"I can't believe that Colonel Fielding can have meant to bring such a suit. He loved my father and honored him above all other men. I cannot believe that he would knowingly smirch the memory of his best friend; unless, poor old man, his mind is entirely gone. And why has the note not been known about before? Why have I never been told—all these years? Are you sure, John, that there is no mistake? Are you sure that the colonel has actually brought the suit?" asked Miss Judy, piteously, with her blue eyes—clouded and filling with tears—fixed on the judge's face.
"It is not the colonel," murmured the judge.
"Then who is it?" persisted Miss Judy, with growing bewilderment and distress. "Who comes at this late day claiming that my father did not pay what he owed,—when he could have paid?"
"Alvarado," John Stanley said, in so low a tone that she barely heard, thus forced himself to utter the name of the Spaniard for the first time since it had become to him an unspeakable thing.
"John—John, I humbly beg your pardon. I didn't dream—oh, my son," Miss Judy cried, forgetting her own trouble.
She ran to him and laid her tender little hands on his broad shoulders, and gazed into his pale, calm face, all unconscious that her own was quivering and wet with tears—tears for the pain which she saw in his set face, for his sacrificed youth, for his lost happiness—tears most of all for gentle Alice Fielding, the girl whom he still loved, although she had rested so long in the grave of the broken-hearted.
XXIII
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Misfortune never comes singly to a community any more than to an individual. No life anywhere may ever stand or fall quite alone, so are the living all bound together. In a village where every door stands wide and all lives are in the open, and where no high, hard walls rise between the people,—as they do in a city,—the bond is closer than it can be elsewhere. So that the uneasiness which the judge communicated so unwillingly to Miss Judy on that quiet midsummer night was the beginning of the end of the peace of many of the good people of Oldfield, for a long time afterward.