Her eyes shone, and her cheeks flushed with a feverish red. Theodore took her hand, held it in both his own, and bent to kiss the cold fingers—not with a lover’s ardour, fondly as he loved; but with a calm and brotherly affection which soothed her agitated heart. He loved her well enough to be able to subjugate himself for her sake.
“My dear Juanita, if you would only withdraw your thoughts from this ghastly subject! I will not ask you to forget. That may be impossible. I entreat you only to be patient, to leave the chastisement of crime to Providence, which works in the dark, works silently, inevitably, to the end for which we can only grope in a lame and helpless fashion. Be sure the murderer will stand revealed sooner or later. That cruel murder will not be his last crime, and in his next act of violence he may be less fortunate in escaping every human eye. Or if that act is to be the one solitary crime of his life something will happen to betray him—some oversight of his own, or some irrepressible movement of a guilty conscience will give his life to the net, as a bird flies into a trap. I beseech you, dear, let your thoughts dwell upon less painful subjects—for your own sake—for the sake——”
He faltered, and left his sentence unfinished, and Juanita knew that his sisters had told him something. She knew that the one hope of her blighted life, hope which she had hardly recognized as hope yet awhile, was known to him.
“I can never cease to think of that night, or to pray that God will avenge that crime,” she said, firmly. “You think that is an unchristian prayer perhaps, but what does the Scripture say? ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ Christ came to confirm that righteous law. Oh! it is well to be a humanitarian—to sign petitions against capital punishment,—but let your nearest and dearest be murdered, and you will be quick to recognize the justice of that old inexorable law—a life for a life. That is what I want, Theodore—the life of the man who killed my husband.”
“If I can help to bring about that end, Juanita, believe me that I will not shrink from the task; but at present I must own that I am off the track, and see no likelihood of succeeding where a trained detective has failed. Could I but find a shred of evidence to put me on the trail, I would pursue that clue to the bitter end; but so far all is dark.”
“Yes, all is dark!” she answered, dejectedly; and then, after a pause, she said, “You are going to stay at Cheriton, I hear?”
“I am to spend three days there at the turn of the year, just before I go back to London. I have chambers in Ferret-court, over the rooms in which your father spent the golden years of his youth, the years that made him a great man. It will be very interesting to me to hear him talk over those years, if I can beguile him into talking of himself, a subject which he so seldom dwells upon.”
“Ask him if he ever made a bitter enemy. Ask him for his experience as a Judge at Assizes—find out, if you can, whether he ever provoked the hatred of a bad vindictive man.”
“I will question your father, Juanita.”
“Do! He will not let me talk to him about the one subject that occupies my mind. He always stops me on the threshold of any inquiries. He might surely help me to find the murderer, with his highly trained intellect, with his experience of the darkest side of human nature. But he will not help me. He would talk more freely to you, no doubt.”