“I’m an anachronism,” I returned. “You’ll be one pretty soon. Our Square is one solid anachronism.”
“It won’t be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will go as the Worth place is going. You’ll miss it, Dominie. You love houses as if they were people.”
It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man’s hands that are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement, but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained against the city’s relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition, pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely endured—the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead, unhuman thing.
That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.
The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.
“Yes; you’re old, Dominie. But you’re not wise. You’re very foolish. Foolish and obstinate.”
Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: “Why am I foolish and obstinate?”
“Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then why did Ned commit suicide?”