It was at this juncture that the copy was received. As she had frequently done before since her father’s sickness, Mary opened the letter to read it aloud. It surprised her. It began as only her brother’s letters began, and yet the handwriting was not his. As she read she grew pale, her lips trembled, and at length bursting into tears, she left the room. The invalid took it from the bed, on which she had dropped it, sat up, and, much moved, read it through. The news was such as he did not wish to believe. The whole matter was singular, and with a flushed face and increased fever he dropped again upon his pillow. If it were really from his son, all reserve or secrecy toward his daughter was at an end, and all that could be done was to await her husband’s arrival.
The excitement was injurious, Mr. Eagleton became so much feebler from day to day that Mary’s greatest fear now was that her brother might not come until too late. It was as she had apprehended. Death came rapidly on, and she was alone at its crisis. In a few days she sat beside the dead body of her father, and in a few more, the only mourner, followed him to his grave.
And yet her brother did not come. Again and again she wrote to him, with an urgency which showed how lonely and unprotected she felt. There was a trial which she anticipated, and which she feared to meet without his aid. She felt assured that her first letter had not reached him, and the journey was one of many days.
A traveler arrived at last, but it was not Henry. In the hall of the mansion from which he had been thrust out with bitter curses, tattered and wretched and bleached with prison gloom, stood the outcast, the fugitive, the robber, the dishonored witness—George Ellis. His wife had pledged her word to her dying father that she would not see him again, and here he stood in her very house, her rightful husband. Her heart throbbed fearfully between returning love and religious duty. But she kept her word to the dead, refused to see him, and shutting herself in her own room, awaited the coming of her brother.
Mr. Eagleton had left a will, but it bore date before the marriage, and did not provide for the state of things which that event produced. Ellis was aware that as her husband he had legal rights, and that her father’s death had given them effect; but he was ignorant of their actual nature, and caution taught him to refrain from violence. He did not intrude upon his wife’s privacy, but, with all the coolness of villainy, he made himself at home in the house from which the dead had just been borne, and trusted to her woman’s weakness, and a love, the strength of which he knew too well, to cure her of her solitary mood.
But my friend appeared, and the face of affairs soon changed. He met Ellis on his arrival, and, surprised at his presence, soon gathered from the servants a history of what had occurred. His first impulse was to eject him forcibly, but better suggestions made him change his purpose. Without allowing them to inform his sister of his arrival, he hastened to the office of his father’s attorney and apprised himself of the precise nature of the intruder’s rights. He knew his want of money, and with a paper carefully drawn, releasing all claim to the estate of Mr. Eagleton, he returned home. He soon had an interview with Ellis, and offered him a certain sum, to be paid upon the spot, if he would sign the instrument. He refused at first, peremptorily, then asked an advance in the offer, and, at last, finding that he could do no better, put his name to the paper, coolly pocketed the money and left the house.
The estate was soon settled. Their native place was connected with associations so painful that they were glad to leave it, and in a few weeks they were quietly domiciled in the city where I found them.
It was a year, at least, after the death of Mr. Eagleton, when early one morning on the high-road leading to the village in which he had lived, the dead body of a wealthy farmer was found by some one passing by. It bore marks of violence which none could doubt. A murder had been committed.
Excitement burned in the town and in the neighborhood. Within the memory of the oldest inhabitant no similar act of violence had been committed. Suspicion first ran riot, then settled, as if by common agreement, upon George Ellis. It was not strange that conjecture should have taken that course.
Ellis did not leave the town when he last turned from the door which had twice cast him off. He remained, for the simple reason that he knew not where else to go. He lurked about its vilest places and made low friends by his ill-gotten money. But he soon lost both, and yet he stayed. No one knew how he lived. He crossed the paths of citizens in strange places and unusual hours. He went in and came out like no one else. His worst companions had shaken him off. He was the very one upon whom any crime would have been first cast.