Thus it fell out that on a certain April evening there were assembled, in the parlour of the cottage, Edith, Mrs. Garside, General St. George, Tom Bristow, and Lionel. It was a very serious occasion, and they all felt it to be such.
The General would sit close to Edith, whom he had not seen for a little while; and several times during the evening he took possession of one of her hands, and patted it affectionately between his own withered palms.
“You are not looking quite so well, my dear, as when I saw you last,” had been his first words after kissing her. Her cheeks were, indeed, just beginning to look in the slightest degree hollow and worn, nor did her eyes look quite so bright as of old. The wonder was, considering all that she had gone through during the last twelve months, that she looked as fair and fresh as she did. Of Mrs. Garside, whom we have not seen for some little time, it may be said that she looked plumper and more matronly than ever. But then nothing could have kept Mrs. Garside from looking plump and matronly. She was one of those people off whom the troubles and anxieties of life slip as easily as water slips off a duck’s back. Although she had a copious supply of tears at command, nothing ever troubled her deeply or for long, simply because there was no depth to be troubled. She was always cheerful, because she was shallow; and she was always kind-hearted so long as her kindness of heart did not involve any self-sacrifice on her part. “What a very pleasant person Mrs. Garside is,” was the general verdict of society. And so she was—very pleasant. If her father had been hanged on a Monday for sheepstealing, by Tuesday she would have been as pleasant and cheerful as ever.
But we must not be unjust to Mrs. Garside. She had one affection, and one only, her love for Edith. During all the days of Edith’s tribulation, her aunt had never deserted her—had not even thought of deserting her; and now, for Edith’s sake, she had buried herself alive in Fern Cottage, where her only excitement was a little mild shopping, now and then, in Duxley High Street, under the incognito of a thick veil, or a welcome visit once and again from Miss Culpepper. Under these depressing circumstances, it ought perhaps to be put down to the credit of Mrs. Garside, rather than to her discredit, that her cheerfulness was not one whit abated, and that her face was a picture of health and content.
“I think you know why I have asked you to meet me here to-night,” began Lionel. “I want your advice: I want you to tell me what step I must take next. You know what the purpose of my life has been ever since the night I escaped from prison. You know how persistently I have pursued that purpose—that I have allowed nothing to deter me or turn me aside from it. The result is that there has grown under my hands a fatal array of evidence, all tending to implicate one man—all pointing with deadly accuracy to one person, and to one only, as the murderer of Percy Osmond. I have but to open my mouth, and the four walls of a prison would shut him round as fast as ever they shut round me; I have but to speak of half I know and that man would have to take his trial for Wilful Murder even as I took mine. But shall I do this thing? That is the question that I want you to help me to answer. So long as the chain of evidence remained incomplete, so long as certain links were wanting to it, I felt that my task was unfinished. But at last I have all that I need. There is nothing more to search for. My task, so far, is at an end. Knowing, then, what I know, and with such proofs in my possession, am I to stop here? Am I to rest content with what I have done, and go no step farther? Or am I to go through with it to the bitter end? What that end would involve you know as well as I could tell you.”
He ceased, and for a little while they all sat in silence. General St. George was the first to speak. “Lionel knows, and you all know, that from the very first he has had my heartfelt sympathy in this unhappy business. He has not had my sympathy only, he has had my help, although I have seen for a long time the point to which we were all tending, and the terrible consequences that must necessarily ensue. Me those consequences affect with peculiar force. One nephew can only be saved at the expense of the irretrievable ruin and disgrace of the other. It is not as though we had been searching in the dark, and had there found the bloodstained hand of a stranger. The hand we have so grasped is that of one of our own kin—one of ourselves. And that makes the dreadful part of the affair. Still, I would not have you misunderstand me. I am as closely bound to Lionel—my sympathy and help are his as much to-day as ever they were, and should he choose to go through with this business in the same way as he would go through with it in the case of an utter stranger, I shall be the last man in the world to blame him. More: I will march with him side by side, whatever be the goal to which his steps may lead him. Such unparalleled wrongs as his demand unparalleled reparation. For all that, however, it is still a most serious question whether there is not a possibility of effecting some kind of a compromise: whether there is not somewhere a door of escape open by means of which we may avert a catastrophe almost too terrible even to bear thinking about.”
“What is your opinion, Bristow?” said Lionel, turning to Tom. “What say you, my friend of friends?”
“I have a certain diffidence in offering any opinion,” said Tom, “simply on account of the relationship of the two persons chiefly involved. To tell the world all that you know, would, undoubtedly, bring about a family catastrophe of a most painful nature. It therefore seems to me that the members of that family, and they alone, should be empowered to offer an opinion on a question so delicate as the one now under consideration.”
“Not so,” said Lionel, emphatically. “No one could have a better right, or even so great a right, to offer an opinion as you. But for you, I should not have been here to-night to ask for that opinion.”
“Nor I here but for you,” interrupted Tom.