“So far as I know, he knew nothing,” Cora answered quickly. “But since receiving that letter I have wondered if he could, by some means, have found out, or if someone can have told him, and whether—whether it can have been that knowledge which drove him to end his life.”
“I think that is possible, Mrs. Hartsilver; yet I don’t consider you are to blame. I have learned several things concerning your marriage, why you married a man you never loved, and why——”
“Who told you that?” Cora interrupted. “Oh, Doctor Johnson, how did you find out?”
“That is not of consequence, nor is the fact of your husband taking his life of consequence now. The past is finished and done with. What matters to-day—the only thing that matters—is what is going to happen in the immediate future.”
He paused, and then continued:
“You say you want my advice, but if I give it I shall expect you, mind, to follow it.”
“You may depend on my doing that.”
“Good. My advice, then, is that you do not, in any circumstances, pay this hush money, or pay any hush money at all. The writer of the letter you have shown me is almost for certain a professional blackmailer, perhaps the only class of criminal to get, in this country, what he deserves when caught. What we must do then is set a trap for him—or her. And that I think I can do successfully, because I did it comparatively recently with most satisfactory results in a somewhat similar case. Do you remember Lord Froissart’s suicide, and before that his daughter’s suicide, Mrs. Hartsilver?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Blackmail in each case, though it was never made public. I am speaking to you now in strictest confidence; both are dead, or I should not tell even you. Poor Vera Froissart fell madly in love with a scoundrel, who wronged her and subsequently attempted to blackmail her. Afraid to tell anybody, she let terror of exposure prey upon her mind until in a moment of actual madness she made away with herself. Some time after her death the same scoundrel approached her father, Lord Froissart, told him why his daughter had ended her life, and threatened exposure if Froissart refused to pay.