Ernestine Wendermott travelled back to London in much discomfort, being the eleventh occupant of a third-class carriage in a particularly unpunctual and dilatory train. Arrived at Waterloo, she shook out her skirts with a little gesture of relief and started off to walk to the Strand. Half-way across the bridge she came face to face with a tall, good-looking young man who was hurrying in the opposite direction. He stopped short as he recognised her, dropped his eyeglass, and uttered a little exclamation of pleasure.
“Ernestine, by all that's delightful! I am in luck to-day!”
She smiled slightly and gave him her hand, but it was evident that this meeting was not wholly agreeable to her.
“I don't quite see where the luck comes in,” she answered. “I have no time to waste talking to you now. I am in a hurry.”
“You will allow me,” he said hopefully, “to walk a little way with you?”
“I am not able to prevent it—if you think it worth while,” she answered.
He looked down—he was by her side now—in good-humoured protest.
“Come, Ernestine,” he said, “you mustn't bear malice against me. Perhaps I was a little hasty when I spoke so strongly about your work. I don't like your doing it and never shall like it, but I've said all I want to. You won't let it divide us altogether, will you?”
“For the present,” she answered, “it occupies the whole of my time, and the whole of my thoughts.”
“To the utter exclusion, I suppose,” he remarked, “of me?”
She laughed gaily.
“My dear Cecil! when have I ever led you to suppose for a moment that I have ever wasted any time thinking of you?”
He was determined not to be annoyed, and he ignored both the speech and the laugh.
“May I inquire how you are getting on?”
“I am getting on,” she answered, “very well indeed. The Editor is beginning to say very nice things to me, and already the men treat me just as though I were a comrade! It is so nice of them!”
“Is it?” he muttered doubtfully.
“I have just finished,” she continued, “the most important piece of work they have trusted me with yet, and I have been awfully lucky. I have been to interview a millionaire!”
“A man?”
She nodded. “Of course!”
“It isn't fit work for you,” he exclaimed hastily.
“You will forgive me if I consider myself the best judge of that,” she answered coldly. “I am a journalist, and so long as it is honest work my sex doesn't count. If every one whom I have to see is as courteous to me as Mr. Trent has been, I shall consider myself very lucky indeed.”
“As who?” he cried.
She looked up at him in surprise. They were at the corner of the Strand, but as though in utter forgetfulness of their whereabouts, he had suddenly stopped short and gripped her tightly by the arm. She shook herself free with a little gesture of annoyance.
“Whatever is the matter with you, Cecil? Don't gape at me like that, and come along at once, unless you want to be left behind. Yes, we are very short-handed and the chief let me go down to see Mr. Trent. He didn't expect for a moment that I should get him to talk to me, but I did, and he let me sketch the house. I am awfully pleased with myself I can tell you.”
The young man walked by her side for a moment in silence. She looked up at him casually as they crossed the street, and something in his face surprised her.
“Why, Cecil, what on earth is the matter with you?” she exclaimed.
He looked down at her with a new seriousness.
“I was thinking,” he said, “how oddly things turn out. So you have been down to interview Mr. Scarlett Trent for a newspaper, and he was civil to you!”
“Well, I don't see anything odd about that,” she exclaimed impatiently. “Don't be so enigmatical. If you've anything to say, say it! Don't look at me like an owl!”
“I have a good deal to say to you,” he answered gravely. “How long shall you be at the office?”
“About an hour—perhaps longer.”
“I will wait for you!”
“I'd rather you didn't. I don't want them to think that I go trailing about with an escort.”
“Then may I come down to your flat? I have something really important to say to you, Ernestine. It does not concern myself at all. It is wholly about you. It is something which you ought to know.”
“You are trading upon my curiosity for the sake of a tea,” she laughed. “Very well, about five o'clock.”
He bowed and walked back westwards with a graver look than usual upon his boyish face, for he had a task before him which was very little to his liking. Ernestine swung open the entrance door to the “Hour”, and passed down the rows of desks until she reached the door at the further end marked “Sub-Editor.” She knocked and was admitted at once.
A thin, dark young man, wearing a pince-nez and smoking a cigarette, looked up from his writing as she entered. He waved her to a seat, but his pen never stopped for a second.
“Back, Miss Wendermott! Very good! What did you get?”
“Interview and sketch of the house,” she responded briskly.
“Interview by Jove! That's good! Was he very difficult?”
“Ridiculously easy! Told me everything I asked and a lot more. If I could have got it all down in his own language it would have been positively thrilling.”
The sub-editor scribbled in silence for a moment or two. He had reached an important point in his own work. His pen went slower, hesitated for a moment, and then dashed on with renewed vigour.
“Read the first few sentences of what you've got,” he remarked.
Ernestine obeyed. To all appearance the man was engrossed in his own work, but when she paused he nodded his head appreciatively.
“It'll do!” he said. “Don't try to polish it. Give it down, and see that the proofs are submitted to me. Where's the sketch?”
She held it out to him. For a moment he looked away from his own work and took the opportunity to light a fresh cigarette. Then he nodded, hastily scrawled some dimensions on the margin of the little drawing and settled down again to work.
“It'll do,” he said. “Give it to Smith. Come back at eight to look at your proofs after I've done with them. Good interview! Good sketch! You'll do, Miss Wendermott.”
She went out laughing softly. This was quite the longest conversation she had ever had with the chief. She made her way to the side of the first disengaged typist, and sitting in an easy-chair gave down her copy, here and there adding a little but leaving it mainly in the rough. She knew whose hand, with a few vigorous touches would bring the whole thing into the form which the readers of the “Hour”, delighted in, and she was quite content to have it so. The work was interesting and more than an hour had passed before she rose and put on her gloves.
“I am coming back at eight,” she said, “but the proofs are to go in to Mr. Darrel! Nothing come in for me, I suppose?”
The girl shook her head, so Ernestine walked out into the street. Then she remembered Cecil Davenant and his strange manner—the story which he was even now waiting to tell her. She looked at her watch and after a moment's hesitation called a hansom.
81, Culpole Street, she told him. “This is a little extravagant,” she said to herself as the man wheeled his horse round, “but to-day I think that I have earned it.”
“Ernestine,” he said gravely, “I am going to speak to you about your father!”
She looked up at him in swift surprise.
“Is it necessary?”
“I think so,” he answered. “You won't like what I'm going to tell you! You'll think you've been badly treated. So you have! I pledged my word, in a weak hour, with the others. To-day I'm going to break it. I think it best.”
“Well?”
“You've been deceived! You were told always that your father had died in prison. He didn't.”
“What!”
Her sharp cry rang out strangely into the little room. Already he could see signs of the coming storm, and the task which lay before him seemed more hateful than ever.
“Listen,” he said. “I must tell you some things which you know in order to explain others which you do not know. Your father was a younger son born of extravagant parents, virtually penniless and without the least capacity for earning money. I don't blame him—who could? I couldn't earn money myself. If I hadn't got it I daresay that I should go to the bad as he did.”
The girl's lips tightened, and she drew a little breath through her teeth. Davenant hesitated.
“You know all about that company affair. Of course they made your father the butt of the whole thing, although he was little more than a tool. He was sent to prison for seven years. You were only a child then and your mother was dead. Well, when the seven years were up, your relations and mine too, Ernestine, concocted what I have always considered an ill-begotten and a miserably selfish plot. Your father, unfortunately, yielded to them, for your sake. You were told that he had died in prison. He did not. He lived through his seven years there, and when he came out did so in another name and went abroad on the morning of the day of his liberation.”
“Good God!” she cried. “And now!”
“He is dead,” Davenant answered hastily, “but only just lately. Wait a minute. You are going to be furiously angry. I know it, and I don't blame you. Only listen for a moment. The scheme was hatched up between my father and your two uncles. I have always hated it and always protested against it. Remember that and be fair to me. This is how they reasoned. Your father's health, they said, was ruined, and if he lives the seven years what is there left for him when he comes out? He was a man, as you know, of aristocratic and fastidious tastes. He would have the best of everything—society, clubs, sport. Now all these were barred against him. If he had reappeared he could not have shown his face in Pall Mall, or on the racecourses, and every moment of his life would be full of humiliations and bitterness. Virtually then, for such a man as he was, life in England was over. Then there was you. You were a pretty child and the Earl had no children. If your father was dead the story would be forgotten, you would marry brilliantly and an ugly page in the family history would be blotted out. That was how they looked at it—it was how they put it to your father.”
“He consented?”
“Yes, he consented! He saw the wisdom of it for your sake, for the sake of the family, even for his own sake. The Earl settled an income upon him and he left England secretly on the morning of his release. We had the news of his death only a week or two ago.”
She stood up, her eyes blazing, her hands clenched together.
“I thank God,” she said “that I have found the courage to break away from those people and take a little of my life into my own hands. You can tell them this if you will, Cecil,—my uncle Lord Davenant, your mother, and whoever had a say in this miserable affair. Tell them from me that I know the truth and that they are a pack of cowardly, unnatural old women. Tell them that so long as I live I will never willingly speak to one of them again.
“I was afraid you'd take it like that,” he remarked dolefully.
“Take it like that!” she repeated in fierce scorn. “How else could a woman hear such news? How else do you suppose she could feel to be told that she had been hoodwinked, and kept from her duty and a man's heart very likely broken, to save the respectability of a worn-out old family. Oh, how could they have dared to do it? How could they have dared to do it?”
“It was a beastly mistake,” he admitted.
A whirlwind of scorn seemed to sweep over her. She could keep still no longer. She walked up and down the little room. Her hands were clenched, her eyes flashing.
“To tell me that he was dead—to let him live out the rest of his poor life in exile and alone! Did they think that I didn't care? Cecil,” she exclaimed, suddenly turning and facing him, “I always loved my father! You may think that I was too young to remember him—I wasn't, I loved him always. When I grew up and they told me of his disgrace I was bitterly sorry, for I loved his memory—but it made no difference. And all the time it was a weak, silly lie! They let him come out, poor father, without a friend to speak to him and they hustled him out of the country. And I, whose place was there with him, never knew!”
“You were only a child, Ernestine. It was twelve years ago.”
“Child! I may have been only a child, but I should have been old enough to know where my place was. Thank God I have done with these people and their disgusting shibboleth of respectability.”
“You are a little violent,” he remarked.
“Pshaw!” She flashed a look of scorn upon him. “You don't understand! How should you, you are of their kidney—you're only half a man. Thank God that my mother was of the people! I'd have died to have gone smirking through life with a brick for a heart and milk and water in my veins! Of all the stupid pieces of brutality I ever heard of, this is the most callous and the most heartbreaking.”
“It was a great mistake,” he said, “but I believe they did it for the best.”
She sat down with a little gesture of despair.
“I really think you'd better go away, Cecil,” she said. “You exasperate me too horribly. I shall strike you or throw something at you soon. Did it for the best! What a miserable whine! Poor dear old dad, to think that they should have done this thing.”
She buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed for the second time since her childhood. Davenant was wise enough to attempt no sort of consolation. He leaned a little forward and hid his own face with the palm of his hand. When at last she looked up her face had cleared and her tone was less bitter. It would have gone very hard with the Earl of Eastchester, however, if he had called to see his niece just then.
“Well,” she said, “I want to know now why, after keeping silent all this time, you thought it best to tell me the truth this afternoon?”
“Because,” he answered, “you told me that you had just been to see Scarlett Trent!”
“And what on earth had that to do with it?”
“Because Scarlett Trent was with your father when he died. They were on an excursion somewhere up in the bush—the very excursion that laid the foundation of Trent's fortune.”
“Go on,” she cried. “Tell me all that you know! this is wonderful!”
“Well, I am glad to tell you this at any rate,” he said. “I always liked your father and I saw him off when he left England, and have written to him often since. I believe I was his only correspondent in this country, except his solicitors. He had a very adventurous and, I am afraid, not a very happy time. He never wrote cheerfully, and he mortgaged the greater part of his income. I don't blame him for anything he did. A man needs some responsibility, or some one dependent upon him to keep straight. To be frank with you, I don't think he did.”
“Poor dad,” she murmured, “of course he didn't! I know I'd have gone to the devil as fast as I could if I'd been treated like it!”
“Well, he drifted about from place to place and at last he got to the Gold Coast. Here I half lost sight of him, and his few letters were more bitter and despairing than ever. The last I had told me that he was just off on an expedition into the interior with another Englishman. They were to visit a native King and try to obtain from him certain concessions, including the right to work a wonderful gold-mine somewhere near the village of Bekwando.”
“Why, the great Bekwando Land Company!” she cried. “It is the one Scarlett Trent has just formed a syndicate to work.”
Davenant nodded.
“Yes. It was a terrible risk they were running,” he said, “for the people were savage and the climate deadly. He wrote cheerfully for him, though. He had a partner, he said, who was strong and determined, and they had presents, to get which he had mortgaged the last penny of his income. It was a desperate enterprise perhaps, but it suited him, and he went on to tell me this, Ernestine. If he succeeded and he became wealthy, he was returning to England just for a sight of you. He was so changed, he said, that no one in the world would recognise him. Poor fellow! It was the last line I had from him.”
“And you are sure,” Ernestine said slowly, “that Scarlett Trent was his partner?”
“Absolutely. Trent's own story clinches the matter. The prospectus of the mine quotes the concession as having been granted to him by the King of Bekwando in the same month as your father wrote to me.”
“And what news,” she asked, “have you had since?”
“Only this letter—I will read it to you—from one of the missionaries of the Basle Society. I heard nothing for so long that I made inquiries, and this is the result.”
Ernestine took it and read it out steadily.
“FORTNRENIG.
“DEAR Sir,—In reply to your letter and inquiry, respecting the whereabouts of a Mr. Richard Grey, the matter was placed in my hands by the agent of Messrs. Castle, and I have personally visited Buckomari, the village at which he was last heard of. It seems that in February, 18—he started on an expedition to Bekwando in the interior with an Englishman by the name of Trent, with a view to buying land from a native King, or obtaining the concession to work the valuable gold-mines of that country. The expedition seems to have been successful, but Trent returned alone and reported that his companion had been attacked by bush-fever on the way back and had died in a few hours.
“I regret very much having to send you such sad and scanty news in return for your handsome donation to our funds. I have made every inquiry, but cannot trace any personal effects or letter. Mr. Grey, I find, was known out here altogether by the nickname of Monty.
“I deeply regret the pain which this letter will doubtless cause you, and trusting that you may seek and receive consolation where alone it may be found,
“I am,
“Yours most sincerely,
“Chas. ADDISON.”
Ernestine read the letter carefully through, and instead of handing it back to Davenant, put it into her pocket when she rose up. “Cecil,” she said, “I want you to leave me at once! You may come back to-morrow at the same time. I am going to think this out quietly.”
He took up his hat. “There is one thing more, Ernestine,” he said slowly. “Enclosed in the letter from the missionary at Attra was another and a shorter note, which, in accordance with his request, I burnt as soon as I read it. I believe the man was honest when he told me that for hours he had hesitated whether to send me those few lines or not. Eventually he decided to do so, but he appealed to my honour to destroy the note as soon as I had read it.”
“Well!”
“He thought it his duty to let me know that there had been rumours as to how your father met his death. Trent, it seems, had the reputation of being a reckless and daring man, and, according to some agreement which they had, he profited enormously by your father's death. There seems to have been no really definite ground for the rumour except that the body was not found where Trent said that he had died. Apart from that, life is held cheap out there, and although your father was in delicate health, his death under such conditions could not fail to be suspicious. I hope I haven't said too much. I've tried to put it to you exactly as it was put to me!”
“Thank you,” Ernestine said, “I think I understand.”
Dinner at the Lodge that night was not a very lively affair. Trent had great matters in his brain and was not in the least disposed to make conversation for the sake of his unbidden guests. Da Souza's few remarks he treated with silent contempt, and Mrs. Da Souza he answered only in monosyllables. Julie, nervous and depressed, stole away before dessert, and Mrs. Da Souza soon followed her, very massive, and frowning with an air of offended dignity. Da Souza, who opened the door for them, returned to his seat, moodily flicking the crumbs from his trousers with his serviette.
“Hang it all, Trent,” he remarked in an aggrieved tone, “you might be a bit more amiable! Nice lively dinner for the women I must say.”
“One isn't usually amiable to guests who stay when they're not asked,” Trent answered gruffly. “However, if I hadn't much to say to your wife and daughter, I have a word or two to say to you, so fill up your glass and listen.”
Da Souza obeyed, but without heartiness. He stretched himself out in his chair and looked down thoughtfully at the large expanse of shirt-front, in the centre of which flashed an enormous diamond.
“I've been into the City to-day as you know,” Trent continued, “and I found as I expected that you have been making efforts to dispose of your share in the Bekwando Syndicate.”
“I can assure you—”
“Oh rot!” Trent interrupted. “I know what I'm talking about. I won't have you sell out. Do you hear? If you try it on I'll queer the market for you at any risk. I won't marry your daughter, I won't be blackmailed, and I won't be bullied. We're in this together, sink or swim. If you pull me down you've got to come too. I'll admit that if Monty were to present himself in London to-morrow and demand his full pound of flesh we should be ruined, but he isn't going to do it. By your own showing there is no immediate risk, and you've got to leave the thing in my hands to do what I think best. If you play any hanky-panky tricks—look here, Da Souza, I'll kill you, sure! Do you hear? I could do it, and no one would be the wiser so far as I was concerned. You take notice of what I say, Da Souza. You've made a fortune, and be satisfied. That's all!”
“You won't marry Julie, then?” Da Souza said gloomily.
“No, I'm shot if I will!” Trent answered. “And look here, Da Souza, I'm leaving here for town to-morrow—taken a furnished flat in Dover Street—you can stay here if you want, but there'll only be a caretaker in the place. That's all I've got to say. Make yourself at home with the port and cigars. Last night, you know! You'll excuse me! I want a breath of fresh air.”
Trent strolled through the open window into the garden, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. He was a free man again now. He had created new dangers—a new enemy to face—but what did he care? All his life had been spent in facing dangers and conquering enemies. What he had done before he could do again! As he lit a pipe and walked to and fro, he felt that this new state of things lent a certain savour to life—took from it a certain sensation of finality not altogether agreeable, which his recent great achievements in the financial world seemed to have inspired. After all, what could Da Souza do? His prosperity was altogether bound up in the success of the Bekwando Syndicate—he was never the man to kill the goose which was laying such a magnificent stock of golden eggs. The affair, so far as he was concerned, troubled him scarcely at all on cool reflection. As he drew near the little plantation he even forgot all about it. Something else was filling his thoughts!
The change in him became physical as well as mental. The hard face of the man softened, what there was of coarseness in its rugged outline became altogether toned down. He pushed open the gate with fingers which were almost reverent; he came at last to a halt in the exact spot where he had seen her first. Perhaps it was at that moment he realised most completely and clearly the curious thing which had come to him—to him of all men, hard-hearted, material, an utter stranger in the world of feminine things. With a pleasant sense of self-abandonment he groped about, searching for its meaning. He was a man who liked to understand thoroughly everything he saw and felt, and this new atmosphere in which he found himself was a curious source of excitement to him. Only he knew that the central figure of it all was this girl, that he had come out here to think about her, and that henceforth she had become to him the standard of those things which were worth having in life. Everything about her had been a revelation to him. The women whom he had come across in his battle upwards, barmaids and their fellows, fifth-rate actresses, occasionally the suburban wife of a prosperous City man, had impressed him only with a sort of coarse contempt. It was marvellous how thoroughly and clearly he had recognised Ernestine at once as a type of that other world of womenkind, of which he admittedly knew nothing. Yet it was so short a time since she had wandered into his life, so short a time that he was even a little uneasy at the wonderful strength of this new passion, a thing which had leaped up like a forest tree in a world of magic, a live, fully-grown thing, mighty and immovable in a single night. He found himself thinking of all the other things in life from a changed standpoint. His sense of proportions was altered, his financial triumphs were no longer omnipotent. He was inclined even to brush them aside, to consider them more as an incident in his career. He associated her now with all those plans concerning the future which he had been dimly formulating since the climax of his successes had come. She was of the world which he sought to enter—at once the stimulus and the object of his desires. He forgot all about Da Souza and his threats, about the broken-down, half-witted old man who was gazing with wistful eyes across the ocean which kept him there, an exile—he remembered nothing save the wonderful, new thing which had come into his life. A month ago he would have scoffed at the idea of there being anything worth considering outside the courts and alleys of the money-changers' market. To-night he knew of other things. To-night he knew that all he had done so far was as nothing—that as yet his foot was planted only on the threshold of life, and in the path along which he must hew his way lay many fresh worlds to conquer. To-night he told himself that he was equal to them all. There was something out here in the dim moonlight, something suggested by the shadows, the rose-perfumed air, the delicate and languid stillness, which crept into his veins and coursed through his blood like magic.
Yet every now and then the same thought came; it lay like a small but threatening black shadow across all those brilliant hopes and dreams which were filling his brain. So far he had played the game of life as a hard man, perhaps, and a selfish one, but always honestly. Now, for the first time, he had stepped aside from the beaten track. He told himself that he was not bound to believe Da Souza's story, that he had left Monty with the honest conviction that he was past all human help. Yet he knew that such consolation was the merest sophistry. Through the twilight, as he passed to and fro, he fancied more than once that the wan face of an old man, with wistful, sorrowing eyes, was floating somewhere before him—and he stopped to listen with bated breath to the wind rustling in the elm-trees, fancying he could hear that same passionate cry ringing still in his ears—the cry of an old man parted from his kin and waiting for death in a lonely land.
Ernestine found a letter on her plate a few mornings afterwards which rather puzzled her. It was from a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn—the Eastchester family solicitors—requesting her to call that morning to see them on important business. There was not a hint as to the nature of it, merely a formal line or two and a signature. Ernestine, who had written insulting letters to all her relatives during the last few days, smiled as she laid it down. Perhaps the family had called upon Mr. Cuthbert to undertake their defence and bring her round to a reasonable view of things. The idea was amusing enough, but her first impulse was not to go. Nothing but the combination of an idle morning and a certain measure of curiosity induced her to keep the appointment.
She was evidently expected, for she was shown at once into the private office of the senior partner. The clerk who ushered her in pronounced her name indistinctly, and the elderly man who rose from his chair at her entrance looked at her inquiringly.
“I am Miss Wendermott,” she said, coming forward. “I had a letter from you this morning; you wished to see me, I believe.”
Mr. Cuthbert dropped at once his eyeglass and his inquiring gaze, and held out his hand.
“My dear Miss Wendermott,” he said, “you must pardon the failing eyesight of an old man. To be sure you are, to be sure. Sit down, Miss Wendermott, if you please. Dear me, what a likeness!”
“You mean to my father?” she asked quietly.
“To your father, certainly, poor, dear old boy! You must excuse me, Miss Wendermott. Your father and I were at Eton together, and I think I may say that we were always something more than lawyer and client—a good deal more, a good deal more! He was a fine fellow at heart—a fine, dear fellow. Bless me, to think that you are his daughter!”
“It's very nice to hear you speak of him so, Mr. Cuthbert,” she said. “My father may have been very foolish—I suppose he was really worse than foolish—but I think that he was most abominably and shamefully treated, and so long as I live I shall never forgive those who were responsible for it. I don't mean you, Mr. Cuthbert, of course. I mean my grand-father and my uncle.” Mr. Cuthbert shook his head slowly.
“The Earl,” he said, “was a very proud man—a very proud man.”
“You may call it pride,” she exclaimed. “I call it rank and brutal selfishness! They had no right to force such a sacrifice upon him. He would have been content, I am sure, to have lived quietly in England—to have kept out of their way, to have conformed to their wishes in any reasonable manner. But to rob him of home and friends and family and name—well, may God call them to account for it, and judge them as they judged him!”
“I was against it,” he said sadly, “always.”
“So Mr. Davenant told me,” she said. “I can't quite forgive you, Mr. Cuthbert, for letting me grow up and be so shamefully imposed upon, but of course I don't blame you as I do the others. I am only thankful that I have made myself independent of my relations. I think, after the letters which I wrote to them last night, they will be quite content to let me remain where they put my father—outside their lives.”
“I had heard,” Mr. Cuthbert said hesitatingly, “that you were following some occupation. Something literary, is it not?”
“I am a journalist,” Ernestine answered promptly, “and I'm proud to say that I am earning my own living.”
He looked at her with a fine and wonderful curiosity. In his way he was quite as much one of the old school as the Earl of Eastchester, and the idea of a lady—a Wendermott, too—calling herself a journalist and proud of making a few hundreds a year was amazing enough to him. He scarcely knew how to answer her.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “you have some of your father's spirit, some of his pluck too. And that reminds me—we wrote to you to call.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Davenant has told you that your father was engaged in some enterprise with this wonderful Mr. Scarlett Trent, when he died.”
“Yes! He told me that!”
“Well, I have had a visit just recently from that gentleman. It seems that your father when he was dying spoke of his daughter in England, and Mr. Trent is very anxious now to find you out, and speaks of a large sum of money which he wishes to invest in your name.”
“He has been a long time thinking about it,” Ernestine remarked.
“He explained that,” Mr. Cuthbert continued, “in this way. Your father gave him our address when he was dying, but the envelope on which it was written got mislaid, and he only came across it a day or two ago. He came to see me at once, and he seems prepared to act very handsomely. He pressed very hard indeed for your name and address, but I did not feel at liberty to disclose them before seeing you.”
“You were quite right, Mr. Cuthbert,” she answered. “I suppose this is the reason why Mr. Davenant has just told me the whole miserable story.”
“It is one reason,” he admitted, “but in any case I think that Mr. Davenant had made up his mind that you should know.”
“Mr. Trent, I suppose, talks of this money as a present to me?”
“He did not speak of it in that way,” Mr. Cuthbert answered, “but in a sense that is, of course, what it amounts to. At the same time I should like to say that under the peculiar circumstances of the case I should consider you altogether justified in accepting it.”
Ernestine drew herself up. Once more in her finely flashing eyes and resolute air the lawyer was reminded of his old friend.
“I will tell you what I should call it, Mr. Cuthbert,” she said, “I will tell you what I believe it is! It is blood-money.”
Mr. Cuthbert dropped his eyeglass, and rose from his chair, startled.
“Blood-money! My dear young lady! Blood-money!”
“Yes! You have heard the whole story, I suppose! What did it sound like to you? A valuable concession granted to two men, one old, the other young! one strong, the other feeble! yet the concession read, if one should die the survivor should take the whole. Who put that in, do you suppose? Not my father! you may be sure of that. And one of them does die, and Scarlett Trent is left to take everything. Do you think that reasonable? I don't. Now, you say, after all this time he is fired with a sudden desire to behave handsomely to the daughter of his dead partner. Fiddlesticks! I know Scarlett Trent, although he little knows who I am, and he isn't that sort of man at all. He'd better have kept away from you altogether, for I fancy he's put his neck in the noose now! I do not want his money, but there is something I do want from Mr. Scarlett Trent, and that is the whole knowledge of my father's death.”
Mr. Cuthbert sat down heavily in his chair.
“But, my dear young lady,” he said, “you do not suspect Mr. Trent of—er—making away with your father!'
“And why not? According to his own showing they were alone together when he died. What was to prevent it? I want to know more about it, and I am going to, if I have to travel to the Gold Coast myself. I will tell you frankly, Mr. Cuthbert—I suspect Mr. Scarlett Trent. No, don't interrupt me. It may seem absurd to you now that he is Mr. Scarlett Trent, millionaire, with the odour of civilisation clinging to him, and the respectability of wealth. But I, too, have seen him, and I have heard him talk. He has helped me to see the other man—half-savage, splendidly masterful, forging his way through to success by sheer pluck and unswerving obstinacy. Listen, I admire your Mr. Trent! He is a man, and when he speaks to you you know that he was born with a destiny. But there is the other side. Do you think that he would let a man's life stand in his way? Not he! He'd commit a murder, or would have done in those days, as readily as you or I would sweep away a fly. And it is because he is that sort of man that I want to know more about my father's death.”
“You are talking of serious things, Miss Wendermott,” Mr. Cuthbert said gravely.
“Why not? Why shirk them? My father's death was a serious thing, wasn't it? I want an account of it from the only man who can render it.”
“When you disclose yourself to Mr. Trent I should say that he would willingly give you—”
She interrupted him, coming over and standing before him, leaning against his table, and looking him in the face.
“You don't understand. I am not going to disclose myself! You will reply to Mr. Trent that the daughter of his old partner is not in need of charity, however magnificently tendered. You understand?”
“I understand, Miss Wendermott.”
“As to her name or whereabouts you are not at liberty to disclose them. You can let him think, if you will, that she is tarred with the same brush as those infamous and hypocritical relatives of hers who sent her father out to die.”
Mr. Cuthbert shook his head.
“I think, young lady, if you will allow me to say so that you are making a needless mystery of the matter, and further, that you are embarking upon what will certainly prove to be a wild-goose chase. We had news of your father not long before his sad death, and he was certainly in ill-health.”
She set her lips firmly together, and there was a look in her face which alone was quite sufficient to deter Mr. Cuthbert from further argument.
“It may be a wild-goose chase,” she said. “It may not. At any rate nothing will alter my purpose. Justice sleeps sometimes for very many years, but I have an idea that Mr. Scarlett Trent may yet have to face a day of settlement.”
She walked through the crowded streets homewards, her nerves tingling and her pulses throbbing with excitement. She was conscious of having somehow ridded herself of a load of uncertainty and anxiety. She was committed now at any rate to a definite course. There had been moments of indecision—moments in which she had been inclined to revert to her first impressions of the man, which, before she had heard Davenant's story, had been favourable enough. That was all over now. That pitifully tragic figure—the man who died with a tardy fortune in his hands, an outcast in a far off country—had stirred in her heart a passionate sympathy—reason even gave way before it. She declared war against Mr. Scarlett Trent.
Ernestine walked from Lincoln's Inn to the office of the Hour, where she stayed until nearly four. Then, having finished her day's work, she made her way homewards. Davenant was waiting for her in her rooms. She greeted him with some surprise.
“You told me that I might come to tea,” he reminded her. “If you're expecting any one else, or I'm in the way at all, don't mind saying so, please!”
She shook her head.
“I'm certainly not expecting any one,” she said. “To tell you the truth my visiting-list is a very small one; scarcely any one knows where I live. Sit down, and I will ring for tea.”
He looked at her curiously. “What a colour you have, Ernestine!” he remarked. “Have you been walking fast?”
She laughed softly, and took off her hat, straightening the wavy brown hair, which had escaped bounds a little, in front of the mirror. She looked at herself long and thoughtfully at the delicately cut but strong features, the clear, grey eyes and finely arched eyebrows, the curving, humorous mouth and dainty chin. Davenant regarded her in amazement.
“Why, Ernestine,” he exclaimed, “are you taking stock of your good looks?”
“Precisely what I am doing,” she answered laughing. “At that moment I was wondering whether I possessed any.”
“If you will allow me,” he said, “to take the place of the mirror, I think that I could give you any assurances you required.”
She shook her head.
“You might be more flattering,” she said, “but you would be less faithful.”
He remained standing upon the hearthrug. Ernestine returned to the mirror.
“May I know,” he asked, “for whose sake is this sudden anxiety about your appearance?”
She turned away and sat in a low chair, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes fixed upon vacancy.
“I have been wondering,” she said, “whether if I set myself to it as to a task I could make a man for a moment forget himself—did I say forget?—I mean betray!”
“If I were that man,” he remarked smiling, “I will answer for it that you could.”
“You! But then you are only a boy, you have nothing to conceal, and you are partial to me, aren't you? No, the man whom I want to influence is a very different sort of person. It is Scarlett Trent.”
He frowned heavily. “A boor,” he said. “What have you to do with him? The less the better I should say.”
“And from my point of view, the more the better,” she answered. “I have come to believe that but for him my father would be alive to-day.”
“I do not understand! If you believe that, surely you do not wish to see the man—to have him come near you!”
“I want him punished!”
He shook his head. “There is no proof. There never could be any proof!”
“There are many ways,” she said softly, “in which a man can be made to suffer.”
“And you would set yourself to do this?”
“Why not? Is not anything better than letting him go scot-free? Would you have me sit still and watch him blossom into a millionaire peer, a man of society, drinking deep draughts of all the joys of life, with never a thought for the man he left to rot in an African jungle? Oh, any way of punishing him is better than that. I have declared war against Scarlett Trent.”
“How long,” he asked, “will it last?”
“Until he is in my power,” she answered slowly. “Until he has fallen back again to the ruck. Until he has tasted a little of the misery from which at least he might have saved my father!”
“I think,” he said, “that you are taking a great deal too much for granted. I do not know Scarlett Trent, and I frankly admit that I am prejudiced against him and all his class. Yet I think that he deserves his chance, like any man. Go to him and ask him, face to face, how your father died, declare yourself, press for all particulars, seek even for corroboration of his word. Treat him if you will as an enemy, but as an honourable one!”
She shook her head.
“The man,” she said, “has all the plausibility of his class. He has learned it in the money school, where these things become an art. He believes himself secure—he is even now seeking for me. He is all prepared with his story. No, my way is best.”
“I do not like your way,” he said. “It is not like you, Ernestine.”
“For the sake of those whom one loves,” she said, “one will do much that one hates. When I think that but for this man my father might still have been alive, might have lived to know how much I loathed those who sent him into exile—well, I feel then that there is nothing in the world I would not do to crush him!”
He rose to his feet—his fresh, rather boyish, face was wrinkled with care.
“I shall live to be sorry, Ernestine,” he said, “that I ever told you the truth about your father.”
“If I had discovered it for myself,” she said, “and, sooner or later, I should have discovered it, and had learned that you too had been in the conspiracy, I should never have spoken to you again as long as I lived.”
“Then I must not regret it,” he said, “only I hate the part you are going to play. I hate to think that I must stand by and watch, and say nothing.”
“There is no reason,” she said, “why you should watch it; why do you not go away for a time?”
“I cannot,” he answered sadly, “and you know why.”
She was impatient, but she looked at him for a moment with a gleam of sadness in her eyes.
“It would be much better for you,” she said, “if you would make up your mind to put that folly behind you.”
“It may be folly, but it is not the sort of folly one forgets.”
“You had better try then, Cecil,” she said, “for it is quite hopeless. You know that. Be a man and leave off dwelling upon the impossible. I do not wish to marry, and I do not expect to, but if ever I did, it would not be you!”
He was silent for a few moments—looking gloomily across at the girl, loathing the thought that she, his ideal of all those things which most become a woman, graceful, handsome, perfectly bred, should ever be brought into contact at all with such a man as this one whose confidence she was planning to gain. No, he could not go away and leave her! He must be at hand, must remain her friend.
“I wonder,” he said, “couldn't we have one of our old evenings again? Listen—”
“I would rather not,” she interrupted softly. “If you will persist in talking of a forbidden subject you must go away. Be reasonable, Cecil.”
He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again his tone was changed.
“Very well,” he said. “I will try to let things be as you wish—for the present. Now do you want to hear some news?”
She nodded.
“Of course.”
“It's about Dick—seems rather a coincidence too. He was at the Cape, you know, with a firm of surveyors, and he's been offered a post on the Gold Coast.”
“The Gold Coast! How odd! Anywhere near—?”
“The offer came from the Bekwando Company!”
“Is he going?”
“Yes.”
She was full of eager interest. “How extraordinary! He might be able to make some inquiries for me.”
He nodded.
“What there is to be discovered about Mr. Scarlett Trent, he can find out! But, Ernestine, I want you to understand this! I have nothing against the man, and although I dislike him heartily, I think it is madness to associate him in any way with your father's death.”
“You do not know him. I do!”
“I have only told you my opinion,” he answered, “it is of no consequence. I will see with your eyes. He is your enemy and he shall be my enemy. If there is anything shady in his past out there, depend upon it Dick will hear of it.”
She pushed the wavy hair back from her forehead—her eyes were bright, and there was a deep flush of colour in her cheeks. But the man was not to be deceived. He knew that these things were not for him. It was the accomplice she welcomed and not the man.
“It is a splendid stroke of fortune,” she said. “You will write to Fred to-day, won't you? Don't prejudice him either way. Write as though your interest were merely curiosity. It is the truth I want to get at, that is all. If the man is innocent I wish him no harm—only I believe him guilty.”
“There was a knock at the door—both turned round. Ernestine's trim little maidservant was announcing a visitor who followed close behind.
“Mr. Scarlett Trent.”