‘Do you know that Hadleigh has good reason for enmity towards me?’
‘No; I never knew or thought that he could have reason for enmity towards any one.’
‘He had towards me.’
‘I believe you are wrong. I am sure of it;’ and she thought that here might be her opportunity to further Philip’s desire to reconcile them.
‘Should you desire to test what I am about to tell you, say to Hadleigh that you have been told George Laurence was a friend of Philip’s mother. He was my friend too. My poor sister was passionate and, like all passionate people, weak. Hadleigh took her from my friend for her money—a pitiful few hundred pounds. I never liked the man; but I hated him then, and hated him still more when Laurence, becoming reckless alike of fortune and life, ruined himself and ... killed himself. But the crime was Hadleigh’s, and it lies heavy on his soul.’
‘Oh, why should you speak so bitterly of what he could neither foresee nor prevent.’
‘I charged him with the murder,’ Beecham continued, without heeding the interruption, ‘and he could not answer me like a man. He spoke soft words, as if I were a boy in a passion; he even attempted to condole with me for the loss of my friend, until I fled from him, lest my hands should obey my wish and not my will. But he had his revenge. He made my sister’s life a torture. She tried to hide it in her letters to me; but I could read her misery in every line. And then, when he discovered that I had gone into the wilds of Africa, without any likelihood of being able to send a message home for many months, he told the lie which destroyed our hopes.’
‘How do you know that it was he who told it?’ she asked, without moving and with some fear of the answer.
‘The man he employed to spread the false report confessed to me what had been done and by whom.’
Madge’s head drooped; there seemed to be no refutation of this proof of Mr Hadleigh’s guilt possible.