The Heart of a Mystery

by T. W. Speight

"It is one which failed to strike me till the present moment."

"What would you have done, I wonder, had you been in my place? That is a question which you will do well to think over at your leisure. Had a claim for the twelve thousand pounds not been sent in in due course, comment would have been aroused, which would inevitably have bred suspicion, and that, in its turn, would probably have led to inquiry; and what the latter, when once set afoot, would have led to, you can judge as well as I. Besides, what excuse could I have made to my mother and Fannie for not claiming the amount? I could have made no excuse; everything must have been told them. In addition, as I have already explained to you, without the twelve thousand pounds they would only have been a step or two removed from pauperism--in which case the fact of my not having claimed on the policy must have become known to everybody. Bah! I might just as well have gone and read out my father's letter at the market cross."

"All that in no way alters the character of the transaction," said Clem, in a low voice.

"Oh, it was a fraud--a gross and palpable fraud--I fully admit that," exclaimed the elder brother, with a harsh laugh. "Even to myself I have never attempted to call it by any other name; only, when you are weighing it in your thoughts, I should like you to put into the opposite scale the trifling facts I have just laid before you. To you they may seem to weigh less than they did with me; but no man can gauge accurately the force of another's temptations. Enough, however, of this for the present." He rose with an air of weariness and looked at his watch.

It was a palpable hint, and Clem accepted it as such. He, too, rose. "John Brancker tells me," he said, "that he happened to meet you at the station on the day of his return from London, and that he explained to you the reason why he had been compelled to resign the situation you found for him."

Edward's face darkened a little.

"Yes, he gave me his version of the affair; but I can't help saying that he seems to me to be excessively thin-skinned. I certainly should not have allowed myself to be put down in the way he seems to have done."

"A rather extreme sensitiveness to the opinion of others is as much a part of John as the color of his hair or the shape of his nose. Think what it must have been to a man of his temperament to go through all that he has gone through during the last six months! You and I, who are of tougher fibre, can but partially realize it. And what is to become of him in the future? The shadow of a crime with which he had nothing whatever to do still clings to him, and may do so for years to come. He is eating his heart out in dumb despair."

Edward Hazeldine took two or three turns from end to end of his office, his eyes bent on the ground and his hands buried deep in his pockets. The whole interview had been inexpressibly galling to him. He was one of those men to whom it is as wormwood and rue to be called upon to explain their reasons for any particular course of action, much more to apologize for it; yet he had felt under the necessity of doing both to-day, and now a query had been put to him which he would fain have answered, but could not. What, indeed, was to become of John Brancker? But before trying in any way to answer that awkward question, he felt that it behoved him to put himself right with Clem on one important point, much as it would cost him to do so.

"That I tacitly allowed John Brancker to be brought in guilty by a coroner's jury," he said, "that I allowed him to languish in prison for eight or nine weeks, and be brought to trial, when a dozen words from me would have made a free man of him--are facts which I have neither the power nor the wish to gainsay; but if you therefore imagine that in case the trial had gone against him, I would not then have spoken out and proclaimed our shame and disgrace to the world, you were never more utterly mistaken in your life. I was fully determined to keep my secret--our secret--till the last possible moment--I have already told you my motives for so doing--but not a moment longer. Had the second verdict proved a confirmation of the first, my father's letter would at once have been handed to the judge. I trust you believe that I am telling you the truth."