“Not properly, sir,” said Ham, in a low voice. “Not as your mother had been used to living. Don’t forget that. The Doctor was as fine a man as ever stepped; but he wasn’t a money-maker. He knowed more than any ten doctors in this county—old Doc Eldridge is a fool to him. But your father was easy, and he served the poor for nothing. He had ten non-paying patients to one that paid. And he was heavily in debt, and his debts were pressing, when he—he died.”
“Ham!” I cried, leaping up again. “You—you believe there is some truth in the story Paul hinted at?”
“Naw, I don’t!” returned the coachman, promptly. “But I tell you that there was a chance for busy-bodies to put this and that together and make out a case of suicide. His death, my poor boy, did make you and your mother wealthy—which you’d never been, in all probability, as long as your poor father remained alive.”
I heard him with pain and with a deeper understanding of the reason for my mother’s seizure that evening. My blurting out the statement that Paul had uttered when he was angry had undoubtedly shocked my mother terribly. She had heard these whispers years before—when my father’s death was still an awful reality to her. What occurred in our drawing room that evening had brought that time of trial and sorrow back to her mind, and had resulted in the attack I have recounted. I understood it all then—or I thought I did—and I left Ham and finally sought my bed, determined more than ever to keep Chester Downes and his son out of the house and make it impossible in the future for them to cause any further trouble or misunderstanding between my mother and myself.
Chapter VI
In Which Is Related a Conversation With My Mother
Mother was better in the morning. I ascertained that fact from James, the butler. Marie, the Frenchwoman, seemed desirous of telling me nothing and—I thought—wished to keep me out of my mother’s room.
But I hung about the house all the morning and, after the doctor had come and gone (and this time, I was glad to see, with a more cheerful face) I insisted on pushing into the room and speaking to mother myself.