I am blind?”
“Oh no,” she replied very positively.
Carrados smiled at her decision but he did not seek to explain that when he could no longer see the faces of men the power was gradually given to him of looking into their hearts, to which some in their turn—strong, free spirits—instinctively responded.
“There is such a thing as friendship at first sight,” he suggested.
“Why, yes; like quite old friends,” she agreed. “It is a pity that I had no very trusty friend, since my mother died when I was quite little. Even my father has been—it is queer to think of it now—well, almost a stranger to me really.”
She looked at Carrados’s serene and kindly face and smiled.
“It is a great relief to be able to talk like this, without the necessity for lying,” she remarked. “Did you know that I was engaged?”
“No; you had not told me that.”
“Oh no, but you might have heard of it. He is a clergyman whom I met last summer. But, of course, that is all over now.”
“You have broken it off?”
“Circumstances have broken it off. The daughter of a man who had the misfortune to be murdered might just possibly be tolerated as a vicar’s wife, but the daughter of a murderer and suicide—it is unthinkable! You see, the requirements for the office are largely social, Mr Carrados.”
“Possibly your vicar may have other views.”
“Oh, he isn’t a vicar yet, but he is rather well-connected, so it is quite assured. And he would be dreadfully torn if the choice lay with him. As it is, he will perhaps rather soon get over my absence. But, you see, if we married he could never get over my presence; it would always stand in the way of his preferment. I worked very hard to make it possible, but it could not be.”
“You were even prepared to send an innocent man to the gallows?”
“I think so, at one time,” she admitted frankly. “But I scarcely thought it would come to that. There are so many well-meaning people who always get up petitions…. No, as I stand here looking at myself over there, I feel that I couldn’t quite have hanged Frank, no matter how much he deserved it…. You are very shocked, Mr Carrados?”
“Well,” admitted Carrados, with pleasant impartiality, “I have seen the young man, but the penalty, even with a reprieve, still seems to me a little severe.”
“Yet how do you know, even now, that he is, as you say, an innocent man?”
“I don’t,” was the prompt admission. “I only know, in this astonishing case, that so far as my investigation goes, he did not murder your father by the act of his hand.”
“Not according to your Law Courts?” she suggested. “But in the great Palace of Justice?… Well, you shall judge.”
She left his side, crossed the room, and stood by the square, ugly window, looking out, but as blind as Carrados to the details of the somnolent landscape.
“I met Frank for the first time after I was at all grown-up about three years ago, when I returned from boarding-school. I had not seen him since I was a child, and I thought him very tall and manly. It seemed a frightfully romantic thing in the circumstances to meet him secretly—of course my thoughts flew to Romeo and Juliet. We put impassioned letters for one another in a hollow tree that stood on the boundary hedge. But presently I found out—gradually and incredulously at first and then one night with a sudden terrible certainty—that my ideas of romance were not his…. I had what is called, I believe, a narrow escape. I was glad when he went abroad, for it was only my self-conceit that had suffered. I was never in love with him: only in love with the idea of being in love with him.
“A few months ago Frank came back to High Barn. I tried never to meet him anywhere, but one day he overtook me in the lanes. He said that he had thought a lot about me while he was away, and would I marry him. I told him that it was impossible in any case, and, besides, I was engaged. He coolly replied that he knew. I was dumbfounded and asked him what he meant.
“Then he took out a packet of my letters that he had kept somewhere all the time. He insisted on reading parts of them up and telling me what this and that meant and what everyone would say it proved. I was horrified at the construction that seemed capable of being put on my foolish but innocent gush. I called him a coward and a blackguard and a mean cur and a sneaking cad and everything I could think of in one long breath, until I found myself faint and sick with excitement and the nameless growing terror of it.
“He only laughed and told me to think it over, and then walked on, throwing the letters up into the air and catching them.
“It isn’t worth while going into all the times he met and threatened me. I was to marry him or he would expose me. He would never allow me to marry anyone else. And then finally he turned round and said that he didn’t really want to marry me at all; he only wanted to force father’s consent to start mining and this had seemed the easiest way.”
“That is what is called blackmail, Miss Whitmarsh; a word you don’t seem to have applied to him. The punishment ranges up to penal servitude for life in extreme cases.”
“Yes, that is what it really was. He came on Thursday with the letters in his pocket. That was his last threat when he could not move me. I can guess what happened. He read the letters and proposed a bargain. And my father, who was a very passionate man, and very proud in certain ways, shot him as he thought, and then, in shame and in the madness of despair, took his own life…. Now, Mr Carrados, you were to be my judge.”
“I think,” said the blind man, with a great pity in his voice, “that it will be sufficient for you to come up for Judgment when called upon.”
* * *
Three weeks later a registered letter bearing the Liverpool postmark was delivered at The Turrets. After he had read it Carrados put it away in a special drawer of his desk, and once or twice in after years, when his work seemed rather barren, he took it out and read it. This is what it contained:
“Dear Mr Carrados,—Some time after you had left me that Sunday afternoon, a man came in the dark to the door and asked for me. I did not see his face for he kept in the shade, but his figure was not very unlike that of your servant Parkinson. A packet was put into my hands and he was gone without a word. From this I imagine that perhaps you did not leave quite as soon as you had intended.
“Thank you very much indeed for the letters. I was glad to have the miserable things, to drop them into the fire, and to see them pass utterly out of my own and everybody else’s life. I wonder who else in the world would have done so much for a forlorn creature who just flashed across a few days of his busy life? and then I wonder who else could.
“But there is something else for which I thank you now far, far more, and that is for saving me from the blindness of my own passionate folly. When I look back on the abyss of meanness, treachery and guilt into which I would have wilfully cast myself, and been condemned to live in all my life, I can scarcely trust myself to write.
“I will not say that I do not suffer now. I think I shall for many years to come, but all the bitterness and I think all the hardness have been drawn out.
“You
