THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF WILKIE COLLINS. Уилки КоллинзЧитать онлайн книгу.
your young lady, and goes back to the period of a transaction in which her late father was engaged, doesn’t it?”
(He nods, and I cut in once more):
“There is a party, who turned up after seeing the announcement of your marriage in the paper, who is cognizant of what he oughtn’t to know, and who is prepared to use his knowledge of the same to the prejudice of the young lady and of your marriage, unless he receives a sum of money to quiet him? Very well. Now, first of all, Mr. Frank, state what you have been told by the young lady herself about the transaction of her late father. How did you first come to have any knowledge of it?”
“She was talking to me about her father one day so tenderly and prettily, that she quite excited my interest about him,” begins Mr. Frank; “and I asked her, among other things, what had occasioned his death. She said she believed it was distress of mind in the first instance; and added that this distress was connected with a shocking secret, which she and her mother had kept from everybody, but which she could not keep from me, because she was determined to begin her married life by having no secrets from her husband.” Here Mr. Frank began to get sentimental again, and I pulled him up short once more with the paper-knife.
“She told me,” Mr. Frank went on, “that the great mistake of her father’s life was his selling out of the army and taking to the wine trade. He had no talent for business; things went wrong with him from the first. His clerk, it was strongly suspected, cheated him — ”
“Stop a bit,” says I. “What was that suspected clerk’s name?”
“Davager,” says he.
“Davager,” says I, making a note of it. “Go on, Mr. Frank.”
“His affairs got more and more entangled,” says Mr. Frank; “he was pressed for money in all directions; bankruptcy, and consequent dishonour (as he considered it) stared him in the face. His mind was so affected by his troubles that both his wife and daughter, toward the last, considered him to be hardly responsible for his own acts. In this state of desperation and misery, he — ” Here Mr. Frank began to hesitate.
We have two ways in the law of drawing evidence off nice and clear from an unwilling client or witness. We give him a fright, or we treat him to a joke. I treated Mr. Frank to a joke.
“Ah!” says I, “I know what he did. He had a signature to write; and, by the most natural mistake in the world, he wrote another gentleman’s name instead of his own — eh?”
“It was to a bill,” says Mr. Frank, looking very crestfallen, instead of taking the joke. “His principal creditor wouldn’t wait till he could raise the money, or the greater part of it. But he was resolved, if he sold off everything, to get the amount and repay — ”
“Of course,” says I, “drop that. The forgery was discovered. When?”
“Before even the first attempt was made to negotiate the bill. He had done the whole thing in the most absurdly and innocently wrong way. The person whose name he had used was a stanch friend of his, and a relation of his wife’s — a good man as well as a rich one. He had influence with the chief creditor, and he used it nobly. He had a real affection for the unfortunate man’s wife, and he proved it generously.”
“Come to the point,” says I. “What did he do? In a business way, what did he do?”
“He put the false bill into the fire, drew a bill of his own to replace it, and then — only then — told my dear girl and her mother all that had happened. Can you imagine anything nobler?” asks Mr. Frank.
“Speaking in my professional capacity, I can’t imagine anything greener,” says I. “Where was the father? Off, I suppose?”
“Ill in bed,” says Mr. Frank, colouring. “But he mustered strength enough to write a contrite and grateful letter the same day, promising to prove himself worthy of the noble moderation and forgiveness extended to him, by selling off everything he possessed to repay his money debt. He did sell off everything, down to some old family pictures that were heirlooms; down to the little plate he had; down to the very tables and chairs that furnished his drawing-room. Every farthing of the debt was paid; and he was left to begin the world again, with the kindest promises of help from the generous man who had forgiven him. It was too late. His crime of one rash moment — atoned for though it had been — preyed upon his mind. He became possessed with the idea that he had lowered himself forever in the estimation of his wife and daughter, and — ”
“He died,” I cut in. “Yes, yes, we know that. Let’s go back for a minute to the contrite and grateful letter that he wrote. My experience in the law, Mr. Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burned everybody else’s letters, half the courts of justice in this country might shut up shop. Do you happen to know whether the letter we are now speaking of contained anything like an avowal or confession of the forgery?”
“Of course it did,” says he. “Could the writer express his contrition properly without making some such confession?”
“Quite easy, if he had been a lawyer,” says I. “But never mind that; I’m going to make a guess — a desperate guess, mind. Should I be altogether in error if I thought that this letter had been stolen; and that the fingers of Mr. Davager, of suspicious commercial celebrity, might possibly be the fingers which took it?”
“That is exactly what I wanted to make you understand,” cried Mr. Frank.
“How did he communicate the interesting fact of the theft to you?”
“He has not ventured into my presence. The scoundrel actually had the audacity — ”
“Aha!” says I. “The young lady herself! Sharp practitioner, Mr. Davager.”
“Early this morning, when she was walking alone in the shrubbery,” Mr. Frank goes on, “he had the assurance to approach her, and to say that he had been watching his opportunity of getting a private interview for days past. He then showed her — actually showed her — her unfortunate father’s letter; put into her hands another letter directed to me; bowed, and walked off; leaving her half dead with astonishment and terror. If I had only happened to be there at the time!” says Mr. Frank, shaking his fist murderously in the air, by way of a finish.
“It’s the greatest luck in the world that you were not,” says I. “Have you got that other letter?”
He handed it to me. It was so remarkably humorous and short, that I remember every word of it at this distance of time. It began in this way:
“To Francis Gatliffe, Esq., Jun.
“SIR — I have an extremely curious autograph letter to sell. The price is a five-hundred-pound note. The young lady to whom you are to be married on Wednesday will inform you of the nature of the letter, and the genuineness of the autograph. If you refuse to deal, I shall send a copy to the local paper, and shall wait on your highly-respected father with the original curiosity, on the afternoon of Tuesday next. Having come down here on family business, I have put up at the family hotel — being to be heard of at the Gatliffe Arms. Your very obedient servant, ALFRED DAVAGER.”
“A clever fellow that,” says I, putting the letter into my private drawer.
“Clever!” cries Mr. Frank, “he ought to be horsewhipped within an inch of his life. I would have done it myself; but she made me promise, before she told me a word of the matter, to come straight to you.”
“That was one of the wisest promises you ever made,” says I. “We can’t afford to bully this fellow, whatever else we may do with him. Do you think I am saying anything libelous against your excellent father’s character when I assert that if he saw the letter he would certainly insist on your marriage being put off, at the very least?”
“Feeling as my father does about my marriage, he would insist on its being dropped altogether, if he saw this letter,” says Mr. Frank, with a groan. “But even that is not the worst of it. The generous, noble girl herself