Agatha Webb (30 page)

DEAR JAMES:

I do not, I cannot, believe it. Though you said to me on going
out, "Your father will explain," I cannot content myself with his
explanations and will never believe what he said of you except you
confirm his accusations by your own act. If, after I have told you
exactly what passed between us, you return me this and other
letters, then I shall know that I have leaned my weight on a
hollow staff, and that henceforth I am to be without protector or
comforter in this world.

O James, were we not happy! I believed in you and felt that you
believed in me. When we stood heart to heart under the elm tree
(was it only last night?) and you swore that if it lay in the
power of earthly man to make me happy, I should taste every sweet
that a woman's heart naturally craved, I thought my heaven had
already come and that now it only remained for me to create yours.
Yet that very minute my father was approaching us, and in another
instant we heard these words:

"James, I must talk with you before you make my daughter forget
herself any further." Forget herself! What had happened? This was
not the way my father had been accustomed to talk, much as he had
always favoured the suit of Philemon Webb, and pleased as he would
have been had my choice fallen on him. Forget herself! I looked at
you to see how these insulting words would affect you. But while
you turned pale, or seemed to do so in the fading moonlight, you
were not quite so unprepared for them as I was myself, and instead
of showing anger, followed my father into the house, leaving me
shivering in a spot which had held no chill for me a moment
before. You were gone—how long? To me it seemed an hour, and
perhaps it was. It would seem to take that long for a man's face
to show such change as yours did when you confronted me again in
the moonlight. Yet a lightning stroke makes quick work, and
perhaps my countenance in that one minute showed as great a change
as yours. Else why did you shudder away from me, and to my
passionate appeal reply with this one short phrase: "Your father
will explain"? Did you think any other words than yours would
satisfy me, or that I could believe even him when he accused you
of a base and dishonest act? Much as I have always loved and
revered my father, I find it impossible not to hope that in his
wish to see me united to Philemon he has resorted to an unworthy
subterfuge to separate us; therefore I give you our interview word
for word. May it shock you as much as it shocked me. Here is what
he said first:

"Agatha, you cannot marry James Zabel. He is not an honest man. He
has defrauded me, ME, your father, of several thousand dollars. In
a clever way, too, showing him to be as subtle as he is
unprincipled. Shall I tell you the wretched story, my girl? He has
left me to do so. He sees as plainly as I do that any
communication between you two after the discovery I have this day
made would be but an added offence. He is at least a gentleman,
which is something, considering how near he came to being my son-
in-law."

I may have answered. People do cry out when they are stabbed,
sometimes, but I rather think I did not say a word, only looked a
disdain which at that minute was as measureless as my belief in
you. YOU dishonest? YOU—Or perhaps I laughed; that would have
been truer to my feeling; yes, I must have laughed.

My father's next words indicated that I did something.

"You do not believe in his guilt," he went on, and there was a
kindness in his tone which gave me my first feeling of real
terror. "I can readily comprehend that, Agatha. He has been in my
office and acted under my eye for several years now, and I had
almost as much confidence in him as you had, notwithstanding the
fact that I liked him much better as my confidential clerk than as
your probable or prospective husband. He has never held the key to
my heart; would God he never had to yours! But he was a good and
reliable man in the office, or so I thought, and I gave into his
hand much of the work I ought to have done myself, especially
since my health has more or less failed me. My trust he abused. A
month ago—it was during that ill turn you remember I received a
letter from a man I had never expected to hear from again. He was
in my debt some ten thousand dollars, and wrote that he had
brought with him as much of this sum as he had been able to save
in the last five years, to Sutherlandtown, where he was now laid
up with a dangerous illness from which he had small hope of
recovering. Would I come there and get it? He was a stranger and
wished to take no one into his confidence, but he had the money
and would be glad to place it in my hands. He added that as he was
a lone man, without friends or relatives to inherit from him, he
felt a decided pleasure at the prospect of satisfying his only
creditor, and devoutly hoped he would be well enough to realise
the transaction and receive my receipt. But if his fever increased
and he should be delirious or unconscious when I reached him, then
I was to lift up the left-hand corner of the mattress on which he
lay and take from underneath his head a black wallet in which I
would find the money promised me. He had elsewhere enough to pay
all his expenses, so that the full contents of the wallet were
mine.

"I remembered the man and I wanted the money; so, not being able
to go for it myself, I authorised James Zabel to collect it for
me. He started at once for Sutherlandtown, and in a few hours
returned with the wallet alluded to. Though I was suffering
intensely at the time, I remember distinctly the air with which he
laid it down and the words with which he endeavoured to carry off
a certain secret excitement visible in him. 'Mr. Orr was alive,
sir, and fully conscious; but he will not outlive the night. He
seemed quite satisfied with the messenger and gave up the wallet
without any hesitation.' I roused up and looked at him. 'What has
shaken you up so?' I asked. He was silent a moment before
replying. 'I have ridden fast,' said he; then more slowly, 'One
feels sorry for a man dying alone and amongst strangers.' I
thought he showed an unnecessary emotion, but paid no further heed
to it at the time.

"The wallet held two thousand and more dollars, which was less
than I expected, but yet a goodly sum and very welcome. As I was
counting it over I glanced at the paper accompanying it. It was an
acknowledgment of debt and mentioned the exact sum I should find
in the wallet—$2753.67. Pointing them out to James, I remarked,
'The figures are in different ink from the words. How do you
account for that?' I thought his answer rather long in coming,
though when it did come it was calm, if not studied. 'I presume,'
said he, 'that the sum was inserted at Sutherlandtown, after Mr.
Orr was quite sure just how much he could spare for the
liquidation of this old debt.' 'Very likely,' I assented, not
bestowing another thought upon the matter.

"But to-day it has been forced back upon my attention in a curious
if not providential way. I was over in Sutherlandtown for the
first time since my illness, and having some curiosity about my
unfortunate but honest debtor, went to the hotel and asked to see
the room in which he died. It being empty they at once showed it
to me; and satisfied that he had been made comfortable in his last
hours, I was turning away, when I espied on a table in one corner
an inkstand and what seemed to be an old copy-book. Why I stopped
and approached this table I do not know, but once in front of it I
remembered what Zabel had said about the figures, and taking up
the pen I saw there, I dipped it in the ink-pot and attempted to
scribble a number or two on a piece of loose paper I found in the
copy-book. The ink was thick and the pen corroded, so that it was
not till after several ineffectual efforts that I succeeded in
making any strokes that were at all legible. But when I did, they
were so exactly similar in colour to the numbers inserted in Mr.
Orr's memorandum (which I had fortunately brought with me) that I
was instantly satisfied this especial portion of the writing had
been done, as James had said, in this room, and with the very pen
I was then handling. As there was nothing extraordinary in this, I
was turning away, when a gust of wind from the open window lifted
the loose sheet of paper I had been scribbling on and landed it,
the other side up, on the carpet. As I stooped for it I saw
figures on it, and feeling sure that they had been scrawled there
by Mr. Orr in his attempt to make the pen write, I pulled out the
memorandum again and compared the two minutely. They were the work
of the same hand, but the figures on the stray leaf differed from
those in the memorandum in a very important particular. Those in
the memorandum began with a 2, while those on the stray sheet
began with a 7—a striking difference. Look, Agatha, here is the
piece of paper just as I found it. You see here, there, and
everywhere the one set of figures, 7753.67. Here it is hardly
legible, here it is blotted with too much ink, here it is faint
but sufficiently distinct, and here—well, there can be no mistake
about these figures, 7753.67; yet the memorandum reads, $2753.67,
and the money returned to me amounts to $2753.67—a clean five
thousand dollars' difference."

Here, James, my father paused, perhaps to give me a commiserating
look, though I did not need it; perhaps to give himself a moment
in which to regain courage for what he still had to say. I did not
break the silence; I was too sure of your integrity; besides, my
tongue could not have moved if it would; all my faculties seemed
frozen except that instinct which cried out continually within me:
"No! there is no fault in James. He has done no wrong. No one but
himself shall ever convince me that he has robbed anyone of
anything except poor me of my poor heart." But inner cries of this
kind are inaudible and after a moment's interval my father went
on:

"Five thousand dollars is no petty sum, and the discrepancy in the
two sets of figures which seemed to involve me in so considerable
a loss set me thinking. Convinced that Mr. Orr would not be likely
to scribble one number over so many times if it was not the one
then in his mind, I went to Mr. Forsyth's office and borrowed a
magnifying-glass, through which I again subjected the figures in
the memorandum to a rigid scrutiny. The result was a positive
conviction that they had been tampered with after their first
writing, either by Mr. Orr himself or by another whom I need not
name. The 2 had originally been a 7, and I could even see where
the top line of the 7 had been given a curl and where a horizontal
stroke had been added at the bottom.

"Agatha, I came home as troubled a man as there was in all these
parts. I remembered the suppressed excitement which had been in
James Zabel's face when he handed me over the money, and I
remembered also that you loved him, or thought you did, and that,
love or no love, you were pledged to marry him. If I had not
recalled all this I might have proceeded more warily. As it was, I
took the bold and open course and gave James Zabel an opportunity
to explain himself. Agatha, he did not embrace it. He listened to
my accusations and followed my finger when I pointed out the
discrepancy between the two sets of figures, but he made no
protestations of innocence, nor did he show me the front of an
honest man when I asked if he expected me to believe that the
wallet had held only two thousand and over when Mr. Orr handed it
over to him. On the contrary he seemed to shrink into himself like
a person whose life has been suddenly blasted, and replying that
he would expect me to believe nothing except his extreme
contrition at the abuse of confidence of which he had been guilty,
begged me to wait till to-morrow before taking any active steps in
the matter. I replied that I would show him that much
consideration if he would immediately drop all pretensions to your
hand. This put him in a bad way; but he left, as you see, with
just a simple injunction to you to seek from me an explanation of
his strange departure. Does that look like innocence or does it
look like guilt?"

I found my tongue at this and passionately cried: "James Zabel's
life, as I have known it, shows him to be an honest man. If he has
done what you suggest, given you but a portion of the money
entrusted to him and altered the figures in the memorandum to suit
the amount he brought you, then there is a discrepancy between
this act and all the other acts of his life which I find it more
difficult to reconcile than you did the two sets of figures in Mr.
Orr's handwriting. Father, I must hear from his own lips a
confirmation of your suspicions before I will credit them."

And this is why I write you so minute an account of what passed
between my father and myself last night. If his account of the
matter is a correct one, and you have nothing to add to it in way
of explanation, then the return of this letter will be token
enough that my father has been just in his accusations and that
the bond between us must be broken. But if—O James, if you are
the true man I consider you, and all that I have heard is a
fabrication or mistake, then come to me at once; do not delay, but
come at once, and the sight of your face at the gate will be
enough to establish your innocence in my eyes.

AGATHA.

The letter that followed this was very short:

DEAR JAMES:

The package of letters has been received. God help me to bear this
shock to all my hopes and the death of all my girlish beliefs. I
am not angry. Only those who have something left to hold on to in
life can be angry.

My father tells me he has received a packet too. It contained five
thousand dollars in ten five-hundred-dollar notes. James! James!
was not my love enough, that you should want my father's money
too?

I have begged my father, and he has promised me, to keep the cause
of this rupture secret. No one shall know from either of us that
James Zabel has any flaw in his nature.