everything, except that I had seen him or knew anything about him. He locked the boy in a narrow cupboard that held hot-water pipes, and told me how to let him out at night. I did not think at the time it could be wrong to keep silence about my father. I did just what he told me to do.
"You know, Herbert, you said the other night that I had deceived you; but, indeed, the great deceit came of itself. I don't think even my father intended it. I could never have believed they could have mistaken that man lying there for my father. First, the police made the mistake; then, in a few hours, we heard the newsboys crying it all over the streets. Still I felt sure that when you came, and the coroner, the truth would be known. When you believed it, too, what word could I have said to you that would not have made it your duty to hunt him down? His daughter was the only person who could take the responsibility of silence. I don't say I was right to do it; I only know I could not do anything else. Even the boy, as I found afterwards, had never seen Beardsley. A servant had given him the note to bring. He naturally thought it was Beardsley who had bribed him, and escaped in his clothes. I only kept silent hour by hour.
"I thought again they would find out at the inquest; but when, at length, the poor body was buried, and those saturated, torn clothes burned, and I had found out from Mrs. Durgan that the poor wretch had no near relatives or friends to mourn him, I could do nothing but acquiesce. I had a message from father, through Mrs. Durgan, before they arrested me. She and he had decided that he must personate the dead man, and he even ventured to play the medium's part at the dark séance. He was always clever at disguises. I could not judge them. I hardly cared, then, whether I lived or died; the wickedness of it all was so dreadful. I shrank far more—and there was nothing heroic in that—from the thought of my father being arrested and punished than from danger for myself. Think what it would have been like if it had been your father!"
Seeing that Alden was profoundly distressed, she hastened to say, "If I had told you, Herbert, how painful would your position have been! And I never even told Bertha; it was father's parting request that she should not know. But I know that of late she has guessed something, for she has lived in fear up here alone. I was obliged when I was ill in Paris to tell her where she would find the truth; she guessed the rest, I fear, and it must have been father's return that she has dreaded. But now he has been brought back so helpless he can never hurt anyone again."
Alden's emotion was hardly restrained from breaking through the crust of his conventionality, and Hermione was fain to turn to a lighter aspect of the case in addressing Durgan.
"I gathered from my father's letters that Mrs. Durgan's motive in befriending him was partly kindness, and partly that he could be of use to her."
"I can understand that," said Durgan. He also felt it a relief to speak clearly on the only aspect of this sorrowful tale which did not awaken emotion. "It was the one thing in the whole world that my wife wanted—to be told how to manipulate the secret springs of a world of fashion in which she had so far moved as one in the dark. And having once taken your father in, she could not go back."
He rose as he said this and went away, wondering how much Alden would submit to the continued devotion of such a daughter to such a father, how much Hermione's appeal would reach him: "Think how you would feel if it were your father."