Roland Yorke / A Sequel to "The Channings"

by Mrs. Henry Wood

When John Ollivera departed on the circuit which was destined to bring him his death, a young man of the name of Willett accompanied the bar. He had been "called," but in point of fact only went as clerk to one of the leading counsel. There are barristers and barristers just as there are young men and young men. Mr. Charles Willett had been of vast trouble to his family; and one of his elder brothers, Edmund, who was home from India on a temporary sojourn to recruit his health, had taken up the cause against him rather sharply: which induced a quarrel between them and lasting ill-feeling.

An intimacy had sprung up between Edmund Willett and John Ollivera, and they had become the closest of friends They took a (supposed) final leave of each other when Mr. Ollivera departed on his circuit, for Mr. Willett was on the point of returning to India. His health had not improved, but he was obliged to go back; he was in a merchant's house in Calcutta; and the probabilities certainly were that he would not live to come home again. However, contrary to his own and general expectations, as is sometimes the case the result proved that everybody's opinion was mistaken. He not only did not die, but he grew better, and finally lived: and he had now come to England on business matters. The minute details attendant on John Ollivera's death had never reached him, either through letters or newspapers, and he became acquainted with them for the first time in an interview with the Rev. Mr. Ollivera. When the unfinished letter was mentioned, and the fact that they had never been able to trace out the smallest information as to whom it was intended for Mr. Willett at once said that it must have been intended for himself. He had charged John Ollivera (rather against the latter's will) to carry out, if possible, an arrangement with Charles Willett upon a certain disagreeable matter which had only come recently to the knowledge of his family, and to get that young man's written promise to arrest himself in, at least, one of his downward courses towards ruin. The letter to Mr. Ollivera, urging the request, was written and posted in London on the Saturday; Mr. Ollivera (receiving it on Sunday morning at Helstonleigh) would no doubt see Charles Willett in the course of Monday. That this was the "disagreeable commission" he had spoken of to Mr. Kene, as having been entrusted to him, and which he had left the Court at half-past three o'clock to enter upon, there could be no manner of doubt. Mr. Willett had expected an answer from him on Tuesday morning--it was the last day of his stay in London, for he would take his departure by the Dover mail in the evening--which answer never came. That Mr. Ollivera was writing the letter for the nine o'clock night despatch from Helstonleigh, and that the words in the commencing lines, "should I never see you again," referred solely to Mr. Willett's precarious health, and to the belief that he would not live to return again from India, also appeared to be indisputable. If this were so, why then, the first part of the letter, at any rate, was the sane work of a perfectly sane man, and no more pointed at self-destruction than it did at self-shampooing. The clergyman and Mr. Willett, arriving at this most natural conclusion, sat and looked at each other for a few moments in painful silence. That unexplained and apparently unexplainable letter had been the one sole stumbling-block in Henry William Ollivera's otherwise perfect belief.

But, to leave no loophole of uncertainty, Charles Willett was sought out. When found (with slippers down at heel, a short pipe in his mouth, and a pewter pint-pot at his elbow) he avowed, without the smallest reticence, that John Ollivera's appointment for half-past three on that long-past Monday afternoon in Helstonleigh, had been with him; and that, in answer to Mr. Ollivera's interference in his affairs, he had desired him to mind his own business and to send word to his brother to do the same.

This left no doubt whatever on the clergyman's mind that the commenced letter had been as sensible and ordinary a letter as any man could sit down to pen, and that the blotted words were appended to it by a different hand--that of the murderer.

In the full flush of his newly-acquired information, he went straight to the house of Mr. Greatorex, to pour the story into his uncle's ear. It happened to be the very day alluded to in the last chapter--in the evening of which you had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Roland Yorke industriously putting his shoulder to the wheel, after the ordinary hours of office work were over.

Mr. Greatorex had been slightly discomposed that day in regard to business matters. It seemed to him that something or other was perpetually arising to cause annoyance to the firm. Their connection was on the increase, requiring the unwearied, active energies of its three heads more fully than it had ever done; whereas one of those heads was less efficient in management than he used to be--the second of them, Bede Greatorex. Mr. Greatorex, a remarkably capable man, always had more hard, sterling, untiring work in him than Bede, and he had it still. With his mother's warm Spanish blood, Bede had inherited the smallest modicum of temperamental indolence. As he had inherited (so ran the suspicion), the disease which had proved fatal to her.

"I cannot reproach him as I would," thought Mr. Greatorex, throwing himself into a chair in his room, when he quitted the office for the day, urged to despair almost at this recent negligence, or whatever it was, that had been brought home to them, and which had been traced to some forgetfulness of Bede's. "With that wan, weary look in his face, just as his mother's wore when her sickness was coming on, it goes against me to blow him up harshly, as I should Frank. He must be very ill; he could not, else, look as he does; perhaps already nearly past hope: it was only when she was past hope that she suddenly failed in her round of duties and broke down. And he has one misery that his mother had not--trouble of mind, with that wife of his."

It was at this juncture that Mr. Greatorex was broken in upon by Henry William Ollivera. The clergyman, standing so that the bright slanting rays of the hot evening sun, falling across his face, lighted up its pallor and its suppressed eagerness, imparted the tale that he had come to tell: the discovery that he and Edmund Willett had that day made.

It a little excited Mr. Greatorex. Truth to say, he had always looked upon that unfinished letter as a nearly certain proof that his nephew's death had been in accordance with the verdict of the jury. To him, as well as to the dead man's brother, the apparent impossibility of discovering any cause for its having been penned, or person for whom it could have been intended, had remained the great gulf of difficulty which could not be bridged over.

In this, the first moment of the disclosure, it seemed to him a great discovery. We all know how exaggerated a view we sometimes take of matters, when they are unexpectedly presented to us. Mr. Greatorex went forth, calling aloud for his son Bede: who came down, in return to the call, in dinner attire. As Bede entered, his eye fell on his cousin Henry--or William, as Mr. Greatorex generally liked to call him--whose usually placid countenance was changed by the scarlet hectic on its thin cheeks. Bede saw that something, great or little, was about to be disclosed, and wished himself away again: for some time past he had felt no patience with the fancies and crotchets of Henry Ollivera.