This House to Let

by William Le Queux

But Jack looked very despairing. The shock had been a terrible one. In spite of the stiff peg he had taken, his face was still livid, and his hands were shaking.

Hugh looked at him anxiously. He was very weak; had the occurrences of this terrible night driven him over the border line that separates sanity from insanity?

Presently he muttered, almost as if to himself, certain disjointed phrases. Hugh caught a few of them, repeated again and again.

"Tied to her for life, she will outlive me, tied to her for life. She will never let me go. My poor family! I have always been a fool, but up to now have never brought disgrace to them. And God forgive me, I was reckoning on the death of my poor old generous aunt, it is idle to say I did not speculate on it. And for what, for what?—the pretended affection, the bought kisses of this adventuress, a card-sharper's decoy, who told me lying tales about the way in which her criminal associate had inherited his money."

He rambled on like this for some quarter of an hour, and Murchison judged it was better to let him ease his mind in such a fashion.

In a way, the poor foolish boy's brain had cleared up to a point; he was able to look the facts squarely in the face. His infatuation might have been so deep that he might, under these damning circumstances, have fallen a victim to her wiles a second time. She would no doubt have been prepared, if he had given her the opportunity, to have sworn her innocence, to have protested that she was the victim of circumstantial evidence, that she had believed what her brother had told her, that she had never been a partner in, or a confidant of, his criminal schemes.

No, so far the rude shock had cleared his brain, made him see and think more clearly. But Murchison very much feared that the agonising remorse for his folly was obscuring it in another direction.

He seemed to look upon himself as something unclean in having allowed himself to be contaminated by association with such a wretched adventuress. He was also acutely conscious that, at the best, he would have to take this horrible secret with him to the grave, unless it sprang suddenly to light, as such secrets have a knack of doing. Above all, he keenly felt the disgrace he had inflicted on his family.

There was a great deal more desultory talk, and Hugh gave him the best advice he could under the unhappy circumstances—a reiteration of the "put it behind you and live it down" philosophy. This would have come easy to a man of the rocky and stolid type to which Murchison belonged by temperament. But Jack was highly-strung and impulsive. There was no ballast in him.

Hugh almost had to push him out of the room. But, before doing so, he mixed the boy another stiff peg, with the hope that it would induce sleep and purchase him the oblivion of a few hours.