CHAPTER X.
Next morning, Tuesday morning, Hugh Ritson found this letter on his table:
"Dearest,—I do not know what is happening to me, but my eyes get worse and worse. To-day and yesterday I have not opened them. Oh, dear, I think I am losing my sight; and I have had such a fearful fright. The day after I wrote to you, Mrs. Drayton's son came home, and I saw him. Oh, I thought it was your brother Paul, and his name is Paul, too, but I think now it must be my eyes—they were very bad, and perhaps I did not see plain. He asked me questions, and went away next morning. Do not be long writing, I am, oh, so very lonely. When are you coming to me? Write soon. Your loving, Mercy."
Hugh Ritson had risen in a calmer mood. He was prepared for a disclosure like this. Last night he had been overwhelmed by the discovery that Paul Ritson was not the son of Robert Lowther. With the coming of daylight a sterner spirit of inquiry came upon him. The question that now agitated him was the identity of the man who had been mistaken for Paul.
After Mercy's letter the mystery was in a measure dispelled. There could hardly be the shadow of a doubt that the man who had slept at the Pack Horse—the man who had been seen by many persons at the fire—the man who Greta had encountered in the lane—was one and the same with the man whom Mercy knew for Paul Drayton, the innkeeper at Hendon.
But so much light on one small spot only made the surrounding gloom more dark. Far more important than any question of who this man was by repute was the other question of why he was there. Wherefore had he come? Why did he not come openly? What hidden reason had he for moving like a shadow where he knew no one and was known of none?
Hugh thought again of the circumstance of his mother's strange seizure. Last night he had formulated his theory respecting it. And it was simple enough. The second man, whoever he was, had, for whatever reason, come to the house, and, failing to attract attention in the hall, had wandered aimlessly upstairs to the first room in which he heard a noise. That room happened to be his mother's, and when the stranger, with the fatal resemblance to her absent son, presented himself before her in that strange way, at that strange hour, in that strange place, the fear had leaped to her heart that it was his wraith warning her of his death, and she had fainted and fallen.
The theory had its serious loop-holes for incredulity, but Hugh Ritson minded them not at all. Another and a graver issue tortured him.
But this morning, by the light of Mercy's letter, his view was clearer. If the man who resembled Paul had come secretly to Newlands, he must have had his reasons for not declaring himself. If he had wandered when none was near into Mrs. Ritson's room, it must have been because he had a purpose there. And his mother's seizure might not have been due to purely superstitious fears, or her silence to shattered nerves.