Mr. Kenmore, in his pursuit of knowledge, had no difficulty in tracing
the Stuarts in Richmond.
At the elegant and fashionable West End of the city, a stylish residence
was pointed out to him as the home of Clarence Stuart and his family.
He remained in the city a few days and stored his mind with all the
available facts regarding this, to him, interesting family.
It was easy to do. The Stuarts, as wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic
people, were well known. The city papers had duly announced their
departure for Italy in their own yacht, the _Sea-Bird_. Their movements
were considered generally interesting to the public, to judge by the
paragraphs that appeared in the daily journals.
Mr. Kenmore heard, incidentally, that Clarence Stuart's wife had been a
wealthy heiress when he married her, some fifteen years before.
Casual inquiry elicited the fact that Clarence Stuart's father had been
dead three weeks.
Guy Kenmore was startled by this information. It went far towards
confirming his theory of the fragment of letter found in old Ronald
Brooke's dead hand, and which he treasured carefully in his pocket-book.
"It was the senior Stuart's death-bed confession," he said to himself.
"What could that dying man have to confess to old Ronald Brooke?"
What but the story of a crime that lay so heavy on his dying hours, that
he was fain to seek the pardon of God and of man before he dared go out
into the terrible unknown?
_Who_ had dared to wrest that important confession from Mr. Brooke's
hand, and strike him dead with the secret unrevealed?
Shuddering, Guy Kenmore asked himself this question to which the answer
seemed only too clear.
The only persons who could have been vitally interested in old Clarence
Stuart's death-bed confession were his son and his family.
Was Clarence Stuart, junior, a guilty man or a wronged man?
Did he or did he not know of his father's death-bed confession?
By whose hand had that confession been sent to old Ronald Brooke?
Who had followed behind the messenger and torn that document from the
old man's hand with a death-blow?
These questions rung unceasingly through Guy Kenmore's head. They
sickened him with their terrible suggestions of hidden guilt and crime.
He believed more and more that Ronald Brooke had been murdered instead
of dying a natural death as his physicians had asserted.
But how was he to find the murderer, and how bring his guilt home to
him?
Mr. Kenmore, who was naturally indolent and ease-loving, and who had
been nurtured in these habits by his life of luxury and indulgence,
found himself staggered by these heavy responsibilities that appeared to
have been thrust upon him. The blood of Ronald Brooke seemed to cry
aloud to him from the earth for vengeance on his murderer.
"Why has Heaven selected me for the instrument of righting Elaine
Brooke's wrongs?" he asked himself, in wonder.
He did not relish the duty, but when he would fain have given it up, a
voice within him loudly urged him forward in the path of duty.
"What good can it do?" he answered back, impatiently, to that inward
monitor. "Mr. Brooke is dead, Irene is dead, her mother has broken loose
from all her old ties and associations, and hidden her life away in the
great thronging world. Can vengeance bring the dead back, or give peace
to the broken heart of that poor wronged woman?"
Yet in spite of his sophistries and protestations the voice within still
loudly echoed: "_Go on._"
He wrote to Mrs. Brooke informing her of her erroneous supposition
concerning Elaine's whereabouts, then he turned his whole attention to
the Stuarts.
"If I could see Clarence Stuart I could form my opinion of him much
better," he thought. "I have nothing else to do. Why not follow them to
Italy?"
He went home to Baltimore and made his preparations for going abroad.
There was no one to oppose his will. His parents were dead, his two
sisters were married to wealthy men, and were too much absorbed in
fashion and pleasure to miss him greatly. Somewhat reluctantly he went,
not remembering that the path of duty is oftentimes the straight road to
happiness.
No dream came to him as he walked the deck those beautiful moonlit
nights of summer and mused on the repulsive task to which he was going,
that fate was leading him straight to the presence of her who had become
a sweet and softened memory to his heart; whose childish willfulness and
flitting spites had so irked him once, but which now he remembered only
as
"Delicious spites and darling angers,
And airy forms of flitting change."
Death had idealized his blue-eyed girl-bride, and he loved her now when
it seemed too late.