A Master of Deception

by Richard Marsh

"That's the portrait of your father. You don't remember him?"

"Not at all."

"I knew him all his life. You are so like what he was at your age that more than once when I have looked at you I have had an uncomfortable feeling that he had come back again to haunt me. Never was son more like his father, in all things."

Rodney winced, scarcely knowing why. His uncle went on.

"Your mother never spoke to you of him?"

"Never."

"She had what she supposed to be sufficient reasons for her reticence; she wished to hide from you, if possible, the knowledge of what manner of man your father was, thinking that the knowledge of the heritage of shame which he had left behind might drive you to walk in his footsteps. I was of a different opinion. I held that if you had in you any of the makings of a decent man, the knowledge of the sort of man your father was would serve you as a warning to keep off the path he'd followed. However, you were your mother's child, not mine, thank God; she had her way, though I warned her that the time would probably come when I should have to tell you the story she would rather have bitten off her tongue than tell."

Mr. Patterson paused, keeping his eyes fixed on the young man in front of him. There was a quality in his gaze which made Rodney conscious of a sense of discomfort to which he had been hitherto a stranger.

"You are so like your father that you even have his Christian name. Rodney Elmore the first was one of those creatures who sometimes come into the world, who could not run straight if they tried--and they never try. He was one of Nature's thieves; a born scamp; a lifelong blackguard. Your mother was my only sister; the only relative I had. I did not understand him so well before she married him as I did afterwards, but I understood him well enough to have kept her from marrying him if I could. But he was one of those hounds who, if they cannot get what they want by fair means, will not hesitate to get it by foul; he even won his wife by foul means, taking advantage of her girlish innocence so that she had to become his wife to save her good name. She lived for six years with him in hell. Then he was detected in a series of frauds which would probably have resulted in his being sent to penal servitude for life. Rather than face the music, he committed suicide."

Again Mr. Patterson paused, and his nephew, on his side, kept still. It seemed to him that his uncle's voice was the voice of doom; he was aware of a sensation of actual physical pain as he listened, as if sentence had not only been pronounced, but punishment also begun. He had wondered vaguely more than once what manner of man his father was, and, since she had volunteered no information, had put questions on the subject to his mother. But she had staved them off in a fashion which suggested--since even in the days of his boyhood his mental processes were sufficiently acute--that there was not much to be told about him which redounded to his credit. So, as years brought wisdom, his curiosity became less and less; a feeling grew up in his bosom that perhaps the less he knew about his father the better it might be. Never, however, had his most pessimistic imaginings come near the reality as portrayed by his uncle. He, the son of a lifelong rogue, who had only escaped the penalty of his misdeeds by self-destruction! He began to apprehend the meaning of the attitude his uncle had taken up towards him. His uncle did his best to assist him to a clearer comprehension.