“He is rich and will pay liberally for the keeping of the secret I hold against his wife,” he decided, and then he set his cunning brain to work to devise a plan by which to approach Colonel Falconer on the delicate subject of his wife.
Poor little Mrs. Finley, whom he had long ago reduced to the status of a trembling, obedient slave, looked at him in wonder as he lounged about the house, paying no attention to the grocery, for he had long ago placed Willie in his store as a clerk, and the youth was very reliable. She thought fearfully:
“There is something brewing in his cunning mind. Has he found out that I have been seeing my poor little grandchild by stealth, and is he planning some punishment for me?”
She trembled at the thought, for she knew that he was both cunning and vindictive. He ruled her and her children with a rod of iron.
He had never forgotten or forgiven the assertion of his wife, that she would never have married him if she had known that he would not care for her children, and he made her and them suffer for it in various ways. One of his favorite methods was to taunt them with the disgrace that Pansy had brought upon them, and another was to keep alive in Willie’s breast the fierce resentment and murderous wrath that had taken hold of him when he first learned that his beautiful sister had gone astray.
Left to himself and to the remorseful pleadings of his mother, the young man might have got over some of his anger, more especially as poor Pansy had atoned for her fault with her life. There were times when the remembrance of her message to him, her pitiful promise that she would never disgrace him again, stung keenly, and forced him to accuse himself of being accessory to her death; but these moods never lasted long, for whenever Mr. Finley found these kinder impulses taking root in the youth’s mind he would dispel them by maliciously hinting that, in all probability, Pansy was yet alive, and might turn up at any time to recall to the world the scandal that had trailed its slime over the name of Laurens.
“Pretty Kate North would not smile so sweetly then when she saw you waiting at the church door on Sundays,” he suggested, with a leer that brought the hot color to Willie’s cheeks, for this, his first real love affair, was a very tender point with him, and he had often wondered to himself if pretty little Kate North, with her black eyes and dimpled red cheeks, thought any the less of him because of the family disgrace.
His love for Kate made him all the more bitter in his thoughts toward Pansy.
“How dared she disgrace the family so? I hate her memory, even though believing her dead and if I knew she were alive I should be tempted to carry out my threat, and shoot her on sight,” he replied angrily to the taunt of his stepfather that day on which Mr. Finley’s mind was so engaged in plotting the best means by which to extort money from Colonel Falconer for keeping the dark secret of his wife’s past.
He did not know that his malice had overreached itself, and that the fury smoldering in Willie’s impetuous mind, and fanned into flame by his sneers and gibes, would bear fruit to disappoint him of all his avaricious hopes.