“I have no doubt that it is genuine,” Basset replied. “It bears the marks of age, and it was found in the chest with the old Bible. If the book is genuine——”
The lawyer raised his hand. “Too fast,” he said. “You say it was found! You mean that this man says it was found?”
“Yes.”
“Precisely. But there is a difference. Still, we have cleared the ground. Now, what does this deed purport to be?”
Basset produced a slip of paper. “An agreement,” he read from it, “between Peter Paravicini Audley and his father and his two younger brothers. After admitting that the entry of the marriage in the register is misleading and that no marriage took place until after the birth of his son, Peter Paravicini undertakes that, in consideration of his father and his brothers taking no action and making no attack upon his wife’s reputation, she being their cousin, he will not set up for the said son, or the issue of the said son, any claim to the title or estates.”
Audley listened to the description, so clear and so precise, and he recognized that it tallied with the deed which tradition had always held to exist but of which John Audley had been able to give no proof. He heard, he understood; yet while he listened and understood, his mind was working to another end, and viewing with passion the tragedy which fate had prepared for him. Too late! Too late! Had this become known a week, only a week, earlier, how lightly had the blow fallen! How impotently! But he had cut the rope, he had severed the strands once carefully twisted, that bound him to safety! And then the irony, the bitterness, the cruelty of those words of Basset’s, “in other circumstances!” They bit into his mind.
Still he suffered in silence, and only his stillness and his unhealthy color betrayed the despair that gripped and benumbed his soul. Stubbs did not look at him; perhaps he was careful not to look at him. The lawyer sat thinking and drumming gently with his fingers on the table. “Just so, just so,” he said presently. “On the face of it, the document of which Mr. John Audley tried to give secondary evidence, and which a person fraudulently inclined would of course concoct. That touch of the cousin well brought in!”
“But the lady was his cousin,” Basset said.
“All the world knows it,” the lawyer retorted coolly, “and use has been made of the knowledge. But, of course, there are a hundred things to be proved before any weight can be given to this document; its origin, the custody from which it comes, the signatures, the witnesses. Its production by a man who has once endeavored to blackmail is alone suspicious. And the deed itself is at variance with the evidence of the Bible.”
“But that variance bears out the deed, which is to secure the younger sons’ rights while covering the reputation of the lady.”