The Mystery of Crocksands by Fred M. White

"It is just as well, I think, to speak plainly," Evors went on. "I can prove to you, if you like, that Wrath was the deliberate cause of all that domestic unhappiness. He pushed his way into your father's life for the double purpose of getting money from him and seeking a certain means and petty revenge. Well, he was successful in both instances. But I did not know all that at the time. Wrath came along ostensibly with a proposal that your father and myself should share with him in the gold mine he had got hold of. This had been brought to him by a young man called Akers, an Englishman whose great hobby was acting. He was on the Australian stage, as was his sister Mary, who was really a talented and beautiful girl, and because of her popularity her brother was rarely out of an engagement. And it didn't take me long to realise that she was infatuated with Wrath. He could do almost what he liked with her. There are some women who cannot resist the great, strong, handsome animal of that type, and I am afraid that Mary Akers was one of them.

"Not that he cared two straws about her however, that has very little to do with the story. We scraped together a certain amount of capital and went up country--that is, your father and myself and Akers, leaving your mother at a Melbourne hotel. Wrath was to have joined us but at the last moment something prevented it, and he remained behind. The gold mine was a swindle from start to finish, and all the money found its way into Wrath's pocket. But that was not the worst feature of the case. We were deliberately lured into a desert country without food and without water, and we nearly died of thirst. There was not an ounce of gold in the mine, so we turned back and should assuredly have died on the way if we had not happened by great good luck to run into a lunatic Englishman who was trying to cross the desert in a motorcar. If he had gone another ten miles we should have missed him, and he would have perished as miserably as we looked like perishing. It was touch and go, any way, but we just managed to run the car back to the fringe of civilisation, and the situation was saved. When we got to Melbourne Wrath had vanished. So, by the way, had Mary Akers, though whether he had anything to do with that I don't know. The man was a thorough blackguard, but I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. And that is one score I have got against Wrath. A year or so later, by a bit or good luck, I came into my share of some family property, and I returned to England. Fortune brought me to Devonshire, where I met Sir George Bland-Merton. The old gentleman took rather a fancy to me, and he allowed me to take a long lease of this bungalow. Of course, in those days I had no thought of ever meeting Wrath down here--in fact I had forgotten all about the scoundrel, and was quite content with this little paradise of mine until the war broke out. Well, you know all about that. And now I am coming to the real point."