Mary Seaham: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

by Mrs. Grey

Their examination of the deceased's effects proved, of course, equally unproductive, as was every inquiry which was afterwards made. A few questions put to the bewildered Mr. Trevor, to whose presence Eugene tremblingly admitted the officials, showed him incompetent to give any available evidence. Their warrant went no further.

With the death of the self-accused offender, ended every possibility of further enlightenment. She had gone to give an account of her actions to a Judge from before whom all hearts are open and no secrets are hid; and who require no human testimony to decide His just and terrible judgment.

They departed, and Eugene breathed more freely, though far was the removal of this one weight of anxiety from leaving peace and comfort at his heart. The gloom and darkness which brooded over the house of sin and death, lay with a leaden weight upon his soul. For the first time he seemed to be sensible of the foulness of the atmosphere in which for years he had breathed so contentedly—the dark maze in which he had entangled himself. Perhaps it was the influence of her presence, which even still, as it had ever done, exercised a power over his feelings—a wish, a transitory yearning for better, purer things; for happiness such as he had never tasted in his world of sensuality.

From whatever it might have arisen, certainly his was no enviable frame of mind, and in the perplexity of the moment he was almost prompted to relax his immediate hold of all his anxious schemes and purposes; put his father under proper guardianship, and leaving the house, the country, for a time, abandon the issue to the future—to fate. If the old man died soon, well and good; he knew his present will would secure him the bulk of his large and long accumulated unentailed property. If he lingered on for years, why even then, he little feared his brother taking advantage of his absence. No, not his brother perhaps, but his friends. Might they not rise up in Eustace Trevor's behalf; and the old man become, as in his present state he was likely to do, a ready tool in their hands, to effect his ruin—for ruin to him any alteration in that will must prove—that will made under his own auspices; at the same time that the deed was executed, which in favour of his brother's alleged incompetency, put all power into his hands, with regard to the management of the entailed property.

No, he must retain his post even to the death, and above all he must gain assurance as to the security of the deed, on which so much depended, and which it had been necessary to humour the old man, at the time, in the whim of keeping secreted in his own possession, without the farther security of a copy—a legal expense against which, he had strongly protested. There was another point too on which he was still painfully anxious. Were the remainder of those forged notes, which his father had evidently neglected to destroy, still in existence, and in the same place from which the rest had been extracted?

With these thoughts on his mind, Eugene went to his father, and with the usual address of which he was full master, broke to him the nature and the cause of the intrusion with which he had that day been terrified and annoyed—in short the whole history of Marryott's share in the forgery case, the origin of which he recalled to his darkened recollection.

The old man was confounded and dismayed—his old panic as regarded his son's youthful delinquency reviving in full force. He, however, held out still, that the notes had been destroyed, and that Marryott must have been a witch to have restored them to existence.

Eugene combated the folly of this idea, at the same time impressing upon him the necessity of ascertaining the better security of any papers of importance, than Marryott's abstraction of the forged notes, proved them to be in at the present moment.

For that purpose he conducted the miserable old man to his study, or rather private room; and with great difficulty induced him to go through an examination under his inspection of all places he thought it likely, the will and the remainder of the notes might be secreted.

But the old man's cunning avarice was a match for the younger one's cupidity.