Mrs. Wilcox ran up with a sob, and fetched the heavy eyelids downward. “Poor young man! He have run his course. I hope he has gone to heaven,” she said.
But my Uncle Corny looked at me, and at the fallen pistol. “I wish him only his due,” he said; “and I hope he has gone to the Devil.”
CHAPTER LXVI.
ONE GOOD WISH.
There must have been a fearful scene, about an hour before we reached that spot. Two powerful wills were in collision—one hard as steel, the other trenchant and resistless as red-hot iron. For many days the conflict had been gathering force and fury, as the rising wind collects its power, before the outbreak of the storm.
The mother was resolved to pierce the mystery of her crafty son. The son was equally resolute to keep his fatal secret. And the father, turbulent and headstrong, wrapped in his own vindictive mood, cared not when the outbreak came, but looked forward to it grimly.
It had been impossible for Downy, as he had naturally foreseen, to keep entirely to himself the presence of a stranger in the house. Although the room was far away from the part his mother occupied, and darkened for the Professor’s use, and secluded by thick shrubbery, it soon became needful for the jailor to secure a confederate. With some misgivings, he took the sour-faced woman into his confidence, knowing her to be close and faithful, as well as clever and resourceful. But unluckily for himself he did not trust the woman wholly. Skinner, as she was called in the household, did not know the real import of the plan she aided. Falsehood was her master’s nature, and he did no despite to it, by relapsing into truth. He told her a chapter of lies; and she had no inkling that the stowaway, whose face she was never allowed to see, was the husband of her mistress.
Thus she was not on her guard so strictly as she would have been, had she known the truth. To learn the existence of a secret is to be halfway towards it; and the pride as well as curiosity of the mistress was soon afoot. But the room was securely locked, and vain was any prowling round it; till indignation and sense of outrage grew no longer bearable.