“Ah! I don’t know, Master Raife,” replied the old servant, shaking his head gravely. “Some secret of his, no doubt. I pressed the master to reveal it to me; but all he would reply was: ‘I was a fool, Edgson. I ought to have told my boy from the first. Every man has a skeleton in his cupboard, Edgson. This is mine!’ Then he murmured something about ‘her’ and ‘that woman’—a woman in the case, it struck me, Master Raife.”
“A woman!” echoed young Remington.
“So it seemed. But, Master Raife, in my position I couldn’t well inquire further into the poor master’s secret. Besides, her ladyship and others came in at the moment. So he uttered no other word—and died before Doctor Grant could arrive.”
“But what does this all mean, Edgson?” asked the dead man’s son, astounded.
“I don’t know, Master Raife,” replied the grave-faced old man. “I really don’t know, sir.”
“To my mind, it seems as though his secret was, in some mysterious way, connected with the fellow who shot him,” declared the young fellow, pale and anxious. “My poor mother does not know—eh?”
“She knows nothing, Master Raife. In the years I have been in the service of your family, I have learnt discretion. I have told you this, sir, because you are my master’s son,” was the faithful man’s response.
“You had no inkling of any secret, Edgson?”
“None in the least, sir, though I have been in Sir Henry’s service thirty-two years come next Michaelmas.”
“It’s a complete mystery then?”