“I have been wronged in Boston,” Adam agreed, ominously, “and shatter my hilt if I know why I hesitate to redress myself while I may.”
“But I did you no wrong to your heart, sir. Our injuries were both of the heart,” Randolph reiterated, persistently. “Look, sir, I had a heart, six years ago, and I felt it cruelly trampled under foot—the same foot that trampled upon yours, and here——”
“Beware!” Adam growled. “I shall cut out your tongue, for little more. Begone, sir, and thank your God at every step you take, that you still live—if you value your life at all; and this I am driven to doubt.”
“Here, here!” replied Randolph, nervously, and with shaking fingers he drew from his pocket a packet of paper folded in the form of a letter. “You will never believe me till I show you this. But I lay my heart open—I expose my wounds, to prove how you wrong me. Read it, read it—the letter she sent me—and then I shall be willing to bide by your answer.”
Adam could not fail to be impressed by the man’s tenacity of purpose. Being a just man, he had a faint suspicion dart through his head that, after all, the man might not have known what he was doing when he committed all his fiendish acts, years before. There had never been any sufficient reason for what he had done, that Adam knew. He took the letter, briefly to see what it was the fellow meant and wanted.
He began to read, and then to feel that the man had obviously undergone some trial, severe and not readily to be forgotten. It was Garde’s own letter to himself he was reading.
“She sent me that and then broke my heart after,” said Randolph, speaking in a low, emotional voice, while Adam looked at the letter. “As if she had not shattered my life sufficiently before.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Rust, after a moment. “Here, I don’t care to pry into your letter. Take it, and go in peace.”
“But read it, read it. You don’t know who wrote it,” said Randolph, who was white with excitement. “I shouldn’t have come to you here with my mortifying apologies, if there had not been a bond between us.”
Adam gave him a look, as of one baffled by an inscrutable mystery. He could not comprehend his visitor’s meaning. Then suddenly a flush leaped into his face, as he remembered something he had heard in those by-gone days, when he walked with that youth, whose very name he could not recall, from Plymouth to Boston.