“I reckon you don't—now that I hurl the unexpected truth into your teeth. You didn't think I'd be sharp enough to inquire about that fellow Baker, did you? You thought a man living here in a city as big as this would let a green country lout like that get him in a trap. Huh! But I wasn't a fool, sir. You thought you were getting facts from me through him, but you were not, by a long shot. I wasn't going to tell a stranger like that delicate family matters. God knows your father's conduct was disgraceful enough without my unfolding his life to a coarse greenhorn so long after his death. You know the reputation my brother Charles had, don't you?”
“Not till it came from you, sir,” said Nelson, coldly. “Baker told me you said he was a little wild, that he drank—”
“My father kicked him out of our home, I tell you,” the old man snapped. “He told him never to darken his door again, after the way he lived before the war and during it. It completely broke that woman's heart.” Old Floyd pointed a' trembling finger at his mother's portrait. “I don't understand why you—how you can come here as you do, calling me your uncle as if you had a right to do so.”
“Right to do so?—stop!” Nelson took him up sharply. “What do you mean? I've the right to ask that, sir, anyway.”
“Oh, you know what I mean, I reckon. That man Baker intimated that you knew all about your family history. You know that your mother and my poor, deluded brother were never married, that they—”
“Not married!” Nelson Floyd shrank as if he had been struck in the face. “For God's sake don't say that! I can stand anything but that.”
“I won't ask you to believe me without ample proof,” old Floyd answered, harshly. “Wait here a minute.”
Nelson sank into a chair, and pale and trembling, and with a heart that seemed dead within him, he watched the old man move slowly from the room. Old Floyd returned presently. An expression that seemed born of grim, palpitating satisfaction lay on his colorless face; a triumphant light blazed in his sullen eyes. He held some books and a package of letters in his hands.
“Here are your father's letters to my parents,” he began. “The letters will tell the whole story. They bear his signature. If you doubt their authenticity—if you think the name is forged, you can compare it to all the specimens of his writing in these old school-books of his. This is a diary he kept in college. You can see from its character how his life was tending. The letters are later, after he met your mother—a French girl—in New Orleans.”
For a moment Nelson stared up into the withered face above him, and then, with a groan of dawning conviction, he took the letters. He opened the one on the top.