A woman's debt

by William Le Queux

This scheme was carried out in spite of spasmodic opposition on the part of both Mrs. Morrice and her friend. When they dared to object, they were met by the stereotyped threat: “Very well. Then your husband shall be told the secret of your past. The choice lies with you.”

Sir George took young Darcy—to call him by his real name—to live with him at the beginning, and he found the young man an apt pupil. He experienced no difficulty in instilling into him a deep resentment against a mother who had practically cast him out of her life. The young man had no scruples in helping his supposed uncle to extract as much money as they could out of the helpless woman.

Their demands grew by leaps and bounds. At first they were content to take a part of her income—the generous allowance which her husband made her. Then, in obedience to their insatiable exactions, she was forced to realize her own small capital. Then came the sale, piece by piece, of her valuable jewellery, and its replacement by cleverly-executed imitations.

The unhappy woman was now so completely under their domination, so broken down by the threat of instant exposure to her husband with which they met the least show of hesitation or demur on her part, that she was finally driven into stealing from Morrice’s safe, when she had exhausted all her other resources.

The way of doing this was made easy by the fact that she had one day, while her husband was away on a business visit to America, discovered amongst a loose packet of his papers a cryptic memorandum which aroused her curiosity. After puzzling over it for some time she came to the conclusion that it must be the calculations for the time lock which the makers of the safe had handed to Mr. Morrice after its construction.

She had locked it up, intending to give it to her husband on his return. But as Mr. Morrice had never alluded to its loss, the incident had slipped her memory. It was revived when Sir George one day jokingly alluded to the financier’s wonderful safe—for Morrice was very proud of this invention and spoke about it to everybody—and wished that he could put his hands inside it for five minutes. Very foolishly, she had admitted that she knew the secret of its mechanism as well as her husband and young Croxton.

Sir George seized upon this indiscreet admission as soon as it suited his purpose. She did not know how the two exactly apportioned the money they wrung from her, but she had an idea that the greater part of it went to the elder man, who lost it at the gaming-table almost as quickly as it came into his hands.

The five thousand pounds handed over to her by her first husband’s instructions, together with the few hundreds left her by her father, had gone to satisfy the insatiable demands of this pair of miscreants. There were still a few pieces of jewellery which had not yet been realized, amongst them the “birthday” necklace. Soon these would have to go the way of the others.

It was necessary to find some other sources of supply; to Sir George’s acute mind the safe presented an obvious solution, there was always something of value inside it.

For a long time she fought obstinately against their efforts to make her a criminal, but in the end—cowed by that terrible threat of exposure, her will-power weakened by these long years of secret suffering—she gave in. Fully conversant with the safe’s mechanism, fully acquainted with the movements of her husband and his secretary, having free access to his room during the absence of both, it was for her a comparatively easy task.