His mother could only
look at him with shining eyes.
"Why, some one came from these parts to enlighten my blindness. He was
hunting for treasure. I knew where the treasure lay, twenty fathoms
deep, in a little bay of an island in the South Seas. What use was
treasure to me since I could not come home? I have known murder and
worse done over treasure. I knew it was there, and I let it be. The
gentle, brown people of the islands had no use for it. It would only
have brought in lawless and desperate men to disturb the peace of that
Garden of Eden. Now it makes me a rich man. It makes him in whose charge
I have left it a rich man. He will bring home the treasure. Like me, he
thinks of it only as a means to an end."
"You will be able to pay the mortgage," my grandfather said, with an air
of immense relief.
Then he seemed to remember something; and he cried out suddenly that
Garret Dawson held an I.O.U. which Uncle Luke had given to Sir Jasper
Tuite for five thousand guineas.
"He said it would hang you," the poor old man went on, sobbing and
stumbling in his speech, "because, of course, it would prove that you
had a motive for shooting Jasper Tuite. He said other things, dreadful
for a father and mother to hear.
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