The Alington Inheritance

Miss Silver was very glad to get home. It had been-she admitted it -a most tiring day. She had not ever been more glad of her comfortable room and of the thoughtful ministrations of her worthy Ha

It was when she was resting in front of the fire that her telephone rang. She got up and went across to it. At the first sound of Frank Abbott’s voice she knew why he had rung her up.

“Is that you, Miss Silver?”

“Yes, Frank.”

“We were too late. He had shot himself. The girl must have let him know.”

Miss Silver said, “Poor Je

Chapter XLI

Mrs. Forbes sat at her desk. She had sat there all night and had not moved. Only her thoughts moved, sliding from picture to picture, and when they had come to the end, the terrible remorseless end, they went back again and began at the begi

At the birth of her child-that was always how she thought of him, as her child. The little quiet man whom she had married didn’t seem to come into it at all. The other children were his. She had borne them with impatience and without joy. But Mac was hers-hers only. He was like her people, the people from whom she herself derived her good looks, her pride, her independence. There was nothing in the other children that engaged her interest. As he grew, so her pride in him grew. When the war came he was between seven and eight years old. Her mind went back to a day in that first winter. They had just finished breakfast, and she had seen their name in the paper she had been turning over-Richard Alington Forbes. Her husband’s second name was Alington. She said on a sudden impulse of curiosity, “Isn’t that a relation of yours-Richard Alington Forbes?” Her husband said, “Yes,” in his quiet absent way, and she had gone on to ask questions.

“Weren’t they relations?”

“Oh, yes-some sort of second or third cousin-” He really wasn’t sure which.

She remembered her own impatience.

“But good gracious me, one should keep up with one’s relationsl”

He was silent for a moment, and she thought he was not going to answer her, but in the end he said,

“What did you see about him?”

“Oh, nothing. I just saw his name. He was being posted to something or other. He’s in the Air Force, isn’t he?”

He said, “Yes, I believe he is.”

That was the first time his name came up between them.

Then in the summer there came the landslide in Belgium – Dunkirk and all the excitement about that. Mrs. Forbes remembered that she had looked for news-not news of the battle, but news of Richard Alington Forbes. Her husband was the next of kin-she had made it her business to find out about that. Her husband was the next of kin, and Mac was the heir. Hope rose in her. It wasn’t as if she had ever seen the man- and so many were being killed- Was it too much to expect that he wouldn’t survive? She had so entirely made up her mind that he would die that when his name came out in the papers she accepted it as a foregone conclusion. It was perhaps as well for their future relationship that her husband was out of the country. She did not see him again while the war lasted, but she moved to Alington House, and Mac had been brought up there.

Her mind travelled slowly over the years. She remembered the first time she had seen Je

With a kind of stu

After that nothing she did would have made any difference. When her husband came home he went to see Miss Garstone. He did not tell his wife what passed between them, and she did not ask. She determined on a certain course of action and she followed it. She didn’t know, therefore, until her husband died that he had undertaken to pay for Je

She had shown nothing. The hurt went too deep for that. The money was paid over to Miss Garstone, and she tried to forget about it. The only person to whom she had spoken about it was Mac, and he had only laughed and told her not to worry. She wondered now what that had meant. Had he had any idea of marrying Je

Never is the most terrible word in the language. This thought came in upon her, flooding her mind with bitterness. She would never see Mac again. The word rang in her head like the ringing of a bell. Never-never -never-never. Her consciousness became deadened to it. It meant nothing. And then, like a curtain rising, consciousness came back and she saw in an awful perspective, as it were, endless mountain ranges of pain.

Her mind travelled on and on. She went through the last few weeks. Mac calm and sure, with his way out all pla

Her mind went back to last week-end, to Mac… She hadn’t known… What was there to know? It was already too late. He wouldn’t have killed himself if there was any other way out of it. There wasn’t any other way. There was no other way for her. She did not even think of the children, or of Alan. They had never mattered to her in the way that Mac had. She opened the drawer and took out a loaded revolver. No one in the house heard the shot.