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Updated: June 29, 2025
Surely we all are wretched enough, without your adding this to our wretchedness." He got up from the stool and took her hand. "Don't, Anstice don't! I broke myself of it before, and I will break myself again. It was a woman drove me to it then, and sent me down the hill, and now I didn't know there was a living soul would care whether old Sharnall drank himself to death or not.
She was only eager to get away, to place herself outside the reach of these slanderous tongues, to hide herself where she could unburden her heart of its bitterness. Mr Sharnall fired one more shaft at her as she left the room. "He takes after his grandfather in other ways besides close-fistedness. The old man had a bad enough name with women, and this man has a worse.
It was full two hours later that Westray came quickly into the organist's room at Bellevue Lodge. "I beg your pardon, Sharnall," he said, "for leaving you so cavalierly. You must have thought me rude and inappreciative; but the fact is I was so startled that I forgot to tell you why I went.
"He asked me whether anyone had ever approached the old lord about the restoration, and I said the Rector had written, and never got an answer." "It wasn't to the old lord he wrote," Mr Sharnall cut in; "it was to this very man. Didn't you know it was to this very man? No one ever thought it worth ink and paper to write to old Blandamer. I was the only one, fool enough to do that.
He had no difficulty in finding other lodgings by correspondence, and he spared himself the necessity of returning at all to his former abode by writing to ask Clerk Janaway to move his belongings. One morning, a month later, Miss Joliffe sat in that room which had been occupied by the late Mr Sharnall.
Westray thought the matter important enough to justify him in going to London to consult Sir George Farquhar, as to the changes in the scheme of restoration which Lord Blandamer's munificence made possible; but Mr Sharnall, at any rate, was left to listen to Miss Joliffe's recollections, surmises, and panegyrics.
This conclusion, however inconclusive, was certainly a triumph for Westray's persuasive oratory, but his satisfaction was chastened by some doubts as to how far he was justified in assailing the scrupulous independence which had originally prompted Mr Sharnall to refuse to have anything to do with Lord Blandamer's offer.
The stone steps and the stone floor of the hall, the stuccoed walls, and the coved stucco roof which held the skylight at the top, made a whispering-gallery of that gaunt staircase; and before Mr Sharnall had climbed half-way up he heard voices. They were voices in conversation; Anastasia had company. And then he heard that one was a man's voice. What right had any man to be in Westray's room?
In this game of hunt the slipper he had imagined that he was growing "hotter" and "hotter" till death balked him at the finish. Westray recollected Mr Sharnall saying more than once that Martin had been on the brink of solving the riddle when the end overtook him. And Sharnall, too, had he not almost grasped the Will-of-the-wisp when fate tripped him on that windy night?
Miss Joliffe had made no attempt to find a new lodger. No "Apartments to Let" was put in the window, and such chattels as Mr Sharnall possessed remained exactly as he left them. Only one thing was moved the collection of Martin Joliffe's papers, and these Westray had taken upstairs to his own room.
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