God help the lad! He had but turned his black and terrible countenance upon her, holding the letter helplessly in his hands, when there sounded through the house, cutting the silence like a knife, a sudden wild cry, a shriek, lasting only for a second, but piercing to the heart of the night, to the heart of the house, like some sudden horrible event. It was followed almost immediately after by a rush of muffled feet along the passage: the door was pushed open violently, yet silently, and someone came in like a shot from a pistol, as sudden and unexpected. Fred felt himself shrink towards the wall in his horror and amaze. It was a man who had come in--a man with a beard which covered half his face, yet showed a curious kind of smile coming out of the midst of it, though the eyes were full of an almost tragic seriousness. Fred had fallen back against the wall as this new-comer appeared. The room swam round and round in his eyes, a darkness came over him, he saw nothing for a moment: then slowly came to himself, and saw again, within reach of him, so near that he could have touched him, this man--whom he had never seen before. Oh, could he but have been sure that he had never seen him before! His heart stopped beating--and then with a flutter and a spring went on again, as if it would have leaped out of his breast. The shock of the supernatural, the horror of an awful discovery, came into the young man’s brain and almost paralysed it as they clashed together. Ah, had it been but the supernatural! But as that face emerged out of the mist, Fred saw that it was that of a living man--and that he heard it talking--_it_--as living men do.
“No a moment too soon--just as you were coming. Let the laddie be, let him come to himself. And what was it you were doing? Did she--or you----?”
“I have given her a fright that will put a stop to that,” he said, with a strange laugh, hard and harsh: and then he flung himself into a chair, throwing off a dark cloak in which he had been wrapped from head to foot. He added after a moment with a groan, “The way of transgressors is hard!” and hid his face in his hands.
Fred had not moved nor said a word, neither had this strange intruder, save for one glance, taken any notice of him. The young man stood up against the wall, supporting himself by it in a sort of conscious swoon and suspense of being. A moment is like an hour in such a horror of discovery; the idea that was too dreadful to entertain becomes possible, certain, familiar, before you have had time to draw a second breath. His father not dead--not a shameful suicide to cheat the insurance companies as his son had once feared--but a still more shameful survivor, having cheated them, having saved his family and cleared his name by the most dreadful, the most false of frauds, the most tremendous of lies. Fred’s whole being surged up like a stormy sea in fierce and violent reaction as soon as he got command again of his stunned faculties--he who had suffered so much misery from the thought that his father had taken his own life in his despair, but who had of late become so tender of his memory, so indignant with those who forgot or were faithless to him! And lo, all his pangs were unnecessary, all his love deceived, and here was the man, living!--a swindler, and a cheat, worse than a bankrupt--having saved his reputation and the comfort of his family by a cheat, the worst of frauds, the most disgraceful. Fred had been ready to defy the world for his father when he came upstairs that evening. He turned now with loathing from the name. Father! What did the word mean?--a cheat, a swindler, the most prodigious and incredible of liars. The youth was hard, as youth is, stern and inexorable. He took nothing into account, neither the motive nor the tremendous sacrifice involved, nor least of all the thought that he himself had profited by this dreadful act. Profited?--he?--Fred? His first act must be to denounce the fraud, to offer restitution. The man should escape first--that he would allow, but no more.