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Updated: May 16, 2025
"Now, Miss Callingham," he said again, peering deep into my eyes, "I want you to concentrate your mind very much, not on this Picture you carry so vividly in your own brain, but on the events that went immediately before and after it. Pause long and think. Try hard to remember. And first, you say there was a great flash of light.
As they did so, a horrible sight met their astonished eyes. Mr. Callingham's dead body lay extended on the ground, shot right through the heart, and weltering in its life-blood. Miss Callingham stood by his side, transfixed with horror, and mute in her agony. On the floor lay the pistol that had fired the fatal shot.
Then came mysterious messages from the Central Press about the absence of any clue to identify the stranger. He hadn't entered the house by any regular way, it seemed; unless, indeed, Mr. Callingham had brought him home himself and let him in with the latchkey.
"You've much to learn yet, Una," he answered. "The story's a long one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You've been deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended.
You went forth upon the world as Una Callingham, with your true personality as Mary Wharton all obscured even in your own memory. Fortunately for your false father's plot, you were small for your age, and developed slowly: he gave out, on the contrary, that you were big for your years and had outgrown yourself, Australian-wise, both in wisdom and stature." "But my mother!" I exclaimed, appalled.
None of the servants had opened the door that evening to any suspicious character; not a soul had they seen, nor did any of them know a man was with their master in the library. They heard voices, to be sure voices, loud at times and angry, but they supposed it was Mr. Callingham talking with his daughter. Till roused by the fatal pistol-shot, the gardener said, they had no cause for alarm.
They saw the pistol on the floor, Mr. Callingham dead you, startled and horrified a man unknown, escaping in hot haste from the window. I risked my own life, so as to save your name and honour. I let them see me escape, so as to exonerate you from suspicion. If they hanged me, what matter?
His manner was as deferential, as kind, and as considerate to my sensitiveness, as anything it's possible for you to imagine in anyone. "I'm sorry to have to trouble you, Miss Callingham," he said, with a very gentle smile; "but I daresay you can understand yourself the object of my visit.
"Oh, Marsden!" she cried, eyeing me close. "Why, I thought you were Miss Callingham!" "How on earth did you know that?" I exclaimed, terrified almost out of my life. Was I never for one moment to escape my own personality? "Why, they put it in the papers that you were coming," Elsie answered, looking tenderly at me, more in sympathy than in anger.
I cried, pricking my ears. "Why, what harm was there in that? Why on earth didn't he want me to talk about Australia?" "Ah! what harm indeed?" Jane echoed blandly. "That's what we often used to say among ourselves downstairs. But Mr. Callingham, he was always that way, miss so strict and particular.
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