CHAPTER XXVI.
A DISINTERESTED PARENT.
‘A person has called to see you, ma’am. He begs to apologise for coming so late, but he has travelled a long way, and will be very thankful if you can see him.’
This is what the butler had whispered in Mrs. Treverton’s ear, handing her at the same time a card on which there was a name written—
‘Colonel Mansfield.’
At sight of this name Laura rose, whispered her excuse to Mrs. Clare, and glided quietly from the room.
‘Where have you left this gentleman?’ she asked the butler.
‘I left him in the hall, ma’am. I did not feel sure you would see him.’
‘He is related to my family,’ said Laura, faltering a little; ‘I cannot refuse to see him.’
This brief conversation occurred in the corridor leading from the servants’ hall to the front of the house. A tall man, wrapped in a loose, rough great-coat, was standing just inside the hall door, while Trimmer’s subordinate, a rustic youth in a dark-brown livery, stood at ease near the fireplace, evidently placed there to protect the mansion from any evil designs on the part of the unknown intruder.
Laura went to the stranger and gave him her hand, withouta word. She was very pale, and it was evident the visitor was as unwelcome as he was unexpected.
‘You had better come to my study,’ she said. ‘There is a good fire there. Trimmer, take candles to the study and some wine.’
‘I’d rather have brandy,’ said the stranger. ‘I am chilled to the bone. An eight hours’ journey in a cattle truck is enough to freeze the youngest blood. For a man of my age, and with chronic neuralgia, it means martyrdom.’
‘I am very sorry,’ murmured Laura, with a look in which compassion struggled against disgust. ‘Come this way. We can talk quietly in my room.’
She went upstairs, the stranger following close at her heels, to the gallery out of which John Treverton’s study, which was also her own favourite sitting-room, opened. It was the room where she and her husband had met for the first time, two years ago, on just such a night as this. It adjoined the bedroom where John Treverton was now lying. She had no desire that he should be a witness to her interview with this visitor of to-night; but she had a sense of protection in the knowledge that her husband would be within call. Hitherto, on the rare occasions when she had been constrained to meet this man, she had confronted him alone, defenceless; and she had never felt her loneliness so keenly as at those times.
‘I ought to have told John the whole truth,’ she said to herself; ‘but how could I—how could I bear to acknowledge——’
She glanced backward, with a suppressed shudder, at the man following her. They were at the door of the study by this time. She opened it, and he went in after her and shut the door behind him.
A fire was burning cheerily on the pretty, bright-looking hearth, antique in its quaint ornamentation, modern in the artistic beauty of its painted tiles and low brass fender. There were candles on the mantelpiece and on the table, where an old-fashioned spirit bottle on a silver tray cheered the soul of the wayfarer. He filled a glass of brandy and drained it without a word.
He gave a deep sigh of contentment or relief as he set down the glass.
‘That’s a little bit better,’ he said, and then he threw off his overcoat and scarf, and planted himself with his back to the fire, and the face which he turned to the light was the face of Mr. Desrolles.
The man had aged within the last six months. Every line in his face had deepened. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haggard and bloodshot. The sands of life run fast for a man whose chief nourishment is brandy.
‘Well,’ he exclaimed, in a hard, husky voice. ‘You do not welcome me very warmly, my child.’
‘I did not expect you.’
‘The surprise should be all the pleasanter. Picture to yourself, now, our meeting as it would be represented in a novel or a stage play. You would throw your arms wide apart, shriek, and rush to my breast. Do you remember Julia in the “Hunchback”? With what a yell of rapture she flings herself into Master Walter’s arms!’
‘Do you remember what Master Walter had been to Julia?’ asked Laura, looking steadily into the haggard eyes, which shifted their gaze as she looked.
‘Real life is flat and tame compared with a stage play,’ said Desrolles. ‘For my part I am heartily sick of it.’
‘I am sorry to see you looking so ill.’
‘I am a perambulating bundle of aches. There is not a muscle in my body that has not its particular pain.’
‘Can you find no relief for this complaint? Are there not baths in Germany that might cure you?’
‘I understand,’ interrupted Desrolles. ‘You would be glad to get me out of the way.’
‘I should be glad to lessen your suffering. When I last wrote to you I sent you a much larger remittance than I had ever done before, and I told you that I should allow you six hundred a year, to be paid quarterly. I thought that would be enough for all your requirements. I am grieved to hear that you have been obliged to ride in a third-class carriage in cold weather.’
‘I have been unlucky,’ answered Desrolles. ‘I have been at Boulogne; a pleasant place, but peopled with knaves. I fell among thieves, and got cleaned out. You must give me fifty or a hundred to-night, and you must not deduct it from your next quarterly payment. You are now a lady of fortune, and could afford to do three times as much as you are doing for me. Why did you not tell me you were married? Pretty treatment that from a daughter!’
‘Father,’ exclaimed Laura, looking at him with the same calm gaze which his shifting eyes had refused to meet just now, ‘do you want me to tell you the truth?’
‘Of course. Whatever else do you suppose I want?’
‘Even if it seems hard and cruel, as the truth often is?’
‘Speak away, girl. My poor old bones have been too long battered about in this world for hard words to break them.’
‘How can you ask me for a daughter’s dutiful love?’ asked Laura, in low, earnest tones. ‘How can you expect it from me? What of a father’s affection or a father’s care have you ever given to me? What do I know of your life except fraud and mystery?Have you ever approached me except in secret, and as an applicant for money?’
‘It’s a true bill,’ ejaculated Desrolles, with a laugh that ended in a groan.
‘When I was a little motherless child you gave me to the one true friend of your youth. He took me as his adopted daughter, leaving you dying, as he supposed. Years passed, and you let him believe you dead. For ten years you made no sign. Your daughter, your only child, was being reared in a stranger’s house, and you did not trouble yourself to make one inquiry about her welfare.’
‘Not directly. How do you know what measures I may have taken to get information indirectly, without compromising your future? It was for your advantage that I kept myself dark, Laura; it was for your sake that I let my old friend believe me dead. As his adopted daughter your prosperity was assured. What would your life have been with me? To save you I lent myself to a lie.’
‘I am sorry for it,’ said Laura coldly. ‘In my mind all lies are hateful. I cannot conceive that good can ever come of them.’
‘In this case good has come of my innocent deception. You are mistress of a fine estate, wife of a husband whom, as I hear, you love.’
‘With all my heart and soul.’
‘Is it too much to ask for a ray of your sunshine—a little benefit from your large wealth?’
‘I will do anything in reason,’ answered Laura, ‘but not even for my own father—had you been all that a father should be to his child—would I suffer Jasper Treverton’s wealth to be turned to evil uses. You told me that you stood alone in the world, with no one dependent on you. Surely six hundred a year is an income that should enable you to live in comfort and respectability?’
‘It will, when I have got myself clear of past liabilities. Remember that until six months ago the help you gave me amounted only to a hundred a year, except when I appealed to you, under the pressure of circumstances, for an extra trifle. A hundred a year in London, to a man in bad health, hardly served to keep the wolf from the door. I had debts to pay. I have been unfortunate in a speculation that promised well.’
‘In future you will have no occasion to speculate.’
‘True,’ said Desrolles, with a sigh, as he filled himself another glass of brandy.
Laura watched him with a face full of pain. Was this a father she could acknowledge to the husband she loved? Only with deepest shame could she confess her close kindred with a creature so sunk in degradation.
Desrolles drank the brandy at a gulp, and then flung himself into the chair by the hearth.
‘And pray how long have you been married?’ he asked.
Laura’s face crimsoned at the question. It was just the one inquiry calculated to give her acutest pain; for it recalled all that was painful in the circumstances of her marriage.
‘We were married on the last day of last year,’ she said.
‘You have been a year married, and I only learn the fact to-night from the village gossips at the inn where I stopped to eat a crust of bread and cheese on my way here!’
‘You might have seen the announcement in theTimes.’
‘I might, but did not. Well, I suppose I surrendered a father’s rights when I gave my child to another man’s keeping; but it seems hard.’
‘Why pain yourself and me with useless reproaches? I am prepared to do all that duty can dictate. I am deeply anxious that your future life should be comfortable and respected. Tell me where you intend to live, and how I can best assure your happiness.’
‘Happiness!’ cried Desrolles, with a derisive shrug. ‘I have never known that since I was five-and-twenty. Where am I going to live, do you ask? Who knows? Not I, you may be sure. I am a wanderer by habit and inclination. Do you think I am going to shut myself in a speculative builder’s brick and mortar box—a semi-detached villa in Camden Town or Islington—and live the monotonous life of a respectable annuitant? That kind of vegetation may suit a retired tradesman, who has spent three-fourths of his life behind the same counter. It would be living death to a man with a mind—a man who has travelled and lived among his fellow-men. No, my dear; you must not attempt to limit my movements by the inch-measure of middle-class respectability. Give me my pittance unfettered by conditions of any kind. Let me receive it quarterly from your London agent, and, since you repudiate my claim to your affection, I pledge myself never again to trouble you with my presence after to-night.’
‘I do not ask that,’ said Laura thoughtfully. ‘It is only right that we should see each other sometimes. By the deception which you practised upon my benefactor, you have made it impossible that I should ever own you as my father before the world. Everybody in Hazlehurst believes that my father died when Jasper Treverton adopted me. But to my husband, at least, I can own the truth: I have shrunk from doing so hitherto, but to-night, while we have been sitting here, I have been thinking that I have acted weakly and foolishly. John Treverton will respect your secret for my sake, and he ought to know it.’
‘Stop,’ cried Desrolles, starting to his feet, and speaking in alouder tone than he had used hitherto. ‘I forbid you to breathe a word of me or my business to your husband. When I revealed myself to you I pledged you to secrecy. I insist——’
He stopped and stood facing the doorway between the two rooms, staring aghast, horror-stricken, as if he had seen a ghost.
‘Great heaven!’ he exclaimed, ‘what brings you here?’
John Treverton stood in the open doorway, a tall, dark figure, in a long velvet dressing-gown. Laura flew to his side.
‘Dearest, why did you get up?’ she cried. ‘How imprudent of you!’
‘I heard a voice raised as if threateningly. What has brought this man here—with you?’
‘He is the relation about whom you once questioned me, John,’ Laura answered, falteringly. ‘You have not forgotten?’
‘This man related to you?’ cried Treverton. ‘This man?’
‘Yes. You know each other?’
‘We have met before,’ answered Treverton, who had never taken his eyes from the other man’s face. ‘We last met under very painful circumstances. It is a surprise to find a relation of yours in Mr.——’
‘Mansfield,’ interrupted Desrolles. ‘I have changed the name of Malcolm for Mansfield—a name in my mother’s family—for Laura’s sake. It might be disadvantageous for her to own kindred with a man whom the world has played football with for the last ten years.’
Desrolles had grown ashy pale since the entrance of Laura’s husband, and the hand with which he poured out his third glass of brandy shook like a leaf.
‘Highly considerate on your part, Mr. Mansfield,’ replied John Treverton. ‘May I ask for what reason you have favoured my wife with this late visit?’
‘The usual motive that brings a poor relation to a rich man’s house. I want money, and Laura can afford to give it. Why beat about the bush?’
‘Why indeed! Plain dealing will be best in this case. I think, as it is a simple matter of business, you had better let me arrange it with you. Laura, will you leave your kinsman’s claims for me to settle? You may trust me to take a liberal view of his position.’
‘I will trust you, dearest, now and always,’ answered his wife, giving him her hand, and then she went to Desrolles, and offered him the same frank hand, looking at him with tender earnestness. ‘Good night,’ she said, ‘and good-bye. I beg you to trust my husband, as I trust him. Believe me, it will be the best for all of us. He will be as ready to recognise your claim as I am, if you will only confide in him. If I have trusted him with my life, cannot you trust him with your secret?’
‘Good night,’ said Desrolles curtly. ‘I haven’t got over my astonishment yet.’
‘At what?’
‘At finding you married.’
‘Good night,’ she said again, on the threshold of the door, and then she came back to tell her husband not to fatigue or excite himself. ‘I can only give you a quarter of an hour,’ she said to Desrolles. ‘Pray remember that my husband is an invalid, and ought to be in bed.’
‘Go to your school children, dearest,’ said Treverton, smiling at her anxiety. ‘I shall be careful.’
The door closed behind Laura, and the two men—fellow-lodgers a year ago in Cibber Street—stood face to face with each other.
‘So you are John Treverton?’ said Desrolles, wiping his lips with that tremulous hand of his, and looking with a hungry eye at the half-empty decanter, looking anywhere rather than straight into the eyes of his fellow-man.
‘And you claim relationship with my wife?’
‘Nearer, perhaps, than you would care to hear; so near that I have some right to know how you, Jack Chicot, came to be her husband—how it was that you married her a year ago, at which period the lovely and accomplished Madame Chicot, whom I had the honour to know, was still living? Either that charming woman was not your wife, or your marriage with Laura Malcolm is invalid.’
‘Laura is my wife, and her marriage as valid as law can make it,’ answered John Treverton. ‘That is enough for you to know. And now be good enough to explain your degree of kindred with Mrs. Treverton. You say your real name is Malcolm. What was your relationship with Laura’s father?’
‘Laura urged me to trust you with my secret,’ muttered Desrolles, throwing himself into his former seat by the fire, and speaking like a man who is calculating the chances of a certain line of policy. ‘Why should I not be frank with you, Jack—Treverton? How much handier the old name comes! Had you been the punctilious piece of respectability I expected to meet in the heir of my old friend Jasper Treverton, I might have shrank from telling you a secret that hardly redounds to my credit, from the churchgoer and ratepayer’s point of view. But to you—Jack—the artist and Bohemian, the man who has tumbled on every platform and acted in every show at the world’s fair—to you I may confide my secret without a blush. Come, fill me another glass, like a good fellow; my hand shakes as if I had the scrivener’s palsy. You know the history of Jasper Treverton’s adopted daughter?’
‘I have heard it, naturally.’
‘You have heard how Treverton, who had quarrelled with his friend Stephen Malcolm about a foolish love affair, was summoned many years after to that friend’s sick bed—found him dying, as every one supposed—then and there adopted Malcolm’s only child, and carried her off with him, leaving a fifty-pound note to comfort his old friend’s last moments and pay the undertaker?’
‘Yes, I have heard all this.’
‘But not what follows. When a doctor gives a patient up for dead, he is sometimes on the high road to recovery. Stephen Malcolm contrived to cheat the doctor. Perhaps it was the comfort provided by that fifty-pound note, perhaps it was the knowledge that his only child’s future was provided for,—anyhow, it seemed as if a burden had been lifted from the sick man’s shoulders, for from the time Jasper Treverton left him he mended, got a new lease of life, and went out into the world again—a lonely wayfarer, happy in the knowledge that his daughter’s fate was no longer allied with his, that whatever evil might befall him her lines were set in pleasant places.’
‘Do you mean to tell me that Stephen Malcolm recovered—lived for years—and allowed his daughter to suppose herself an orphan, and his friend to believe him dead?’
‘To tell the truth would have been to hazard his daughter’s good fortune. As an orphan, and the adopted child of a rich bachelor, her lot was secure. What would it have been if she had been flung back upon her actual father, to share his precarious existence? I considered this, and took the unselfish view of the question. I might have claimed my daughter back; I might have sponged on Jasper. I did neither—I went my solitary way, along the stony highway of life, uncheered, unloved.’
‘You!’ cried John Treverton. ‘You!’
‘Yes. In me you behold the wreck of Stephen Malcolm.’
‘You Laura’s father! Great heaven! Why, you have not a feature, not a look in common with her! Her father! This is indeed a revelation.’
‘Your astonishment is not flattering to me. My child resembles her mother, who was one of the loveliest women I ever saw. Yet I can assure you, Mr. Treverton, that at your age, Stephen Malcolm had some pretension to good looks.’
‘I am not disputing that, man. You may have been as handsome as Adonis; but my Laura’s father should have at least something of her look and air; a smile, a glance, a turn of the head, a something that would reveal the mystic link between parent and child. Does she know this? Does she recognise you as her father?’
‘She does, poor child. It is at her wish I have revealed myself to you.’
‘How long has she known?’
‘It is a little more than five years since I told her. I had just returned from the Continent, where I had spent seven years of my life in self-imposed exile. Suddenly I was seized with the outcast’s yearning to tread his native soil again, and look upon the scenes of youth once more before death closes his eyes for ever. I came back—could not resist the impulse that drew me to my daughter—put myself one day in her pathway, and told her my story. From that time I have seen her at intervals.’
‘And have received money from her,’ put in John Treverton.
‘She is rich and I am poor. She has helped me to live.’
‘You might have lived upon the money she gave you a little more reputably than you were living in Cibber Street, when we were fellow-lodgers.’
‘What were my vices in Cibber Street? My life was inoffensive.’
‘Late hours and the brandy bottle—the ruin of body and soul.’
‘I have a chronic malady which makes brandy a necessity for me.’
‘Would it not be more exact to say that brandy is your chronic malady? Well, Mr. Mansfield, I shall make a proposition to you in the character of your son-in-law.’
‘I have a few words to say to you before you make it. I have told you my secret, which all the world may know, and welcome. I have committed no crime in allowing my old friend to suppose me dead. I have only sacrificed my own interests to the advantage of my daughter; but you, Mr. Treverton, have your secret, and one which I think you would hardly like to lay bare to the world in which you are now such an important personage. The master of Hazlehurst Manor would scarcely care to be identified with Jack Chicot, the caricaturist, and husband—at least by common repute—of the dancer whose name used to adorn all the walls of London.’
‘No,’ said Treverton, ‘that is a dark page in my life which I would willingly tear out of the book; but I have always known the probability of my finding myself identified with the past, sooner or later. This world of ours is monstrous big when a man tries to make a figure in it; but it’s very small when he wants to hide himself from his fellow-men. I have told my wife all I can tell her without stripping the veil from that past life of mine. To reveal more would be to make her unhappy. You can have no motive for telling her more than I have told her. I can rely on your honour in this matter?’
‘You can,’ answered Desrolles, looking at him curiously; ‘but I shall expect you to treat me handsomely—as a son-in-law, whose wealth has come to him through his marriage, should treat his wife’s father.’
‘What would you call handsome treatment?’ asked Treverton.
‘I’ll tell you. My daughter, who has a woman’s petty notions about money, has offered me six hundred a year. I want a thousand.’
‘Do you?’ asked Treverton, with half-concealed contempt. ‘Well, live a respectable life, and neither your daughter nor I will grudge you a thousand a year.’
‘I shall live the life of a gentleman. Not in England. My daughter wants to get me out of the country. She said as much just now; or, at any rate, what she did say implied as much. A continental life would suit my humour, and perhaps mend my health. Annuitants are long-lived.’
‘Not when they drink a bottle of brandy a day.’
‘In a milder climate I may diminish the quantity. Give me a hundred in ready money to begin with, and I’ll go back to London by the first train to-morrow morning, and start for Paris at night. I ask for no father’s place at your Christmas table. I don’t want you to kill the fatted calf for me.’
‘I understand,’ said Treverton, with an involuntary sneer, ‘you only want money. You shall have it.’
He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, and unlocked a despatch box, in which he was in the habit of keeping money received from his steward before he sent it off to the bank. There was a little over a hundred pounds in the box, in notes and gold. John Treverton counted a hundred; the crisp notes, the bright gold, lay in a tempting heap on the table before him, but he kept his hand upon the money for a minute or two, while he sat looking at it with a meditative countenance.
‘By the way, Mr. —— Mansfield,’ he began after that thoughtful silence, ‘when, after a lapse of so many years, you presented yourself to your daughter, what credentials did you bring with you?’
‘Credentials?’
‘Yes. In other words, how did you prove your identity? You had parted with her when she was a child of six years old. Did her memory recall your features when she met you as a girl of seventeen, or did she take your word for the fact that you were the father she had believed to be in his grave?’
‘She remembered me when I recalled myself to her. At first her memory was naturally vague. She had a dim recollection of my face, but no certainty as to when and where she had last seen it, until I recalled to her the circumstances of her childhood, the last days we spent together before my serious illness, her mother, the baby brother that died when she was three years old. John Treverton, you libel nature if you suppose that a daughter’s instinct can fail her when a father appeals to it. Had materialproofs been wanted to convince my child that her father stood before her, I had those proofs, and I showed them to her—old letters, the certificate of her birth, her mother’s picture. The portrait I gave to Laura. I have the documents about me to-night. I have never parted with them.’
He produced a bloated pocket-book, the leather worn greasy with long usage, the silk lining frayed and ragged, and from this receptacle brought forth half-a-dozen papers, yellow with age.
One was the certificate of Laura Malcolm’s birth. The other five were letters addressed to Stephen Malcolm, Esq., Ivy Cottage, Chiswick. One of these, the latest in date, was from Jasper Treverton.
‘I am deeply grieved to hear of your serious illness, my poor friend,’ he wrote; ‘your letter followed me to Germany, where I have been spending the autumn at one of the famous mineral baths. I started for England immediately, and landed here half-an-hour ago. I shall come on as fast as rail and cabs can bring me, and indeed hope to be with you before you get this letter.
‘Yours in all friendship,‘Jasper Treverton.
‘The Ship Hotel, Dover,
‘October 15th, 185—.’
The other letters were from friends of the past, like Jasper. One had enclosed aid in the shape of a post-office order. The rest were sympathetic and regretful refusals to assist a broken-down acquaintance. The writers offered their impecunious friend every good wish, and benevolently commended him to Providence. In every case the respectability and the respectful tone of Stephen Malcolm’s correspondents went far to testify to the fact that he had once been a gentleman. There was a deep descent from the position of the man to whom these letters were written to the status of Mr. Desrolles, the second-floor lodger in Cibber Street.
So far as they went his credentials were undeniable. Laura had recognised him as her father. What justification could John Treverton find for repudiating his claim? For the money the man demanded he cared not a jot; but it pained him unspeakably to accept this dissipated waif, soaked in alcohol, as the father of the woman he loved.
‘There is your hundred pounds, Mr. Mansfield,’ he said, ‘and since you have taught the little world of Hazlehurst to consider my wife an orphan, the less you show yourself here the better for all of us. Villages are given to scandal. If you were to be seen at this house, people would want to know who you are and all about you.’
‘I told you I should start for Paris to-morrow night,’ answered Desrolles, strapping his pocket-book, which was now distended to its uttermost with notes and gold. ‘I shan’t change my mind.I’m fond of Paris and Parisian ways, and know my way about that glorious city almost as well as you, though I never married a French wife.’
John Treverton sat silent, with his thoughtful gaze bent on the fire, apparently unconscious of the other man’s sneer.
‘Ta ta, Jack. Any message for your old friends in the Quartier Latin? No? Ah, I suppose the Squire of Hazlehurst has turned his back on the companions of Jack Chicot; just as King Harry the Fifth threw off the joyous comrades of the Prince of Wales. The desertion broke poor old Falstaff’s heart; but that’s a detail. Good night, Jack.’
Laura re-entered the room at this moment, and drew back startled at hearing her father address her husband with such friendly familiarity.
‘I have told Mr. Treverton everything, my dear,’ said Desrolles.
‘I am so glad of that,’ answered Laura, and then she laid her hand upon the old man’s shoulder, with more affection than she had ever yet shown him, and said, with grave gentleness, ‘Try to lead a good life, my dear father, and let us hear from you sometimes, and let us think of each other kindly, though Fate has separated us.’
‘A good life,’ he muttered, turning his bloodshot eyes upon her for a moment with a look that thrilled her with a sudden horror. ‘The money should have come sooner, my girl. I’ve travelled too far on the wrong road. There, good-bye, my dear. Don’t trouble yourself about an old scapegrace like me. Jack, send me my money quarterly to that address,’—he threw down a dingy-looking card—‘and I’ll never worry you again. You can blot me out of your mind, if you like; and you need never fear that my tongue will say an evil word of you, go where I may.’
‘I will trust you for that,’ answered John Treverton, holding out his hand.
Desrolles either did not see the gesture, or did not care to take the hand. He snatched up his greasy-looking hat and hurried from the room.
‘Dearest, do you think any worse of me now you know that man is my father?’ asked Laura, when the door had closed upon Desrolles, and the bell had been rung to warn Trimmer of the guest’s departure.
‘Do I think any worse of a pearl because it comes out of an oyster?’ said her husband, smiling at her. ‘Dear love, if the parish workhouse were peopled with your relations, not one of them more reputable than Mr. Mansfield, my love and reverence for you would not be lessened by a tittle.’
‘You don’t believe in hereditary genius, then. You don’t think that we derive our characters mainly from our fathers and mothers?’
‘If I did I should believe that your mother was an angel, and that you inherited her disposition.’
‘My poor father,’ said Laura, with something between a sigh and a shudder. ‘He was once a gentleman.’
‘No doubt, love. There is no saying how low a man may descend when he once takes to travelling down-hill.’
‘If he had not been a gentleman my adopted father could never have been his friend,’ mused Laura. ‘It would not have been possible for Jasper Treverton to associate with anything base.’
‘No, love. And now tell me, when first your father presented himself to you, was not his revelation a great surprise, a shock to your feelings?’
‘It was indeed.’
‘Tell me, dear, how it happened. Tell me all the circumstances, if it does not pain you.’
‘No, dear. It pained me for you to know that my father had fallen so low, but now that you know the worst, I feel easier in my mind. It is a relief to me to be able to speak of him freely. Remember, Jack, he had bound me solemnly to secrecy. I would not break my promise, even to you.’
‘I understand all, dear.’
‘The first time I saw my father,’ Laura began falteringly, as if even to speak of him by that sacred name were painful to her, ‘it was summer time, a lovely August evening, and I had strolled out after dinner into the orchard. You know the gate that opens from the orchard into the field. I saw a man standing outside it smoking, with his arms resting on the top of the gate. Seeing a stranger there, I turned away to avoid him, but before I had gone three steps he stopped me. “Miss Malcolm, for God’s sake let me speak to you,” he said. “I am an old friend whom you must remember.” I went up to him and looked him full in the face; for there was such earnestness in his manner that it never occurred to me that he might be an impostor. “Indeed, I do not remember you,” I said. “When have I ever seen you?” Then he called me by my Christian name. “Laura,” he said, “you were six years old when Mr. Treverton brought you here. Have you quite forgotten the life that went before that time?”’
She paused, and her husband drew her to the low chair by the fire, and seated himself beside her, letting her head rest on his shoulder.
‘Go on, love,’ he said gently, ‘but not if these memories agitate you.’
‘No, dear. It is a relief to confide in you. I told him that I did remember the time before I came to the Manor House. Some events I could remember distinctly, others faintly, like the shadows in a dream. I remembered being in France, by the sea,in a place where the fisherwomen wore bright-coloured petticoats and high caps, where I had children of my own age to play with, and where the sun seemed always shining. And then that life had changed to dull gray days in a place near a river, a place where there were narrow lanes, and country roads and fields; and yet there was a town close by with tall chimneys and busy streets. I remembered that here my mother was ill, lying in a darkened room for many weeks; and then one day my father took me to London in the omnibus, and left me in a large, cold-looking house in a great square—a house where all the rooms were big and lofty, and had an awful look after our little parlour at home, and where I used to sit in a drawing-room all day with an old lady in black satin, who let me amuse myself as best I could. My father had told me that the old lady was his aunt, and that I was to call her aunt, but I was too much afraid of her to call her anything. I think I must have stayed there about a week, but it seemed ages, for I was very unhappy, and used to cry myself to sleep every night, when the maid had put me to bed in a large, bleak room at the top of the house; and then my father came and took me home again in the red omnibus. I could see that he was very unhappy, and while we were walking in the lane that led to our house he told me that my dear mamma had gone away, and that I should never see her again in this world. I had loved her passionately, Jack, and the loss almost broke my heart. I am telling you much more than I told the stranger. I only said enough to him to prove that I remembered my old life.’
‘And how did he reply?’
‘He took a morocco case from his pocket and gave it into my hand, telling me to look at the portrait inside it. Oh, how well I remembered that sweet face! The memory of it flashed upon me like a dream one has forgotten and tried vainly to recall, till it comes back suddenly in a breath. Yes, it was my mother’s face. I could remember her looking just like that as she sat at work on the rocks by the sands where I played with the other children, at that happy place in France. I remembered her sitting by my cot every night before I fell asleep. I asked the stranger how he came to possess this picture. “I would give all the money I have in the world for it,” I said. “You shall do nothing of the kind,” he answered. “I give it you as a free gift, but I should not have done that if you had not remembered your mother’s face. And now, Laura, look at me and tell me if you have ever seen me before?”’
‘You looked and could not remember him,’ said John Treverton.
‘No. Yet there was something in the face that seemed familiar to me. When he spoke I knew that I had heard thevoice before. It seemed kind and friendly, like the voice of some one I had known long ago. He told me to try and realize what change ten years of evil fortune would make in a man’s looks. It was not time only which had altered him, he told me, but the world’s ill-usage, bad health, hard work, corroding sorrow. “Make allowance for all this,” he said, “and look at me with indulgent eyes, and then try to send your thoughts back to that old life at Chiswick, and say what part I had in it.” I did look at him very earnestly, and the more I looked the more familiar the face grew. “I think you must be a friend of my father’s,” I said at last. “Poverty has no friends,” he answered; “at the time you remember your father was friendless. Oh, child, child, can ten years blot out a father’s image? I am your father.”’
Laura paused, with quickened breathing, recalling the agitation of that moment.
‘I cannot tell you how I felt when he said this,’ she continued, presently. ‘I thought I was going to fall fainting at his feet. My brain clouded over; I could understand nothing; and then, when my senses came slowly back, I asked him how this could be true? Did not my father die a few hours after I was taken away by Jasper Treverton? My benefactor had told me that it was so. Then he—my father—said that he had allowed Jasper Treverton to suppose him dead, for my sake; in order that I might be the adopted child of a rich man, and well placed in life, while he—my real father—was a waif and stray, and a pauper. Mr. Treverton had received a letter announcing his old friend’s death—a letter written in a feigned hand by my father himself and had never taken the trouble to inquire into the particulars of the death and burial. He felt that he had done enough in leaving money for the sick man’s use, and in relieving him of all care about his daughter. This is what my father told me. How could I reproach him, Jack, or despise him for this deception, for a falsehood which so degraded him? It was for my sake he had sinned.’
‘And you had no doubt as to his identity? You were fully assured that he was that very father whom you had supposed dead and buried ten years before?’
‘How could I doubt? He showed me papers—letters—that could have belonged to no one but my father. He gave me my mother’s portrait; and then, through the mist of years, his face came back to me as a face that had been very familiar; his voice had the sound of long ago.’
‘Did you give him money on this first meeting?’
‘He told me that he was poor, a broken-down gentleman, without a profession, with bad health, and no means of earning his living. Could I, his daughter, living in luxury, refrainfrom offering him all the help in my power? I begged him to reveal himself to Mr. Treverton—papa, as you know I always called him—but he shrank, not unnaturally, from acknowledging a deception that placed him in such a false position. “No,” he said, “I told a lie for your sake, I must stick to it for my own.” I could not urge him to alter his resolution upon this point, for I felt how hard it would be for him to stand face to face with his old friend under such degrading circumstances. I promised to keep his secret, and I told him that I would send him all the money I could possibly spare out of my income, if he would give me an address to which I might send it.’
‘How often did you see him after this?’ asked John Treverton.
‘Before to-night, only three times. One of those occasions was the night on which you saw me admit him at the garden-door.’
‘True,’ said Treverton, blushing as he remembered the cruel suspicions that had been awakened in his mind by that secret interview. ‘And you never told my cousin anything about your father?’
‘Never. He made me promise to keep his existence a secret from all the world; and even if I had not been so bound I should have shrunk from telling Mr. Treverton the cheat that had been practised upon him; for I felt that it was a cheat, however disinterested and generous the motive.’
‘A purposeless cheat, I should imagine,’ said John musingly, ‘for once having promised to take care of you, I should hardly think that my cousin Jasper would have flung you back upon poverty and gloomy days. No, love, once knowing your sweetness, your truthful, loving nature, it would not have been human to give you up.’
‘My poor father thought otherwise, unhappily.’
‘Dearest love, do not let this error of your father’s cast a shadow upon your life. I, who have known the shifts and straits to which poverty may bring a man, can pity and in some measure understand him. We will do all that liberality can do to make the remnant of his days respectable and happy.’