“"O H, Syl, I can't tell you how glad I am that you are back. And Ella too—with that hateful marriage broken off. I don't quite understand how it is. He backed out at the last moment, didn't he? But my poor head has been in such a whirl all day that I don't seem to understand anything. Dr. Simmons is very kind and clever, but he's not like you, Syl. Your coming gives me hope. Oh, you mustn't let him die, Syl, dear.”

Miss Lanyon put her hands on Sylvester's shoulders and began to cry softly. He put his arm kindly round her, and tried to comfort her.

“I've been crying all day, I think,” she continued. The poor lady's eyes were red; her grizzling hair, usually so neat, was disarranged; she wore an old red dressing-gown with great white buttons, within which her fragile figure seemed to be lost. The dining-room fire was nearly out, and only one gas-jet was alight. The two were sitting up, neither able to go to bed and sleep. Ella had retired to her room almost immediately after her arrival, having learned that the old man was unconscious.

“He rallied so to-day,” said Miss Lanyon, drying her tears, “I thought the poor dear had suddenly recovered. He spoke quite sensibly, though he was so weak, and, oh, he wanted you so badly, Syl. And then Lady Milmo's telegram came about the wedding, and I gave it him to read. No, you mustn't scold me any more about it. I thought he would be so pleased. Then he asked where you had gone, and when you were coming back, quite in his old quiet way, and called for writing materials, and he wrote something with great, great difficulty, and made nurse and me witness his signature. It must have been to do with his will, I think. He had just time to put it in an envelope when he fainted away. He revived afterwards, and then he began to moan for you and Ella to come to him. He didn't like the nurse; the strange face troubled him, poor darling. He only wanted Ella and you. And now you have come and seen him, what do you really think, Syl, dear? If it is the worst, tell me, for I am not afraid to hear it.”

She drew herself up with a flash of family resemblance to her brother, which the physician's quick eye noticed. He replied frankly. The old man was in a natural sleep,—a hopeful sign. His recovery would probably depend upon his power of resistance. Lytton, the great specialist, was coming down to-morrow, and they might expect his verdict to be final.

They talked long together in the cold, dimly lit room. Miss Lanyon repeated her story, with fresh details added here and there, told of the kindness of Simmons, the numberless inquiries from the townspeople, broke off to recall little instances of her brother's goodness. Only to-day, during his short spell of consciousness, he had asked whether Sylvester had made the arrangement for the Jenkins' three children to board with the Jellicoes. At this announcement Sylvester brought his hand down hard upon the table. \

“What a brute I am!” he exclaimed! “I forgot all about it! And he remembered! What did you tell him?”

“I said that you no doubt were seeing to the matter,” replied Miss Lanyon.

Sylvester sat on the corner of the table and stared in front of him, his mind full of the father the latchet of whose shoes he felt himself unworthy to loosen, and tears came into his eyes. The incident touched him deeply. This tender thoughtfulness for little things in the midst of events great enough to absorb the attention of a strong man seemed a keynote of his father's nature.

“He is the one perfect man of his generation,” said Sylvester.

A while later he induced Miss Lanyon to go to bed, and went upstairs to relieve the nurse by his father's side. And for some hours he watched the beloved face, placid and wan in the dim light. Skilled physician though he was, he alternated between hope and fear. A world without his father was unimaginable. His life was barren enough already. His father was the only being left that could satisfy the dumb craving for human sympathy that gnawed continually at his vitals. The prospect of his grim loneliness appalled him. Again he looked intently into the sleeping face. The muscles all relaxed, it appeared unutterably careworn,—the face of a man many years older. To the son seemed as if the last two days had brought the havoc; he cursed Roderick in his heart.

Only once before had he felt the same murderous hatred of a man. Then he was watching, even as he was doing now, by a man's bedside. The memory recurred, intensely vivid. He set his teeth as he lived over again those hours of agony and strife. Unconsciously he drew up his indictment of humanity for the wrongs it had inflicted on him. Friendship was naught. Had not his dearest friend stabbed him in the dark? Woman was inherently false and corrupt. His own wife, who had lain in his arms, had betrayed him, and she had smiled, smiled to the hour of her death. To have children was a curse. How did he know that alien blood did not run in Dorothy's veins? Woman's love, what was it? To-night Ella had confessed her love for him. It had not stopped her from throwing herself into the embraces of a satyr. The brute nature of humanity! He himself had not been safeguarded from spasms of jealousy. Fiercely he attributed them to the lower instincts. He forgot how at times in his sombre house he had let his pen slip from his fingers and had ached for the touch of a woman's hand and the sound of a child's laughter; how a girl's fresh face, perilously like Ella's, had quivered before his vision, and how the grip of cold iron had suddenly fastened round his heart, and he had resumed his work, hard and scornful. These things that had come to him were remote from the flesh; but he forgot them. In his hour of dark misanthropy he ranked her sex and his own temptation at their lowest. For her humiliation he had no pity. Like other women, she had rolled in the mire; smirching was the natural consequence. For Roderick he had hatred, unmitigated by any pleasant memory of old acquaintance. But he remembered his father's many kindnesses to Roderick, and the man's crime was further blackened by ingratitude.

Nor did he pity the father of the son thus disgraced. The ignoble, mean old man who had always been the object of his scorn had brought his punishment upon himself; for had he not neglected the elementary responsibilities of parentage? There could be no pity for a father of whom the son spoke openly with cynical contempt. Sylvester's eyes fell upon his own father's face, and the contrast brought a tumultuous rush of feeling. And from the wall opposite, his mother smiled down upon him through the gloom. She was gone,—the one pure, divine woman the earth had held. The one perfect man lay there, still living. He must not die. Sylvester shook with a great terror. His father was as needful as the sun in a foul and dismal world. These two were remote as stars from the rest of humanity. Through them passed his faith in God.

But his faith in man was gone. On this night of vigil, after his day of self-repression and stern meting out of justice, was the culmination of all the disillusion and the bitterness of his life. Towards the three human beings upon whom he was bringing crushing disgrace his heart was cold granite. And the old man with the kindly, careworn face slept on and on by his side.

At the first streaks of the winter dawn the door opened, and Ella, simply dressed for the day, entered the room. Sylvester rose with a frown and advanced to meet her.

“I must take my turn,” she whispered.

“There is no necessity,” he returned.

“I have passed through great trouble,” she said, looking at him with eyes pathetically bright through want of sleep, “and it would be mere human kindness to let me sit here for a little alone. And you must take some rest.”

“I thank you for your consideration,” he replied ironically, ignoring her appeal, “but I am not in need of rest.” He held the door open for her to pass out, but she stood her ground.

“You are hard, but you claim to be just. Uncle Matthew sent for me. Aunt Agatha has told you. I have some right to be here. Besides, it would hurt him to know that you refused to let me be with him.”

“If you put it that way, I must admit your claim,” he said coldly. “If you will come into the passage, I will give you some directions in view of contingencies.”

She assented, and they went out together. At the end of the passage a housemaid passed wraithlike on her way to the kitchen. The crack of the stairs beneath her tread sounded sharp in the unbroken silence of the house.

“Thank you, I will not forget,” said Ella, when he had ended his instructions. She disappeared into the sick chamber; and Sylvester, going to his own room, threw himself in his clothes upon the bed, and wrapped in a rug fell, through force of habit and through fatigue, into a heavy sleep.

A couple of hours afterwards he was awakened. Mr. Usher urgently requested to speak with him. Sylvester rose, shook the sleep from his eyes, and faced the grim contingencies of another day. He was prepared for this interview with the father, had steeled himself against whining entreaties and appeals to old comradeship. But to see him was an act of common decency, however unpleasant and however fruitless. He sponged his face with ice-cold water and went downstairs to the dining-room. Mr. Usher was sitting on the edge of an armchair, warming his plump hands before the fire. He rose as Sylvester entered, and, putting his hands behind his back, regarded him with eyes more than ever expressionless and red-rimmed.

“I had a telegram from my poor boy last night,” he announced in his slow, pedantic way. “I could not come round last night. I have been suffering again lately from my bronchial tubes. My doctor tells me the night air in winter is dangerous for me. I was a prisoner.”

“Your health is valuable to you, no doubt,” said Sylvester, sarcastically.

“I live for my son,” replied Usher, sitting down again in the armchair. “If I ran risks now and contracted illness, who would stand by my son in his hour of need? Prudence has been the guiding principle of my life. I have profited by it.”

He wagged his head and looked into the fire. Sylvester turned one of the straight-backed chairs and sat down, his elbow on the table.

“Perhaps you will state your business, Mr. Usher,” he said. “My time, like your health, is valuable.”

“All in good time,” replied Usher; “nothing good comes of hurrying. I never hurry.” He rubbed his palms together meditatively, like some colossal and flabby fly. Then he continued deliberately: “I learn from Roderick that he has been arrested for forging your father's name to a cheque.”

“For £3,000,” said Sylvester.

“Yes. It is a great sum of money. But your father gave it to him as a wedding present. Your father is a generous man.”

“Your son confessed to me that he forged it.”

“Well, perhaps he did,” assented Usher. “Perhaps he did.”

In spite of his contempt for the old man and his pitilessness towards Roderick, he gazed upon his interlocutor with some wonder. Not a shaft of dismay at the disgrace hanging over his son's head seemed to have penetrated the brass-armoured egotism of this placid, unvenerable man. Sylvester waited contemptuously for him to speak.

“You are preferring the charge against him this morning?” asked Usher.

“I have instructed my solicitor to do so.”

“There is still time to telegraph to your solicitor to withdraw it.”

“I have no such intentions.”

“I cannot let you proceed. I have the feelings of a father.”

Sylvester rose, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, stood on the hearth-rug facing Mr. Usher.

“It is no doubt a painful matter to you,” said he, with cold politeness, “but my intentions are unalterable. I will prosecute him right through. Nothing you can possibly say will have the slightest effect on my determination.”

Then the old man seemed to hug his stout body with his arms, and for the first time a gleam came into his pale eyes and he chuckled softly to himself. At the unexpected sound Sylvester started. Such symptoms pointed to senility. But suddenly the old man turned to him with a quick snarl, in startling contrast with his deliberate manner,—

“I suppose you are not aware, you young fool, that you will be sending your own brother to gaol.”

He bent forward, gripping the arms of the chair, fixing Sylvester with an inscrutable gaze, his lips beneath the scrubby white moustache parted and showing his yellow stumps of teeth.

“Your brother. Don't you understand?”

“What idiocy are you talking?” exclaimed Sylvester, in angry impatience.

“I am talking the truth, my young friend. I am a truthful man,” replied Usher, with mocking resumption of his usual habit of speech. “Roderick is your own dear brother.”

“You accuse my father of having an illegitimate son?”

“Oh, no. Roderick is quite legitimate. He is my son. At least, I quite believed your poor mother.”

“My mother—what the devil are you talking about?” cried Sylvester, fiercely. “What has my mother got to do with it?”

“Roderick is her son, my dear Sylvester. Hers and mine. She was my wife.”

Sylvester glared at him for a moment, and then, the preposterous absurdity of the story dawning upon him, he broke into a contemptuous laugh and turned away. The man was mad.

“I think it time we parted,” said Sylvester. Ushers face expressed pained surprise.

“You do not believe me?”

Then as Sylvester did not reply otherwise than by a shrug, he drew a mass of papers from his breast-pocket and selected therefrom a photograph, old and discoloured, of a man and woman posed in the angular attitudes of the photographer's art in the late fifties, and clad in the uncouth attire of those days. The woman had a baby upon her lap.

“Your mother and brother and I,” said Mr. Usher. “I was a handsome young man. I had fine black whiskers.”

Sylvester received the picture, looked at it, and a spasm of horrible disgust shook his frame. The young woman was his mother—unmistakably.

“She was my dear wife,” said Usher.

“And you played the brute beast, I suppose, until she divorced you. And then she married my father. I see,” said Sylvester, grimly.

But Usher raised his hand in deprecation. “On the contrary,” said he, “we were never divorced. When I said your father had no illegitimate children, I was wrong. You are an illegitimate child.”

Sylvester flung the photograph with a furious gesture into the fire. The old man darted forward to rescue it, but Sylvester roughly pushed him back into his chair, and stood over him trembling with anger. Behind him the photograph curled and flamed.

“What devilish story are you telling me? Let me have it at once, all of it,” cried Sylvester.

There was a slight pause. Usher passed the tip of his tongue over his lips, and again he hugged himself in his armchair.

“I have been waiting to tell you this for thirty years. For your dear father's sake I have held my peace. I am a peaceful man. But I could not let you send your own brother to prison, your dear mother's son. Fraternal love is a wondrous thing.”

“Come to the point and tell me, or I may not be responsible for what I do,” said Sylvester, in husky menace.

The swelling triumph of his long-deferred vengeance had not quite overmastered a craven spirit. A glance out of the corner of his eye assured Usher of Sylvester's desperation. The sight was an unholy mingling of delight and fear. He rubbed his soft palms together and wagged his head.

“It is a sad story. I blame my wife. She acted wrongly. We lived in Australia on a little farm. I am fond of rural pursuits. Ayresford is rural. That is why I came here. We were married and happy with our little child. We called him Roderick. It is a family name, but perhaps that would not interest you. He was three years old when your father came to these parts. Ah! he was a dashing young fellow then. He is not dashing now. Poor Matthew!”

“Damn you!” said Sylvester.

“Ah! that is what your father has often said. You are like your father. Well, to shorten a long story, he fell in love with my wife, and she with him, and she ran away with him to England, leaving me alone with our poor little boy Roderick. Here are proofs.” He patted the sheaf of papers on his lap and signed to Sylvester to read them; but Sylvester motioned a negative. He was convinced. His anger had subsided into he knew not what state of reeling horror. Yet through it all Usher himself was revealed to him, and he regarded him as something obscene.

“And you have received money from my father all this time as the price of silence.”

“I was poor, and I forgave mine enemy. I am a forgiving man. It is my way. When your dear mother died I came here and lived near him, to show that I forgave him.”

“Like father, like son,” said Sylvester,—“a blackmailer and a forger. Oh, my God!” He turned away and stood with bowed head, staring at the carpet, his hands clenched. Without moving he said hoarsely,—

“Go. We have nothing more to say to each other.”

“You see you can't let your dear brother go to a felon's doom—and your legitimate brother, too, my dear Sylvester,” said Usher, smacking his lips at each word. Then he rose and buttoned his frock-coat and went out of the room, chuckling quietly.

Presently Sylvester roused himself with a great shuddering sigh.

“Oh, God!” he said, and moved a step or two towards the fire.

There was a knock at the door and a servant entered, bearing a letter on a tray.

“Miss Lanyon said I was to give you this at once, sir.”

He took it, found the envelope was addressed to himself in his father's handwriting. He did not notice that the ink on the envelope was wet, nor that the enclosure had been written some time previously.

“I, Matthew Lanyon,” it ran, “of Woodlands, Ayresford, hereby declare that I drew a cheque for £3,000, dated the 10th December, 189-, in favour of Roderick Charles Usher, Esq., of 13 Queen's Park Mansions, London, S. W.” The document was signed by him, and the signature was witnessed by Agatha Lanyon and Mary Evans, the nurse.

Like a man in a dream, Sylvester crossed to a little desk by the window, that once had been his mother's, and wrote out a telegram; then a letter with which he enclosed his father's statement. Both he addressed to his solicitor. The gardener was summoned and despatched to the post-office. When he had gone, Sylvester was scarcely conscious of his action. Roderick's fate was of small account compared with the doom that had fallen upon himself.

But an hour afterwards Roderick was driving through the London streets, a free man.