DETECTIVE CALEB SWEETWATER MYSTERIES (Thriller Trilogy). Anna Katharine Green
she show at this unhappy crisis, interest, devotion, passion almost, for one she had regarded with open scorn when it was the dearest wish of his heart to see them united? It was one of the contradictions of our mysterious human nature, and at this crisis and in this moment of secret heart-break and miserable doubt it made the old gentleman shrink, with his first feeling of actual despair.
The next moment Agnes had risen and they were both facing him.
“Good-evening, Agnes.”
Mr. Sutherland forced himself to speak lightly.
“Ah, Frederick, do I find you here?” The latter question had more constraint in it.
Frederick smiled. There was an air of relief about him, almost of cheerfulness.
“I was just leaving,” said he. “I was the bearer of a message to Miss
Halliday.” He had always called her Agnes before.
Mr. Sutherland, who had found his faculties confused by the expression he had surprised on the young girl’s face, answered with a divided attention:
“And I have a message to give you. Wait outside on the porch for me,
Frederick, till I exchange a word with our little friend here.”
Agnes, who had thrust something she held into a box that lay beside her on a table, turned with a confused blush to listen.
Mr. Sutherland waited till Frederick had stepped into the hall. Then he drew Agnes to one side and remorselessly, persistently, raised her face toward him till she was forced to meet his benevolent but searching regard.
“Do you know,” he whispered, in what he endeavoured to make a bantering tone, “how very few days it is since that unhappy boy yonder confessed his love for a young lady whose name I cannot bring myself to utter in your presence?”
The intent was kind, but the effect was unexpectedly cruel. With a droop of her head and a hurried gasp which conveyed a mixture of entreaty and reproach, Agnes drew back in a vague endeavour to hide her sudden uneasiness. He saw his mistake, and let his hands drop.
“Don’t, my dear,” he whispered. “I had no idea it would hurt you to hear this. You have always seemed indifferent, hard even, toward my scapegrace son. And this was right, for—for—” What could he say, how express one-tenth of that with which his breast was labouring! He could not, he dared not, so ended, as we have intimated, by a confused stammering.
Agnes, who had never before seen this object of her lifelong admiration under any serious emotion, felt an impulse of remorse, as if she herself had been guilty of occasioning him embarrassment. Plucking up her courage, she wistfully eyed him.
“Did you imagine,” she murmured, “that I needed any warning against Frederick, who has never honoured me with his regard, as he has the young lady you cannot mention? I’m afraid you don’t know me, Mr. Sutherland, notwithstanding I have sat on your knee and sometimes plucked at your beard in my infantile insistence upon attention.”
“I am afraid I don’t know you,” he answered. “I feel that I know nobody now, not even my son.”
He had hoped she would look up at this, but she did not.
“Will my little girl think me very curious and very impertinent if I ask her what my son Frederick was saying when I came into the room?”
She looked up now, and with visible candour answered him immediately and to the point:
“Frederick is in trouble, Mr. Sutherland. He has felt the need of a friend who could appreciate this, and he has asked me to be that friend. Besides, he brought me a packet of letters which he entreated me to keep for him. I took them, Mr. Sutherland, and I will keep them as he asked me to do, safe from everybody’s inspection, even my own.”
Oh! why had he questioned her? He did not want to know of these letters; he did not want to know that Frederick possessed anything which he was afraid to retain in his own possession.
“My son did wrong,” said he, “to confide anything to your care which he did not desire to retain in his own home. I feel that I ought to see these letters, for if my son is in trouble, as you say, I, his father, ought to know it.”
“I am not sure about that,” she smiled. “His trouble may be of a different nature than you imagine. Frederick has led a life that he regrets. I think his chief source of suffering lies in the fact that it is so hard for him to make others believe that he means to do differently in the future.”
“Does he mean to do differently?”
She flushed. “He says so, Mr. Sutherland. And I, for one, cannot help believing him. Don’t you see that he begins to look like another man?”
Mr. Sutherland was taken aback. He had noticed this fact, and had found it a hard one to understand. To ascertain what her explanation of it might be, he replied at once:
“There is a change in him—a very evident change. What is the occasion of it? To what do you ascribe it, Agnes?”
How breathlessly he waited for her answer! Had she any suspicion of the awful doubts which were so deeply agitating himself that night? She did not appear to have.
“I hesitate,” she faltered, “but not from any doubt of Frederick, to tell you just what I think lies at the bottom of the sudden change observable in him. Miss Page (you see, I can name her, if you cannot) has proved herself so unworthy of his regard that the shock he has received has opened his eyes to certain failings of his own which made his weakness in her regard possible. I do not know of any other explanation. Do you?”
At this direct question, breathed though it was by tender lips, and launched in ignorance of the barb which carried it to his heart, Mr. Sutherland recoiled and cast an anxious look upon the door. Then with forced composure he quietly said: “If you who are so much nearer his age, and, let me hope, his sympathy, do not feel sure of his real feelings, how should I, who am his father, but have never been his confidant?”
“Oh,” she cried, holding out her hands, “such a good father! Some day he will appreciate that fact as well as others. Believe it, Mr. Sutherland, believe it.” And then, ashamed of her glowing interest, which was a little more pronounced than became her simple attitude of friend toward a man professedly in love with another woman, she faltered and cast the shyest of looks upward at the face she had never seen turned toward her with anything but kindness. “I have confidence in Frederick’s good heart,” she added, with something like dignity.
“Would God that I could share it!” was the only answer she received. Before she could recover from the shock of these words, Mr. Sutherland was gone.
Agnes was more or less disconcerted by this interview. There was a lingering in her step that night, as she trod the little white-embowered chamber sacred to her girlish dreams, which bespake an overcharged heart; a heart that, before she slept, found relief in these few words whispered by her into the night air, laden with the sweetness of honeysuckles:
“Can it be that he is right? Did I need such a warning,—I, who have hated this man, and who thought that it was my hatred which made it impossible for me to think of anything or anybody else since we parted from each other last night? O me, if it is so!”
And from the great, wide world without, tremulous with moonlight, the echo seemed to come back:
“Woe to thee, Agnes Halliday, if this be so!”
Chapter XX.
A Surprise for Mr. Sutherland
Meanwhile Mr. Sutherland and Frederick stood facing each other in the former’s library. Nothing had been said during their walk down the hill, and nothing seemed likely to proceed from Frederick