A woman's debt

by William Le Queux

White as death at these ominous words, she advanced into the room, closing the door, her troubled glance changing from the stern, set face of her uncle to the pallid countenance of her lover, the two men who were the dearest to her in the world, loving the one with a filial devotion that could not have been surpassed by a daughter, the other with all the fervour of her ardent youth.

It was a painful scene. In a few trenchant words, the more weighty from the cold, judicial tone in which they were uttered, Morrice explained to her what had happened. She learned to a certain extent the secret of that wonderful safe, about the protecting properties of which she had so often laughingly rallied its owner, this wretched safe which had worked the ruin of Richard, and now menaced her own happiness.

She was too much dazed by the sudden and tragic happening to do much more than grasp a few salient facts. The safe was opened by two keys, one carried by each of the two men. They alone of all the inmates of the house knew of its mechanism. That safe had been opened, and certain valuable property extracted.

“But how could it be opened by one person, if it requires two keys?” she cried, grasping at the first difficulty that presented itself to her in her distress.

Mr. Morrice did not mince matters. “If I had a duplicate key of the one carried by the other man, I could open it alone, and vice versa,” he explained.

She understood the horrible suggestion, but her heart refused to credit it. Of course she realized that her uncle would not steal his own property, that would be a surmise altogether too ridiculous. But it was equally impossible to believe that Richard, the man in whom the great financier had placed such implicit trust, to whom her whole soul went out in pity and yearning, should stoop to such a dastardly act, with all the long and sinister preparations for its execution.

She stretched her hands out imploringly to her lover. “Richard, you are no thief, nothing shall ever convince me of it,” she cried in a voice of agony. “Deny it, deny it to us both. Say something that will persuade him of the falseness of the accusation, of the injustice he is doing you.”

The miserable young man was hardly less moved than herself. “I have denied it, Rosabelle; I have offered to swear it, to take any oath he may dictate to me. But he refuses to believe either word or oath. I can do no more. Thank heaven, black as appearances are, you believe that I am an honest man.”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” she cried brokenly. “I do not care a straw for appearances, if they were twice as strong against you as they are. I know you so well, my heart tells me that you have not done this horrible thing.”

And then Morrice delivered his sentence. Incensed as he was at what he considered the obstinacy of Croxton, he could not fail to be moved by the girl’s passionate vindication of her lover.