The Millbank Case: A Maine Mystery of To day

THEODORE WING had no known enemy in the world. He was a man of forty; “well-to-do,” as they say in New England; a lawyer by profession, and already “mentioned” for a county judgeship. He was unmarried, but there were those who had hopes, and there was scarce a spinster in Millbank who hadn’t a kindly word and smile for him—at times. He was not a church member, but it was whispered that his clergyman was disposed to look leniently on this shortcoming, for Wing was a regular attendant at service and liberal with money for church purposes, which, shrewd guessers said, some of the church members were not. Wing lived in the River Road, just at the top of Parlin’s Hill. He was from “over East, somewheres,” and had come to Millbank as a law student, when old Judge Parlin was at the head of the Maine bar. He became in turn chief clerk, junior partner, and finally full partner to the judge, and when the latter died—of disappointment, it was said, due to failure to secure the chief justiceship—Wing became the head of the firm, and finally the firm itself; for he had a dislike for partnerships, and at forty his office associates were employés associated in particular cases, not partners in the general business. Judge Parlin was less than sixty years of age when he died and left a widow, the Parlin homestead, and an estate of private debts, that seemed to breed as Wing attempted to untangle affairs. For years his income had been large and his expenses small. His townsmen had rated him as their richest man who was not of the great Millbank logging firms. There was not a man but would have considered it an insult to the town to hint that Judge Parlin was worth less than a hundred thousand dollars. His investments turned out the veriest cats and dogs; and even in cases where the security might have been ample, the papers were often executed with such carelessness that collection rested on the honesty of the borrower and not on sufficiency of documentary evidence. In fact, the debts outvalued the resources two to one—that is, they seemed to, until it was announced that the Parlin homestead had been sold for a sum sufficient to pay all obligations and leave the widow a life income of five hundred dollars a year. People understood when it was learned that Wing himself was the purchaser. Mrs. Parlin was fifty years of age at the time of her husband’s death—a woman to whom stateliness had come with white hairs and the growth of ambition. From the hour of the judge’s death, the devotion she had given him living turned to the protection of his good name. In a distant, cold way she had always shown a regard for Wing, which changed to more marked affection, when his interposition provided the means to meet the last of her husband’s debts. She harboured no suspicion that the price paid for the homestead was beyond value. Not only had it been her home throughout her married life, but the judge had always spoken of its value in the large terms that were habitual with him in dealing with personal matters, and, from the moment when Wing discovered the condition of the estate, he held before her constantly the idea that the homestead would bring a price sufficient to cover the indebtedness. Indeed, she felt that she was making a sacrifice, when she consented to waive her dower rights, and chiefly she rejoiced that the purchaser was Wing and not a stranger. It is possible that some suspicion attached in her mind to the purchase of the annuity, and this may have been confirmed by Wing’s insistence that he would consent to occupy the homestead only on condition that she should make it her home for her lifetime. If, however, this was so, she proved herself large-minded enough to understand that her happiness—so far as this was possible to her now dwarfed life—was the best acknowledgment she could make to such a man, and during the five years since the judge’s death, she had been the mistress of Wing’s home.