Then there came a sound like a gasp, the colour receding as quickly as it had come, leaving him almost pallid.
“Ernest Fitzmaurice!” The words, though scarcely above a murmur, caught my ears at once. “Good God! the last man, the last human being one could have suspected. Can it be?”
I, though no lawyer, nor gifted with special instinct of the detective kind, had not lost any shadow of the expressions following each other on his face, nor of the words of his almost involuntary exclamations, and of course I was much better prepared than my companions for the probable incidents of the interview, and therefore to some extent at an advantage. So I waited for a moment or two while Mr Payne handed the letters to his son, and, still without addressing me, sat motionless, save for a slightly nervous tapping of his fingers on the table, his eyes fixed before him, till Clarence, with a gleam of something almost approaching triumph, laid the papers down in front of his father, with the two words only, into which, however, his tone infused a big amount of meaning—
“Well, sir?”
Then the father turned to me.
“I am so amazed,” he said, and his voice shook a little in spite of his professional self-control, “so amazed, as to what all this points to, as to feel almost stunned for the moment. May I ask you, Miss Fitzmaurice, as to what the knowledge was which, so far, I gather by these,” and he tapped the letters as he spoke, “you have had the courage and resolution to keep to yourself? And still further, how did you come by it?”
I shook my head. I had anticipated some such inquiry as the first result of his reading the letters, and I was prepared for it.
“Mr Payne,” I said earnestly, “I have thought it well out. I do not see that it is necessary for me to tell even you what you have just asked. You see I have withheld it from my own father, and he does not press it. The whole thing is, or may be, now well in train. You and he—my father, I mean—with the benefit of your advice and experience, can follow it out to the end, without my having to tell what I should be thankful to keep silent about. The information, or the knowledge, came to me accidentally. I was never intended to hear or to know what I did hear and do know. What, in point of fact, you now know yourself. If I have been able, as I think I have been, to start things, or rather to help things on in the right direction, by doing away with the difficulty that this man, Ernest Fitzmaurice, might have had in tracing—well, you know whom—I shall feel thankful and grateful for the rest of my life.”
“As to that,” was Mr Payne’s reply, “there can be no manner of doubt; whereas, but for your intervention, time of the most precious might have been lost. The whole éclaircissement, in short, delayed till, in the eyes of those chiefly concerned, it had lost its greatest value for them! But, excuse me, I still feel almost stupefied. It will take a little time for this extraordinary aspect of things to get into focus with me.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I can understand that.”