Day had broken before the several denizens of the Wilderness had all returned to their homes, the police finished their inquiries, and all come back to its normal quiet. Mrs. Westmacott had been left sleeping peacefully with a small chloral draught to steady her nerves and a handkerchief soaked in arnica bound round her head. It was with some surprise, therefore, that the Admiral received a note from her about ten o'clock, asking him to be good enough to step in to her. He hurried in, fearing that she might have taken some turn for the worse, but he was reassured to find her sitting up in her bed, with Clara and Ida Walker in attendance upon her. She had removed the handkerchief, and had put on a little cap with pink ribbons, and a maroon dressing-jacket, daintily fulled at the neck and sleeves.
"My dear friend," said she as he entered, "I wish to make a last few remarks to you. No, no," she continued, laughing, as she saw a look of dismay upon his face. "I shall not dream of dying for at least another thirty years. A woman should be ashamed to die before she is seventy. I wish, Clara, that you would ask your father to step up. And you, Ida, just pass me my cigarettes, and open me a bottle of stout.""Now then," she continued, as the doctor joined their party. "I don't quite know what I ought to say to you, Admiral. You want some very plain speaking to.""'Pon my word, ma'am, I don't know what you are talking about.""The idea of you at your age talking of going to sea, and leaving that dear, patient little wife of yours at home, who has seen nothing of you all her life! It's all very well for you. You have the life, and the change, and the excitement, but you don't think of her eating her heart out in a dreary London lodging. You men are all the same.""Well, ma'am, since you know so much, you probably know also that I have sold my pension. How am I to live if I do not turn my hand to work?"Mrs. Westmacott produced a large registered envelope from beneath the sheets and tossed it over to the old seaman.
"That excuse won't do. There are your pension papers. Just see if they are right."He broke the seal, and out tumbled the very papers which he had made over to McAdam two days before.
"But what am I to do with these now?" he cried in bewilderment.
"You will put them in a safe place, or get a friend to do so, and, if you do your duty, you will go to your wife and beg her pardon for having even for an instant thought of leaving her."The Admiral passed his hand over his rugged forehead. "This is very good of you, ma'am" said he, "very good and kind, and I know that you are a staunch friend, but for all that these papers mean money, and though we may have been in broken water lately, we are not quite in such straits as to have to signal to our friends. When we do, ma'am, there's no one we would look to sooner than to you.""Don't be ridiculous!" said the widow. "You know nothing whatever about it, and yet you stand there laying down the law. I'll have my way in the matter, and you shall take the papers, for it is no favor that I am doing you, but simply a restoration of stolen property.""How that, ma'am?"
"I am just going to explain, though you might take a lady's word for it without asking any questions. Now, what I am going to say is just between you four, and must go no farther. I have my own reasons for wishing to keep it from the police. Who do you think it was who struck me last night, Admiral?""Some villain, ma'am.I don't know his name."
"But I do. It was the same man who ruined or tried to ruin your son. It was my only brother, Jeremiah.""Ah!"
"I will tell you about him--or a little about him, for he has done much which I would not care to talk of, nor you to listen to. He was always a villain, smooth-spoken and plausible, but a dangerous, subtle villain all the same. If I have some hard thoughts about mankind I can trace them backto the childhood which I spent with my brother. He is my only living relative, for my other brother, Charles's father, was killed in the Indian mutiny.
"Our father was rich, and when he died he made a good provision both for Jeremiah and for me. He knew Jeremiah and he mistrusted him, however; so instead of giving him all that he meant him to have he handed me over a part of it, telling me, with what was almost his dying breath, to hold it in trust for my brother, and to use it in his behalf when he should have squandered or lost all that he had. This arrangement was meant to be a secret between my father and myself, but unfortunately his words were overheard by the nurse, and she repeated them afterwards to my brother, so that he came to know that I held some money in trust for him. I suppose tobacco will not harm my head, Doctor? Thank you, then I shall trouble you for the matches, Ida." She lit a cigarette, and leaned back upon the pillow, with the blue wreaths curling from her lips.
