One of My Sons

"You might have held the letter back," I whispered.

But she met me with a noble look.

"You mean if I have not drawn suspicion upon them by my first subterfuge. But with so much in their disfavour, how could I calculate upon another opportunity of seeing them all together. And they must read it together. So my uncle told me. But he never thought it would be with police-officers in the house."

Here the coroner advanced to question her, and I am happy to say that my presence gave her courage to bear up under the ordeal. This was what he elicited from her.

She did not know what was in the letter. It had been written by her uncle while still on his sick bed and after an experience which I will not relate here, as it will be found more fully stated in the letter itself. This letter I will reproduce for you at once, though it was weeks before I knew its whole contents:

GEORGE, LEIGHTON, AND ALFRED:

I may not have been a good father, but I have at least been a just one. Though each and all of you since coming to man's estate have given me great cause for complaint, I have never been harsh towards you, nor have I ever denied you anything from mere caprice or from an egotistic desire to save myself trouble. Yet to one of you my life is of so little value that he is willing to resort to crime to rid himself of me. Does this shock you, Leighton, George, Alfred? We are a Christian family, members of an honourable community, trained each and all in religious principles, you, by the best, the sweetest of mothers – does it move you to think that one of you could contemplate parricide and even attempt it? It moves me; and in two of you must awaken a horror, the anticipation of which affords me the sole comfort now remaining to my doomed and miserable life. For nothing will ever make me believe that this act was a concerted one or that the attempt which has just been made upon my life had its birth in more than one dark breast. One guilty soul there is among you, but only one; and lest to the remaining two the accusation I have just made may seem fanciful, unreal, the result of nightmare or the effect of fever, I will relate what happened in this room last night, just as I related it to Hope when she asked me this morning why I seemed so loath to see you before you went out to your several lounging places.

I was dozing. The lamp which since my illness has never been turned out in my room, threw great shadows on wall and ceiling. I seemed conscious of these shadows, though I was half asleep, but not so conscious that I was not aware of the light shining through the transom from the gas jet near the top of the stairs. This light has always been company for me, especially in wakeful nights or when I found myself troubled by dreams or any physical distress. It seemed to connect me with the rest of the house, and simple as it may seem to you, accounts for the cheerfulness with which I have declined the offers of my sons to sit with me during these last painful nights. I had no need of their company while this light shone; and as for pain – why, that is an evil which all men are called upon sooner or later to endure.

I was resting then, in this mild reflected light, when suddenly it went out. This woke me, for the orders are strict that this jet be left burning till the servants come downstairs in the morning. But I did not stir in my bed; I simply listened. Though aroused and somewhat disturbed by this palpable disregard of my wishes, I exerted all of my faculties to detect the step I now heard loitering about my door. But it was studiously cautious and made no distinct sound in my ear. I did not like this, and listened still more intently, whereupon I heard the door open and someone come in, softly, and with long pauses such as were not wont to accompany the entrance of any member of my household. I was deciding whether to raise an alarm or lie still and let myself be robbed of the money which I had just received from the bank, when I heard the whispered "Father" with which one and all of you approach me at night when you wish to ascertain if I am asleep or awake.

Why did I hear myself called and yet make no reply? What was in my heart, or what have I seen of late in your natures or conduct, that I should remain quiet under this appeal and lie there shut-eyed and watchful? I had no definite reason for doubting any of you. I knew you were in debt and that two of you at least were in crying need of money, but I hardly think I dreaded the rifling of my desk by the hands of one of my sons. Yet that approach so gentle and so measured! the drawn-in breath! the shadow that grew and grew upon the wall! – all these spoke of something quite different from the anxiety of a son keeping watch over a sick father's slumbers.

The desk was near the window towards which my eyes were turned in open watchfulness, and I hoped by lying still to catch sight of the intruder's figure at the moment of his passing between me and the faint illumination made on the curtains by the street lamp opposite. But the intruder did not advance in that direction. He passed instead to the little cupboard over the wash-stand, where, as you all know, my medicines are kept. This I was made aware of by the faint click made by one bottle striking another. "George has come home ill, or Leighton has one of his terrible headaches," was the soothing thought which then came to me, and I found it difficult not to speak out and ask who was sick and what bottle was wanted. But the something which from the first had acted in the way of restraint upon me, held me still, and I remained dumb while that sneaking hand continued to fumble among the phials and glasses. Suddenly a fear struck me, a fear so far removed from any which I had ever before known, that my whole attitude of thought towards my sons must have undergone an instantaneous change – a gulf opening where an instant before was confidence and love. The medicine was kept there from which my nightly dose was prepared; a medicine which you have all heard declared by my physician to be a deadly poison, which must be measured most carefully and given in only such doses as he had prescribed. Could it be that my son was feeling about for this? Had George bet once too often on that mare which will be his ruin, or Leighton found his religion an insufficient cloak for indiscretions which ever shunned the light of day; or Alfred – the child of my heart, he whom his dying mother placed as a last trust in my arms – confounded the ennui of inaction with that weariness of life which is the bane of rich men's sons? I know the despairs that come in youth, and I quaked where I lay; but it was not upon self-destruction that this man at the cupboard was bent. I felt my whole frame tremble and my heart sink in unutterable despair as he advanced, still quietly and with great pauses, up to the foot-board of my bed, then around to the side, protected, as you know, by a screen, till he crouched out of sight, but within reach of the small table where my glass stands with the spoon beside it, ready for my use if I grow restless and weary.

To have turned, to have intercepted the creeping figure in its work, and thus have known definitely and forever which one of you had thus furtively visited my medicine cabinet before proceeding to my bedside, might have been the natural course with some; but it was not my course. I was not content just to interrupt. I wanted to know the full extent of what I had to fear. A remark which Dr. Bennett had once let fall recurred to me, transfixing me to my bed. "If you were not a careful man," he had said in diagnosing my present illness, "I should say that you had taken something foreign into your system; something which has no business there; something which under other circumstances and in another man's case I should denominate poison." It had seemed nonsense to me at the time, and I laughed at what I considered a fatuous remark, uttered with unnecessary gravity; but now that there was really poison in the house, and one of my own blood stood hiding behind the screen within a foot of my medicine glass, I could not but choke down the cry which this thought caused to rise in my throat and listen for what might come. Alas! I was destined to behold with my eyes as well as hear with my ears the next move made by my unknown visitant. By the grace of God or through some coincidence equally providential, the gas at this momentous instant was relit in the hall, and I perceived, amid the old shadows thus called out upon the wall, a new one – that of a hand holding a bottle, which, projecting itself beyond the straight line cast by the screen, was now stealing slowly but surely in the direction of the table on which stood my glass of medicine. I did not gasp or cry. Thought, feeling, consciousness even of my own unfathomable misery seemed lost in the one instinct – to watch that hand. Would it falter? Should I see it tremble or hesitate in its short passage across the faintly illumined space upon which my eyes were fixed? Yes, some monition of conscience, some secret fear or filial remembrance made it pause for an instant; but even as my heart bounded in glad relief and human feelings began to re-awake in my frozen breast, it steadied and passed on, and though I could no longer see aught but a shadowy arm, I could hear one – two – three – a dozen drops falling into my drink – a sound which, faint as it was, made the guilty heart behind the screen quake; for the hand shook as it retreated, and I beheld distinctly outlined on the illumined space before me the end of the semi-detached label which marked the special bottle on which the word poison is printed in large letters.

No further doubt was possible. The medicine in my glass had been strengthened and by the hand of one of my sons.

Which one?

In the misery of the moment I felt as if I did not care. That any of you should seek my death was an overwhelming grief to me. But as thought and reason returned, the wild desire to know just what and whom I had to fear seized me in the midst of my horror, mixed with another sentiment harder to explain, and which I can best characterise as a feeling of dread lest I should betray my suspicions and so raise between my children and myself an insurmountable barrier.

Subduing my emotion and summoning to my aid all the powers of acting with which I have been by nature endowed, I moved restlessly under the clothes, calling out in a sort of sleepy alarm:

"Who's there? Is it you, George? If so, reach me my medicine."

But no George stepped forth.

"Leighton?" I cried petulantly. "Surely I hear one of you in the room." But my son Leighton did not reply.

I did not call for Alfred. I could not! He was the last son of his mother.

Did I wrong the others in not uttering his name also?

Meantime all was quiet behind the screen. Then I heard a quick movement, followed by the shutting of a door, and I realised that an escape had been effected from the room in a way I had not calculated on – that is, by means of the dressing-room opening out of the alcove in which my bed stands.

I had thought myself a weak man up to that hour; but when I heard that door close, I bounded to my feet and attempted to reach the hall before the man who had thus escaped me could find refuge in any of the adjoining rooms. But I must have fallen insensible almost immediately, for when I came to myself I found the foot-board of the bed within reach of my hand, and the clock on the point of striking two.

I dragged myself up and staggered back to bed. I had neither the courage nor the strength to push the matter further at that time. Indeed, I felt a sort of physical fear, probably the result of illness, which made it quite impossible for me to traverse the halls and creep from room to room seeking for guilt in eyes whose expression up to this unhallowed hour had betrayed nothing worse than a reckless disregard of my wishes.

Yet it was torment unspeakable to lie there in an uncertainty which threw a cloud over all my sons. For hours my thoughts ran the one gamut, George, Leighton, Alfred, clinging agonisedly to each beloved name in turn, only to drop into a dreadful uncertainty as I remembered the temptations besetting each one of you, and the readiness with which you all, from the oldest to the youngest, have ever succumbed to them. There was no determining point in the character of any of you which made me able to say in this solitary and awful communion with my own fears, "This one at least is innocent!" If I dwelt on George's generous good nature, I also recalled his wild extravagance and the debts he so recklessly heaps up at every turn he makes in this God-forsaken city; if some recollection of Leighton's strict ways in open matters of conscience came to soothe me, there instantly came with it the remembrance of the various tales which had reached my ears of certain secret attachments which drew him into circles where crime is more than a suggestion, and murder a possible attendant upon every feast. Then Alfred – youngest of all but the least youthful in his attitude towards the world and his fellow-men – what honourable ambition had he ever shown calculated to give me solace at this awful time, and make the association of his name with a damnable crime an impossibility and an outrage?

Meanwhile, my whole mental vision was clouded with the pictured remembrances of your faces as seen in childhood, in early youth, or at any other time, indeed, than the intolerable present. George's, when he brought home his first school medal; Leighton's, when he denied himself a new pair of skates that he might give the money to a crying street urchin; Alfred's, when the fever left him and his cheeks grew rosy again with renewed health. All these young and innocent faces crowded about me, awakening poignant suggestions of the change which a few short, short years had wrought in relations which once seemed warm and alive with promise. Then, a group of frank-eyed boys; now, – this awful question: which?

It was not till an hour had passed that I remembered that the phial had not been returned to the cabinet. In whose possession would it be found? Should I have a search made for it? I turned cold in bed at the debasing, the intolerable prospect of acting as detective in my own house. Then the poisoned glass! it still stood beside me; if I left it untouched it would show suspicion on my part, and suspicion might precipitate my doom. How could I avoid taking it without raising doubts as to my discovery of the trick which had been played so near me? In the feverish condition of my mind but one plan suggested itself. Throwing out my arm, I precipitated the glass to the floor, over which I heard it roll, with extraordinary sensations. Then I waited for daybreak, in much the same condition of mind in which a man awaits his last hour; for my heart yearned over my sons even while panting under the consciousness that one of them was a monster of ingratitude and innate depravity.

When Hewson and the girls came down, and I heard the stir of life in the house, I rang my bell and asked for Hope. She came in with beaming face and a smile full of happiness. She had risen from a beauty sleep and, possibly because my thoughts had been so dark, I had never seen her look so bright and lovely. But her cheeks paled as she approached my bedside and noticed my miserable appearance; and it was with sudden anxiety she cried:

"What a wretched night you must have had, uncle! You look poorly this morning. You should have sent for me before."

Again I summoned up all my powers of acting.

"I knocked over my medicine in the night. Perhaps that is why I look so wretched. I did not sleep after four. You can say so, if any of the boys ask after me at the breakfast table."

With a woman's solicitude she moved around to my side, where the screen stood.

"Why, what's this?" she exclaimed, stooping as her foot encountered some small object.

I expected her to lift the glass. Instead of that she lifted the bottle. It had been left there on the floor and not carried out of the room, as I had naturally supposed.

I endeavoured to look undisturbed and as if this bottle had been thrown over with the glass, but I failed pitiably. At the sight of her dear, womanly face and the affection beaming in every look, I broke down and raised my arms imploringly towards her.

"Come to my arms!" I prayed. "Let me feel one true head on my breast."

The next minute I was conscious of having said a word too much. Her look, which you all know and love, changed, and, while she submitted to my caresses and even warmly returned them, it was with an appearance of doubt which I almost cursed myself for having roused in that innocent breast.

"Why one true heart?" she repeated. "Are there not others in this house? George and Alfred love you devotedly; and little Claire – what child could show more fondness for a grandfather than she?"

Why had she not included Leighton?

I endeavoured to right myself with some mechanical phrase or other, but the attempt was not very successful, and she was leaving the room in great disturbance when I called her hurriedly back.

"I want you to smile as usual," I gravely enjoined. "George's extravagances and Alfred's caprices are no new story to you. I have been thinking about them, that is all, but I had rather they did not know it."

I could not mention Leighton's name, either.

Meantime she was standing there with the poison bottle in her hand. I could not bear to look at it, and motioned her to restore it to the cabinet. As she did so, I perceived her turn with half-open lips, as if about to ask some question. But she either lacked the courage or the will to do so, for she proceeded to the cabinet with the bottle, which she placed quietly on the shelf. But almost instantly she took it up again.

"Why, uncle," she cried, "there is not as much here as there ought to be! I am sure the bottle was half full last night."

And then I remembered it was she who prepared my medicine for me.

"And I left it on the shelf," she went on. "Uncle, how came it to be lying by the side of your bed? Did you try to strengthen the dose? You know you ought not to; Dr. Bennett said that three drops in half a glass of water were all you could take with safety."

I had not a word to say. My mind seemed a blank, and no excuse presented itself. The wish which I had openly cherished of seeing Hope married to one of my sons clogged my faculties. My protest confined itself to a slow shake of the head and a dubious smile she was far from understanding.

"I think I will stay with you," she gently suggested. "Nellie will bring my breakfast up with yours, and we can have a tête-à-tête meal at your bedside."

But this did not chime in with my plans.

"No," said I. "Nellie can stay with me if you wish, but I want you to go down. Your cousins will miss you if you are not there to pour the coffee for them. Alfred shows an astonishing punctuality of late, and George quite emulates his younger brother's precision and haste. Leighton was never late."