Captain Fortescue took no notice of this insolent remark; he was not going to give vent to his feeling of anger in the chamber of death; he knew that he would have another opportunity of letting Watson know what he thought of her behaviour to him. So, without deigning to reply, he locked the safe, and taking the will and the keys in his hand he went out of the room.
Crossing the landing, he entered his own bedroom, and closed and locked the door. Now he was safe from intrusion and from Watson's prying gaze. He put his candle on the table, drew a chair near it, and sat down to open the letter. He wondered at himself that he could wait even to do this; but he had a nervous dread of the revelation he was about to receive, and, at the last moment, he actually feared to look upon that which before he had been so anxious to see.
He tore open the long envelope, which was securely fastened at one end, and drew out a sheet of foolscap paper.
He opened it and spread it before him; he turned over the page; he looked at the back of it.
Horror of horrors! Had sudden blindness fallen upon him? Was the loss of sight to be added to all his other losses? He could see nothing—not a single word appeared to be written on any one of the four pages. So far as he could see, it was simply a blank sheet, unused, unsoiled, utterly void of any information on any subject whatever. He held it up to the light; he tried to imagine that he saw secret marks in the tracing of the paper; he turned the pages over and over, but he could find nothing but emptiness—a plain, white surface which seemed to mock his scrutiny.
Surely he had brought the wrong envelope! But no, there was the address on the outside in his father's childish handwriting:
"For my son,
To be opened after my death."
Could the old man have made a mistake, and have placed the wrong document in the cover?
He went back to the room of death, carefully locking the door this time, and he made a thorough investigation of the contents of the safe. But he found nothing whatever to repay his search, no other envelope, no other letter—nothing at all but old accounts and a few business papers.
He stood by the bed and looked at his dead father's face, and longed unutterably to ask him what he had done with the information which he had so much wished him to receive. But the lips were closed—the voice was still—and no message came from the other world to guide and direct him in his time of bewilderment and consternation. Fortescue went to his bedroom again, and once more examined the sheet of paper. Then a bright thought seized him. Could it be that his father, fearing lest the document should fall into other hands, had written it in invisible ink? Was it possible that, if he only knew how to deal with it, he might be able to fill those blank pages with words of weight and importance? He remembered, when he was a boy, having a bottle of ink of that kind, which made no mark upon the paper unless heat were brought to bear upon it. Perhaps his father had remembered it also, and, recollecting the fact that he had known the secret as a boy, he had adopted this means of making his letter even more private, and had thus considerably lessened the liability of its being deciphered by any eyes excepting those of his son.