Still the second question remains unanswered:—
“Why should Dick Darke have killed Charley Clancy?”
Even put in this familiar form it receives no reply. It is an enigma to which no one present holds the key. For none know aught of a rivalry having existed between the two men—much less a love-jealousy, than which no motive more inciting to murder ever beat in human breast.
Darke’s partiality for Colonel Armstrong’s eldest daughter has been no secret throughout the settlement. He himself, childishly, in his cups, long since made all scandal-mongers acquainted with that. But Clancy, of higher tone, if not more secretive habit, has kept his love-affair to himself; influenced by the additional reason of its being clandestine.
Therefore, those, sitting up as company to his afflicted parent, have no knowledge of the tender relations that existed between him and Helen Armstrong, any more than of their being the cause of that disaster for which the widow now weeps.
She herself alone knows of them; but, in the first moment of her misfortune, completely prostrated by it, she has not yet communicated aught of this to the sympathetic ears around her. It is a family secret, too sacred for their sympathy; and, with some last lingering pride of superior birth, she keeps it to herself. The time has not come for disclosing it.
But it soon will—she knows that. All must needs be told. For, after the first throes of the overwhelming calamity, in which her thoughts alone dwelt on the slain son, they turned towards him suspected as the slayer. In her case with something stronger than suspicion—indeed almost belief, based on her foreknowledge of the circumstances; these not only accounting for the crime, but pointing to the man who must have committed it.
As she lies upon her couch, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and sighs heaved from the very bottom of her breast—as she listens to the kind voices vainly essaying to console her—she herself says not a word. Her sorrow is too deep, too absorbing, to find expression in speech. But in her thoughts are two men—before, her distracted fancy two faces—one of a murdered man, the other his murderer—the first her own son, the second that of Ephraim Darke.
Notwithstanding ignorance of all these circumstances, the thoughts of her sympathising neighbours—those in council outside—dwell upon Dick Darke; while his name is continuously upon their tongues. His unaccountable conduct during the day—as also the strange behaviour of the hound—is now called up, and commented upon.
Why should the dog have made such demonstration? Why bark at him above all the others—selecting him out of the crowd—so resolutely and angrily assailing him?