"From Italy!" repeated Victoria, wondering—"who on earth—Did they give their name?"
"No, my lady, they said you'd know them quite well."
Victoria hurried on to the drawing-room. Two figures rose as she entered the room, which was only lit by the firelight; and then stood motionless.
Victoria advanced bewildered.
"Will you kindly tell me your names?"
"Don't you remember me, Lady Tatham?" said a low, excited voice.
Victoria turned on an electric switch close to her hand, and the room was suddenly in a blaze of light. She looked in scrutinizing astonishment at the figure in dingy black, standing before her, and at a girl, looking about sixteen—deathly pale—who seemed to be leaning on a chair in the background.
That strange, triangular face, with the sharp chin, and the abnormal eyes—where, in what dim past, had she seen it before? For some seconds memory wrestled. Then, old and new came together; and she recognized her visitor.
"Mrs. Melrose!" she said, in incredulous amazement. The woman in black came nearer, and spoke brokenly—the bitter emotion beneath gradually forcing its way.
"I am in great distress—I don't know what to do. My daughter and I are starving—and I remembered you'd come to see me—that once—at Threlfall. I knew all about you. I've asked English people often. I thought perhaps you'd help me—you'd tell me how to make my husband do something for me—for me—and for his daughter! Look at her"—Netta paused and pointed—"she's ill—she's dropping. We had to hurry through from Lucca. We couldn't afford to stop on the way. We sold everything we had; some people collected a hundred francs for us; and we just managed to buy our tickets. Felicia didn't want to come, but I made her. I couldn't see her die before my eyes. We've starved for months. We've parted with everything, and I've written to Mr. Melrose again and again. He's never answered—till a few weeks ago, and he said if we troubled him again he'd stop the money. He's a bad, bad man."
Shaking, her teeth chattering, her hands clenched at her side, the forlorn creature stared at Victoria. She was not old, but she was a wreck; a withered, emaciated wreck of the woman Victoria had once seen twenty years before.
Victoria, laying a gentle hand upon her, drew an armchair forward.
"Sit down, please, and rest. You shall have food directly. I will have rooms got ready. And this is your daughter?"
She went up to the girl who stood shivering like her mother, and speechless. But her proud black eyes met Victoria's with a passion in them that seemed to resent a touch, a look. "She ought to be lovely!" thought Victoria; "she is—if one could feed and dress her."
"You poor child! Come and lie down."
She took hold of the girl and guided her to a sofa. When they reached it, the little creature fell half fainting upon it. But she controlled herself by an astonishing effort, thanked Victoria in Italian, and curling herself up in a corner she closed her eyes. The white profile on the dark sofa cushion was of a most delicate perfection, and as Victoria helped to remove her hat she saw a small dark head covered with short curls like a boy's.
Netta Melrose looked round the beautiful room, its pictures, its deep sofas and chairs, its bright fire, and then at the figures of Victoria and the housekeeper in the distance. Victoria was giving her orders. The tears were on Netta's cheeks. Yet she had the vague, ineffable feeling of one just drawn from the waves. She had done right. She had saved herself and Felicia.
Food was brought, and wine. They were coaxed to eat, warmed and comforted. Then Victoria took them up through the broad, scented passages of the beautiful house to rooms that had been got ready for them.
"Don't talk any more to-night. You shall tell me everything to-morrow. My maid will help you. I will come back presently to see you have everything you want."
Felicia, frowning, wished to unpack their small hand-bag, with its shabby contents, for herself. But she was too feeble, and the maid, in spite of what seemed to the two forlorn ones her fine clothes and fine ways, was kind and tactful. Victoria's wardrobe was soon laid under contribution; beautiful linen, and soft silken things she possessed but seldom wore, were brought out for her destitute guests.
Victoria came in to say good-night. Netta looked at the stately woman, the hair just beginning to be gray, the strong face with its story of fastidious thought, of refined and sheltered living.
"You're awfully good to us. It's twenty years!—" Her voice failed her.
"Twenty years—yes, indeed! since I drove over to see you that time! Your daughter was a little toddling thing."
"We've had such a life—these last few years—oh, such an awful life! My old father's still alive—but would be better if he were dead. My mother depended on us entirely—she's dead. But I'll explain everything—everything."
It was clear, however, that till sleep had knit up the ravelled nerves of the poor lady, no coherent conversation was possible. Victoria hastened to depart.
"To-morrow you shall tell me all about yourself. My son will be home to-morrow. We will consult him and see what can be done."
Mother and daughter were left alone. Felicia rose feebly to go to her own room, which adjoined her mother's. She was wearing a dressing-gown of embroidered silk—pale blue, and shimmering—which Victoria's maid had wrapped her in, after the child's travelling clothes, thread-bare and mud-stained, had been taken off. The girl's tiny neck and wrists emerged from it, her little head, and her face from which weariness and distress had robbed all natural bloom. What she was wearing, or how she looked, she did not know and did not care. But her mother, in whom dress had been for years a passion never to be indulged, was suddenly—though all her exhaustion—enchanted with her daughter's appearance.
"Oh, Felicia, you look so nice!"
She took up the silk of the dressing-gown and passed it through her fingers covetously; then her tired eyes ran over the room, the white bed standing ready, the dressing-table with its silver ornaments and flowers, the chintz-covered sofas and chairs.
"Why shouldn't we be rich too?" she said angrily. "Your father is richer than the Tathams. It's a wicked, wicked shame!"
Felicia put her hand to her head.
"Oh, do let me go to bed," she said in Italian.
Netta put her arm round her, supporting her. Presently they passed a portrait on the wall, an enlarged photograph of a boy in cricketing dress.
Underneath it was written:
"Harry. Eton Eleven. July 189—-."
Felicia for the first time showed a gleam of interest. She stopped to look at the picture.
"Who is it?"
"It must be her son, Lord Tatham."
The girl's sunken eyes seemed to drink in the pleasant image of the
English boy.
"Shall we see him?"
"Of course. To-morrow. Now come to bed!"
Felicia's head was no sooner on the pillow than she plunged into sleep. Netta, on the other hand, was for a long time sleepless. The luxury of the bed and the room was inexpressibly delightful and reviving to her. Recollections of a small bare house in the Apuan Alps above Lucca, and of all that she and Felicia had endured there, ran through her mind, mingled with visions of Threlfall as she had known it of old, its choked passages—the locked room from which she had stolen the Hermes—the great table in Edmund's room with its litter of bric-à-brac—Edmund himself….
She trembled; alternately desperate, and full of fears. The thought that Melrose was only a few miles from her—that she was going to face and brave him after all these years—turned her cold with terror. And yet misery had made her reckless.
"He shall provide for us!" She gathered up her weak soul into this supreme resolve. How wise she had been to follow the sudden impulse which had bade her appeal to the Tathams! Were they not her kinsfolk by marriage?
They knew what Edmund was! They were kind and powerful. They would protect her, and take up her cause. Edmund was now an old man. If he died, who else had a right to his money but she and Felicia? Oh! Lady Tatham would help them; she'd see them righted! Cradled in that hope, Netta Melrose at last fell asleep.
XIV
Tatham arrived at Duddon by the earliest possible train on the following morning.
On crossing the hall he perceived in the distance a very slight thin girl, dressed in black, coming out of his mother's sitting-room. When she saw him she turned hurriedly to the stairs and ran up, only pausing once on the first landing to flash upon him a singularly white face, lit by singularly black eyes. Then she disappeared.
"Who is that lady?" he asked of Hurst in astonishment.
"Her ladyship expects you, my lord," replied Hurst evasively, throwing open the door of the morning-room. Victoria was disclosed; pacing up and down, her hands in the pockets of her tweed jacket. Tatham saw at once that something had happened.
She put her hands on his shoulders, kissed him, and delivered her news. She did so with a peculiar and secret zest. To watch how he took the fresh experiences of life, and to be exultantly proud and sure of him the while, was all part of her adoration of him.
"Melrose's wife and daughter! Great Scot! So they're not dead?" Tatham stood amazed.
"He seems to have done his best to kill them. They're starved—and destitute. But here they are."
"And why in the name of fortune do they come to us?"
"We are cousins, my dear—and I saw her twenty years ago. It isn't a bad move. Indeed the foolish woman might have come before."
"But what on earth can we do for them?"
The young man sat down bewildered, while his mother told the story, piecing it together from the rambling though copious narrative, which she had gathered that morning from Netta in her bed, where she had been forced to remain, at least for breakfast.
After her flight, Melrose's fugitive wife had settled down with her child in Florence, under the wing of her own family. But they were a shiftless, importunate crew, and, in the course of years, every one of them came more or less visibly to grief. Her sisters married men of the same dubious world as themselves, and were always in difficulties. Netta's eldest brother got into trouble with the bank where he was employed, and another brother, as a deserter from the army, had to make his escape to South America. The father, Robert Smeath, had found it more and more difficult to earn anything on which to keep his belongings, and as a picture dealer seemed to have fallen into bad odour with the Italian authorities, for reasons of which Netta could give no account.
"And how much do you think Mr. Melrose allowed his wife and child?" asked Victoria, her eyes sparkling. "Eighty pounds a year!—on which in the end the whole family seem to have lived. Finally, the mother died, and Mr. Smeath got into some scrape or other—I naturally avoided the particulars—which involved pledging half Mrs. Melrose's allowance for five years. And on the rest—forty pounds—she and her daughter, and her old father have been trying to live for the last two. You never heard such a story! They found a small half-ruined villa in the mountains north of Pisa, and there they somehow existed. They couldn't afford nursing or doctoring for the old father; they were half starved; the mother and daughter have both actually worked in the vineyards; and, of course, they had no servant. You should see the poor woman's hands! Then she began to write to her husband. No reply—for eighteen months, no reply—till just lately, an intimation from the Florentine bank, that if any more similar letters were addressed to Mr. Melrose the allowance would be stopped."
"Old fiend!" cried Tatham, "now we'll get at him!"
Victoria went on to describe how, at last, an English family who had taken one of the old villas on the Luccan Alps for the summer had come across the forlorn trio. They were scandalized by the story, and they had impressed on Mrs. Melrose that she and her daughter had a legal right to suitable maintenance from her husband. Urged by them—and starvation—Netta had at last plucked up courage. The old father was left in the charge of a contadino family, a small loan was raised for them to which the English visitors contributed, and the mother and daughter started for home.
"But without us, or some one else to help her," said Victoria, "she would never—never!—get through the business. Her terror of Melrose is a perfect disease. She shakes if you mention his name. That was what made her think of me—and that visit I paid her. Poor thing! she was rather pretty then. But it was plain enough what their relations were. Well, now, Harry, it's for you to say. But my blood's up! I suggest we see this thing through!"
The door slowly opened as she spoke, and two small figures came in silently, closing it behind them. There they stood, a story in themselves; Netta, with the bearing and the dress of a shabby little housekeeper; the girl ghastly thin, her shoulder-blades cutting her flimsy dress, blue shadows in all the hollows of the face, but with extraordinary pride of bearing, and extraordinary possibilities of beauty in the modelling of her delicate features, and splendid melancholy eyes. Tatham could not help staring at her. She was indeed the disinherited princess.
Then he walked up to them, and shook hands with boyish heartiness.
"I say, you do look pumped out! But don't you worry too much. My mother and I'll see what can be done. We'll set the lawyers on, if there's nothing else. It's a beastly shame, anyway! But now, you take it easy. We'll look after you. Sit down, won't you? Mother's chairs are the most comfortable in the house!"
He installed them; and then at once took the serious, business air, which still gave his mother a pleasure which was half amusement. Felicia, sitting in a corner behind her mother's sofa, could not take her eyes from him. The tall, fair English youth, six foot two, and splendidly developed, the pink of health, modesty, and kindly courtesy, was different from all other beings that had ever swum into her view. She watched him close and furtively—his features, his dress, his gestures; comparing the living man in her mind with the photograph upstairs, and so absorbed in her study of him that she scarcely heard a word of the triangular discussion going on between her mother, Tatham, and Victoria. The whole time she was drinking in impressions, as of a god-like creature, all beneficence.
After an hour's cross-examination of the poor, shrinking Netta, Tatham's blood too was up; he was eager for the fray. To attack Melrose was a joy; made none the less keen by the reflection that to help these two helpless ones was a duty. Lydia's approval, Lydia's sympathy were certain; he kindled the more.
"All right!" he said, rising. "Now I think we are agreed on the first step. Faversham is our man. I must see Faversham at once, and set him to work! If I find him, I will report the result to you, Mrs. Melrose—so far—by luncheon time."
He departed, to ring up the Threlfall office in Pengarth and inquire whether Faversham could be seen there. Victoria left the room with him.
"Have you forgotten these rumours of which Undershaw wrote you?"
"What, as to Faversham? No, I have not forgotten them. But I shan't take any notice of them. He can't accept anything for himself till these two have got their due! What right has he to Melrose's property at all?" said the young man indignantly.
* * * * *
The mother and son had scarcely left the room when Netta turned to her daughter with trembling lips.
"I haven't"—half whispering—"told them anything about the Hermes!"
"It was no theft!" said Felicia passionately. "I would tell anybody!"
Netta was silent, her face working with unspoken fear. Suddenly, Felicia said in her foreign English, pronounced with a slight effort, and very precisely:
"That is a very beautiful young man!"
Netta was startled.
"Lord Tatham? Not at all, Felicia. He is very nice, but I do not even call him good-looking."
"He is a very beautiful young man," repeated Felicia with emphasis, "and
I am going to marry him!"
"Felicia! for heaven's sake—do not show your mad ways here!" cried
Netta, white with new alarm.
For the first time for many, many days Felicia smiled. She got up and went to a glass that hung on the wall. Taking one of the sidecombs from her curls, she began to pull them out, winding them round her tiny fingers, making more of them, and patting them back into place, till her head was one silky mass of ripples. Then she looked at herself.
"I must have a new dress at once!" she said peremptorily.
"I don't know where you'll get it!" cried Netta—"you foolish child!"
"The young man will give it me." And still before the glass, she gave a little bound, like a kitten. Then she ran back to her mother, took Netta's face in her hands, dashed a kiss at it, and subsided, weak and gasping, on to a sofa. When Victoria reappeared Felicia was motionless as before, but there was a first streak of colour in her thin, cheeks, and a queer brightness in her eyes.
Faversham was sitting in his Pengarth office, turning over the morning's post. He had just ridden in from the Tower. Before him lay a telephone message taken down for him by his clerk, before his arrival:
"Lord Tatham will be at Mr. Faversham's office by 12:30. He wishes to speak to Mr. Faversham on important business."
Something, no doubt, to do with the right-of-way proceedings to which Tatham was a party; or, possibly, with a County Council notice which had roused Melrose to fury, to the effect that some Threlfall land would be taken compulsorily for allotments under a recent Act, if the land were not provided by arrangement.
"Perfectly reasonable! And every complaint that Tatham will make—if he has come to complain—will be perfectly reasonable. And I shall have to tell him to go to the devil!"
He sat pen in hand, staring at the paper on his desk, his mind divided between a bitter disgust with his day's work and the consciousness of a deep central resolve, which that disgust did not affect, and would not be allowed to affect. He was looking harassed, pale, and perceptibly older. No doubt his general health had not yet fully recovered from his accident. But those who disliked in him a certain natural haughtiness, said that he had now more "side on" than ever.
A bell below warned him of Tatham's arrival. He hurriedly took out papers from various drawers, and arranged them on the office table. They related to the matter on which he thought Tatham might wish to confer with him.
His door opened.
"Hullo, Faversham! Hope you're quite strong," said the incomer.
"All right, thank you." The two men shook hands. "You've been doing
Scotland as usual?"
"Two months of it. Beastly few birds. Not at all sorry to come back. Well, now—I've got something very surprising to talk to you about. I say"—he looked round him—"we shan't be disturbed?"
Faversham rose, gave a telephone order and resumed his seat.
"Who do you think we've got staying at Duddon?"
"I haven't an idea. Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks. Has Melrose ever talked to you about his wife and daughter?"
Faversham stared, took a whiff at his cigarette, and put it down.
"Are you her to tell me anything about them?"
"They are staying at Duddon at this moment," said Tatham, watching his effect; "arrived last night—penniless and starving."
Faversham flushed.
"You're sure they are the right people?" he said after a pause.
Tatham laughed.
"My mother remembers Mrs. Melrose twenty years ago; and the daughter, if it weren't that she's little more than skin and bone, would be the image of Melrose—on a tiny scale. Now, look here! this is their story."
The young man settled down to it, telling it just as it had been told to him, until toward the end a tolerably hot indignation forced its way, and he used some strong language with regard to Melrose, under which Faversham sat silent.
"I've no doubt he's told you the same lies he's told everybody else!" exclaimed Tatham, after waiting a little for comments that were slow in coming.
"I was quite aware they were alive," said Faversham, slowly.
"You were, by Jove!"
"And I have already appealed to Melrose to behave reasonably toward them."
"Reasonably! Good heavens!" Tatham had flushed in his turn. "A man is bound to behave rather more than 'reasonably'—toward his daughter, anyway—I don't care what the mother had done. I tell you the girl's a real beauty, or will be, when she's properly fed and dressed. She's a girl anybody might be proud of. And there he's been wallowing in wealth, while his child has been starving. And threatening to stop their wretched allowance! Well, you know as well as I, what public opinion will be, if these facts get about. Public opinion is pretty strong already. But, by George, when this is added to the rest! Can't you persuade him to behave himself before it all gets into the papers? It will get into them of course. There the poor things are, and we mean to stand by them. There must be a proper provision for the wife—that the courts can get out of him. And as to the girl—why, she is his heiress!—and ought to be acknowledged as such."
Tatham turned suddenly, as he spoke, and fixed a pair of very straight blue eyes on his companion.
"Mr. Melrose is not bound to make her his heir," said Faversham quietly.
"Not bound! I daresay. But who else is there? He's not very likely to leave it to any of us," said Tatham with a grin. "And he's not the kind of gentleman to be endowing missions. Who is there?" he repeated.
"Mr. Melrose will please himself," said Faversham, coldly. "Of that we may be sure. Now then—what is it exactly that these ladies have come to ask?" he continued, in a sharp businesslike tone. "You are aware of course that Mrs. Melrose left her husband of her own free will—without any provocation?"
"You won't get a judge to believe that very easily—in the case of Melrose! Anyway she's done nothing criminal. And she's willing, poor wretch! to go back to him. But if not, she asks for a maintenance allowance, suitable to his wealth and position, and that the daughter should be provided for. You can't surely refuse to support us so far?"
Tatham had insensibly stiffened in his chair. His manner which at first, though not exactly cordial, had still been that of the college friend and contemporary, had unconsciously, in the course of the conversation, assumed a certain tone of authority, as though there spoke through him the force of a settled and traditional society, of which he knew himself to be one of the natural chiefs.
To Faversham, full of a secret bitterness, this second manner of Tatham's was merely arrogance. His own pride rose against it, and what he felt it implied. Not a sign of that confidence in the new agent which had been so freely expressed at Duddon a couple of months before! His detractors had no doubt been at work with this jolly, stupid fellow, whom everybody liked. He would have to fight for himself. Well, he would fight!
"I shall certainly support any just claim," he said, as Tatham rose, "but I warn you that Mr. Melrose is ill—he is very irritable—and Mrs. Melrose had better not attempt to spring any surprises on him. If she will write me a letter, I will see that it gets to Mr. Melrose, and I will do my best for her."
"No one could ask you to do any more," said Tatham heartily, repenting himself a little. "They will be with us for the present. Mrs. Melrose shall write you a full statement and you will reply to Duddon?"
"By all means."
"There are a good many other things," said Tatham—uncertainly—as he lingered, hat in hand—"that you and I might discuss—Mainstairs, for instance! I ought to tell you that my mother has just sent two nurses there. The condition of things is simply appalling."
Faversham straightened his tall figure.
"Mainstairs is a deadlock. Mr. Melrose won't repair the cottages. He intends to pull them down. He has given the people notice, and he is receiving no rent. They won't go. I suppose the next step will be to apply for an ejectment order. Meanwhile the people stay at their own peril. There you have the whole thing."
"I hear the children are dying like flies."
"I can do nothing," said Faversham.
Again a shock of antagonism passed through the two men. "Yes, you can!" thought Tatham; "you can resign your fat post, and your expectations, and put the screw on the old man, that's what you could do." Aloud he said:
"A couple of thousand pounds, according to Undershaw, would do the job.
If you succeed in forcing them out, where are they to go?"
"That's not our affair."
Tatham caught up his hat and stick, and abruptly departed; reflecting indeed when he reached the street, that he had not been the most diplomatic of ambassadors on Mrs. Melrose's behalf.
Faversham, after some ten minutes of motionless reflection, heavily returned to his papers, ordering his horse to be ready in half an hour. He forced himself to write some ordinary business letters, and to eat some lunch, and immediately after he started on horseback to find his way through the October lanes to the village of Mainstairs.
A man more harassed, and yet more resolved, it would have been difficult to find. For six weeks now he had been wading deeper and deeper into a moral quagmire from which he saw no issue at all—except indeed by the death of Edmund Melrose! That event would solve all difficulties.
For some time now he had been convinced, not only that the mother and daughter were living, but that there had been some recent communication between them and Melrose. Various trifling incidents and cryptic sayings of the old man, not now so much on his guard as formerly, had led Faversham to this conclusion. He realized that he himself had been haunted of late by the constant expectation that they might turn up.
Well, now they had turned up. Was he at once to make way for them, as Tatham clearly took for granted?—to advise Melrose to tear up his newly made will, and gracefully surrender his expectations as Melrose's heir to this girl of twenty-one? By no means!
What is the claim of birth in such a case, if you come to that? Look at it straight in the face. A child is born to a certain father; is then torn from that father against his will, and brought up for twenty years out of his reach. What claim has that child, when mature, upon the father—beyond, of course, a claim for reasonable provision—unless he chooses to acknowledge a further obligation? None whatever. The father has lived his life, and accumulated his fortune, without the child's help, without the child's affection or tendance. His possessions are morally and legally his own, to deal with as he pleases.
In the course of life, other human beings become connected with him, attached to him, and he to them. Natural claims must be considered and decently satisfied—agreed! But for the disposal of a man's superfluities, of such a fortune as Melrose's, there is no law—there ought to be no law; and the English character, as distinct from the French, has decided that there shall be no law. "If his liking, or his caprice even," thought Faversham passionately, "chooses to make me his heir, he has every right to give, and I to accept. I am a stranger to him; so, in all but the physical sense, is his daughter. But I am not a stranger to English life. My upbringing and experience—even such as they are—are better qualifications than hers. What can a girl of twenty, partly Italian, brought up away from England, hardly speaking her father's tongue, do for this English estate, compared to what I could do—with a free hand, and a million to draw on? Whom do I wrong by accepting what a miraculous chance has brought me—by standing by it—by fighting for it? No one—justly considered. And I will fight for it—though a hundred Tathams call me adventurer!"
So much for the root determination of the man; the result of weeks of excited brooding over wealth, and what can be done with wealth, amid increasing difficulties and problems from all sides.
His determination indeed did not protect him from the attacks of conscience; of certain moral instincts and prepossessions, that is, natural to a man of his birth and environment.
The mind, however, replied to them glibly enough. "I shall do the just and reasonable thing! As I promised Tatham, I shall look into the story of these two women, and if it is what it professes to be, I shall press Melrose to provide for them."
Conscience objected: "If he refuses?"
"They can enforce their claim legally, and I shall make him realize it."
"Can you?" said Conscience. "Have you any hold upon him at all?"
A flood of humiliation, indeed, rushed in upon him, as he recalled his effort, while Melrose was away in August, to make at least some temporary improvement in the condition of the Mainstairs cottages—secretly—out of his own money—by the help of the cottagers themselves. The attempt had been reported to Melrose by that spying little beast, Nash, and peremptorily stopped by telegram—"Kindly leave my property alone. It is not yours to meddle with."
And that most abominable scene, after Melrose's return to the Tower! Faversham could never think of it without shame and disgust. Ten times had he been on the point of dashing down his papers at Melrose's feet, and turning his back on the old madman, and his house, forever. It was, of course, the thought of the gifts he had already accepted, and of that vast heritage waiting for him when Melrose should be in his grave, which had restrained him—that alone; no cynic could put it more nakedly than did Faversham's own thoughts. He was tied and bound by his own actions, and his own desires; he had submitted—grovelled to a tyrant; and he knew well enough that from that day he had been a lesser and a meaner man.
But—no silly exaggeration! He straightened himself in his saddle. He was doing plenty of good work elsewhere, work with which Melrose did not trouble himself to interfere; work which would gradually tell upon the condition and happiness of the estate. Put that against the other. Men are not plaster saints—or, still less, live ones, with the power of miracle; but struggling creatures of flesh and blood, who do, not what they will, but what they can.
And suddenly he seemed once more to be writing to Lydia Penfold. How often he had written to her during these two months! He recalled the joy of the earlier correspondence, in which he had been his natural self, pleading, arguing, planning; showing all the eagerness—the sincere eagerness—there was in him, to make a decent job of his agency, to stand well with his new neighbours—above all with "one slight girl."
And her letters to him—sweet, frank, intelligent, sympathetic—they had been his founts of refreshing, his manna by the way. Until that fatal night, when Melrose had crushed in him all that foolish optimism and self-conceit with which he had entered into the original bargain! Since then, he knew well that his letters had chilled and disappointed her; they had been the letters of a slave.
And now this awful business at Mainstairs! Bessie Dobbs, the girl of eighteen—Lydia's friend—who had been slowly dying since the diphtheria epidemic of the year before, was dead at last, after much suffering; and he did not expect to find the child of eight, her little sister, still alive. There were nearly a score of other cases, and there were three children down with scarlet fever, besides some terrible attacks of blood-poisoning—one after childbirth—due probably to some form of the scarlet fever infection, acting on persons weakened by the long effect of filthy conditions. What would Lydia say, when she knew—when she came? From her latest letter it was not clear to him on what day she would reach home. After making his inspection he would ride on to Green Cottage and inquire. He dreaded to meet her; and yet he was eager to defend himself; his mind was already rehearsing all that he would say.
A long lane, shaded by heavy trees, made an abrupt turning, and he saw before him the Mainstairs village—one straggling street of wretched houses, mostly thatched, and built of "clay-lump," whitewashed. In a county of prosperous farming, and good landlords, where cottages had been largely rebuilt during the preceding century, this miserable village, with various other hamlets and almost all the cottages attached to farms on the Melrose estate, were the scandal of the countryside. Roofs that let in rain and wind, clay floors, a subsoil soaked in every possible abomination, bedrooms "more like dens for wild animals than sleeping-places for men and women," to quote a recent Government report, and a polluted water supply!—what more could reckless human living, aided by human carelessness and cruelty, have done to make a hell of natural beauty?
Over the village rose the low shoulder of a grassy fell, its patches of golden fern glistening under the October sunshine; great sycamores, with their rounded masses of leaf, hung above the dilapidated roofs, as though Nature herself tried to shelter the beings for whom men had no care; the thatched slopes were green with moss and weed; and the blue smoke wreaths that rose from the chimneys, together with the few flowers that gleamed in the gardens, the picturesque irregularity of the houses, and the general setting of wood and distant mountain, made of the poisoned village a "subject," on which a wandering artist, who had set up his canvas at the corner of the road, was at the moment, indeed, hard at work. There might be death in those houses; but out of the beauty which sunshine strikes from ruin, a man, honestly in search of a few pounds, was making what he could.
To Faversham's overstrung mind the whole scene was as the blood-stained palace of the Atreidae to the agonized vision of Cassandra. He saw it steeped in death—death upon death—and dreaded of what new "murder" he might hear as soon as he approached the houses. For what was it but murder? His conscience, arguing with itself, did not dispute the word. Had Melrose, out of his immense income, spent a couple of thousand pounds on the village at any time during the preceding years, a score of deaths would have been saved, and the physical degeneracy of a whole population would have been prevented.
* * * * *
Heavens! that light figure in Dobbs's garden, talking with the old shepherd—his heart leapt and then sickened. It was Lydia.
A poignant fear stirred in him. He gave his horse a touch of the whip, and was at her side.
"Miss Penfold!—you oughtn't to be here! For heaven's sake go home!"
Lydia, who in the absorption of her talk with the shepherd had not heard his approach, turned with a start. Her face was one of passionate grief—there were tears on her cheek.
"Oh, Mr. Faversham—"
"The child?" he asked, as he dismounted.
"She died—last night."
"Aye, an' there's another doon—t' li'le boy—t' three-year-old," said old Dobbs sharply, straightening himself on his stick, at sight of the agent.
"The nurses are here?" said Faversham after a pause.
"Aye," said the shepherd, turning toward his cottage, "but they can do nowt. The childer are marked for deein afore they're sick." And he walked away, his inner mind shaken with a passion that forbade him to stay and talk with Melrose's agent.
Two or three labourers who were lounging in front of their houses came slowly toward the agent. It was evident that there was unemployment as well as disease in the village, and that the neighbouring farms, where there were young children, were cutting themselves off, as much as they could, from the Mainstairs infection, by dismissing the Mainstairs men.
Faversham meanwhile again implored Lydia to go home. "This whole place reeks with infection. You ought not to be here."
"They say that nothing has been done!"
Her tone was quiet, but her look pierced.
"I tried. It was impossible. The only thing that could be done was that the people should go. They are under notice. Every single person is here in defiance of the law. The police will have to be called in."
"And where are we to goa, sir!" cried one of the men who had come up. "Theer's noa house to be had nearer than Pengarth—yo' know that yoursen—an' how are we to be waakin' fower mile to our work i' t' mornin', an' fower mile back i' t' evening? Why, we havena got t' strength! It isna exactly a health resort—yo' ken—Mainstairs!"
"I'll tell yo' where soom on us might goa, Muster Faversham," said another older man, removing the pipe he had been stolidly smoking; "theer's two farmhouses o' Melrose's, within half a mile o' this place—shut oop—noabody there. They're big houses—yan o' them wor an' owd manor-house, years agone. A body might put oop five or six families in 'em at a pinch. Thattens might dëa for a beginnin'; while soom o' these houses were coomin' doon."
Lydia turned eagerly to Faversham.
"Couldn't that be done—some of the families with young children that are not yet attacked?" Her eyes hung on him.
He shook his head. He had already proposed something of the sort to
Melrose. It had been vetoed.
The men watched him. At last one of them—a lanky youth, with a frowning, ironic expression and famous as a heckler at public meetings—said with slow emphasis:
"There'll coom a day i' this coontry, mates, when men as treat poor foak like Muster Melrose, 'ull be pulled off t' backs of oos an' our like. And may aa live to see 't!"
"Aye! aye!" came in deep assent from the others, as they turned away. But one white and sickly fellow looked back to say:
"An' it's a graat pity for a yoong mon like you, sir, to be doin' Muster Melrose's dirty work—taakin' o' the police—as though yo' had 'em oop your sleeve!"
"Haven't I done what I could for you?" cried Faversham, stung by the reproach, and its effect on Lydia's face.
"Aye—mebbe—but it's nowt to boast on." The man, middle aged but prematurely old, stood still, trembling from head to foot. "My babe as wor born yesterday, deed this mornin'; an' they say t' wife 'ull lig beside it afore night."
There was a sombre silence. Faversham broke it. "I must see the nurses," he said to Lydia; "but again, I beg of you to go! I will send you news."
"I will wait for you. Don't be afraid. I won't go indoors."
He went round the houses, watched by the people, as they stood at their doors. He himself was paying two nurses, and now Lady Tatham had sent two more. He satisfied himself that they had all the stores which Undershaw had ordered; he left a donation of money with one of them, and then he returned to Lydia.
They walked together in silence; while a boy from the village led Faversham's horse some distance in the rear. All that Faversham had meant to say had dropped away from him. His planned defence of himself could find no voice.
"You too blame me?" he said, at last, hoarsely.
She shook her head sadly.
"I don't know what to think. But when we last met—you were so hopeful—"
"Yes—like a fool. But what can you do—with a madman."
"Can you bear—to be still in his employ?"
She looked up, her beautiful eyes bright and challenging.
"Mainstairs is not the whole estate. If I'm powerless here—I'm not elsewhere—"
She was silent. He turned upon her.
"If you are to misunderstand and mistrust me—then indeed I shall lose heart!"
The feeling, one might almost say the anguish, in his dark, commanding face moved her strangely. Condemnation and pity—aye, and something else than pity—struggled within her. For the first time Lydia began to know herself. She was strangely shaken.
"I will try—and understand," she said in a voice that trembled.
"All my power of doing anything depends on it!" he said, passionately. "I can say truly that things would have been infinitely worse if I had not been here. And I have worked like a horse to better them—before you came."
She was silent. His appeal to her as to his judge hurt her poignantly. Yet what could she do or say? Her natural longing was to console; but where were the elements of consolation? Could anything be worse than what she had seen and heard?
The mingled emotion which silenced her, warned her not to continue the conversation. She perceived the opening of a side-lane leading back to the river and the Keswick road.
"This is my best way, I think," she said, pausing, and holding out her hand. "The pony-cart is waiting for me at Whitebeck."
He looked at her in distress, yet also in anger. A friend might surely have stood by him more cordially, believed in him more simply.
"You are at home again? I may come and see you."
"Please! We shall want to hear."
Her tone was embarrassed. They parted almost coldly.
Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape—wood, and stubble, and ferny slope—steeped in stormy majesties of light. But for once the quick artist sense was shut against Nature's spectacles. She walked in a blind anguish of self-knowledge and self-scorn. She who had plumed herself on the poised mind, the mastered senses!
She moaned to herself.
"Why didn't he tell me—warn me! To sell himself to that man—to act for him—defend him—apologize for him—and for those awful, awful things! An agent must."
And she thought of some indignant talk of Undershaw, which she had heard that morning.
Her moral self was full of repulsion; her heart was torn. Friend? She owned her weakness, and despised it. Turning aside, she leant a while against a gate, hiding her face from the glory of the evening. Week by week—she knew it now!—through that frank interchange of mind with mind, of heart with heart, represented by that earlier correspondence, still more perhaps through the checks and disappointments of its later phases, Claude Faversham had made his way into the citadel.
The puny defences she had built about the freedom of her maiden life and will lay in ruins. Her theories were scattered like the autumn leaves that were scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling captive. Serenity, peace were gone.
Meanwhile, as Faversham rode toward the Tower, absorbed at one moment in a misery of longing, and the next in a heat of self-defence, perhaps the strongest feeling that finally emerged was one of dismay that her abrupt leave-taking had prevented him from telling her of that other matter of which Tatham's visit had informed him. She must hear of it immediately, and from those who would judge and perhaps denounce him.
Nevertheless, as he dismounted at the Tower, neither the burden of Mainstairs, nor the fear of Lydia's disapproval, nor the agitation of the news from Duddon, had moved him one jot from his purpose. A man surely is a coward and a weakling, he thought, who cannot grasp the "skirts of happy chance," while they are there for the grasping; cannot take what the gods offer, while they offer it, lest they withdraw it forever.
Yet, suppose, that by his own act, he raised a moral barrier between himself and Lydia Penfold which such a personality would never permit itself to pass?
His vanity, a touch of natural cynicism, refused, in the end, to let him believe it. His hope lay in a frank wrestle with her, a frank attack upon her intelligence. He promised himself to attempt it without delay.
XV
The day following the interview between Tatham and Faversham was a day of expectation for the inmates of Duddon. On the evening before, Tatham with much toil had extracted a more or less, coherent statement from Netta Melrose, persuading her to throw it into the form of an appeal to her husband. "If we can't do anything by reasoning, why then we must try pressure," he had said to her, in his suavest County Council manner; "but we won't talk law to begin with." The statement when finished and written out in Netta's childish hand was sent by messenger, late in the evening, within a covering letter to Faversham, written by Tatham.
Tatham afterward devoted himself till nearly midnight to composing a letter to Lydia. He had unaccountably missed her that afternoon, for when he arrived at the cottage from Pengarth she was out, and neither Mrs. Penfold nor Susy knew where she was. In fact she was at Mainstairs, and with Faversham. She had mistaken a phrase in Tatham's note of the morning, and did not expect him till later. He had waited an hour for her, under the soft patter of Mrs. Penfold's embarrassed conversation; and had then ridden home, sorely disappointed, but never for one instant blaming the beloved.
But later, in the night silence, he poured out to her all his budget: the arrival of the Melroses; their story; his interview with Faversham; and his plans for helping them to their rights. To a "friend" it was only allowed, besides, to give restrained expression to his rapturous joy in being near her again, and his disappointment of the afternoon. He thought over every word, as he wrote it down, his eyes sometimes a little dim in the lamp-light. The very reserve imposed upon him did but strengthen his passion. Nor could young hopes believe in ultimate defeat.
At the same time, the thought of Faversham held the background of his mind. Though by now he himself cordially disliked Faversham, he was quite aware of the attraction the new agent's proud and melancholy personality might have for women. He had seen it working in Lydia's case, and he had been uncomfortably aware at one time of the frequent references to Faversham in Lydia's letters. It was evident that Faversham had pushed the acquaintance with the Penfolds as far as he could; that he was Lydia's familiar correspondent, and constantly appealing for help to her knowledge of the country folk. An excellent road to intimacy, as Tatham uneasily admitted, considering Lydia's love for the people of the dales, and her passionate sympathy with the victims of Melrose's ill-deeds.
Ah! but the very causes which had been throwing her into an intimacy with Faversham must surely now be chilling and drawing her back? Tatham, the young reformer, felt an honest indignation with the failure of Claude Faversham to do the obvious and necessary work he had promised to do. Tatham, the lover, knew very well that if he had come back to find Faversham the hero of the piece, with a grateful countryside at his feet, his own jealous anxiety would have been even greater than it was. For it was great, argue with himself as he might. A dread for which he could not account often overshadowed him. It was caused perhaps by his constant memory of Faversham and Lydia on the terrace at Threlfall—of the two faces turned to each other—of the sudden fusion as it were of the two personalities in a common rush of memories, interests, and sympathies, in which he himself had no part….
He put up his letter on the stroke of midnight, and then walked his room a while longer, struggling with himself and the passion of his desire; praying that he might win her. Finally he took a well-worn Bible from a locked drawer, and read some verses from the Gospel of St. John, quieting himself. He never went to sleep without reading either a psalm or some portion of the New Testament. The influence of his Eton tutor had made him a Christian of a simple and convinced type; and his mother's agnosticism had never affected him. But he and she never talked of religion.
Nothing arrived from Threlfall the following day during the morning.
After luncheon, Victoria announced her intention of going to call on the
Penfolds.
"You can follow me there in the motor," she said to her son; "and if any news comes, bring it on."
They were in the drawing-room. Netta, white and silent, was stretched on the sofa, where Victoria had just spread a shawl over her. Felicia appeared to be turning over an illustrated paper, but was in reality watching the mother and son out of the corners of her eyes. Everything that was said containing a mention of the Penfolds struck in her an attentive ear. The casual conversation of the house had shown her already that there were three ladies—two of them young—who were living not far from Duddon, and were objects of interest to both Lady Tatham and her son. Flowers were sent them, and new books. They were not relations; and not quite ordinary acquaintances. All this had excited a furious curiosity in Felicia. She wished—was determined indeed—to see these ladies for herself.
"You will hardly want to go out," said Victoria gently, standing by Netta's sofa, and looking down with kind eyes on the weary woman lying there.
Netta shook her head; then putting out her hand she took Victoria's and pressed it. Victoria understood that she was waiting feverishly for the answer from Threlfall, and could do nothing and think of nothing till it arrived.
"And your daughter?" She looked round for Felicia.
"I wish to drive in a motor," said Felicia, rising and speaking with a decision which amused Victoria. Pending the arrival from London of some winter costumes on approval, Victoria's maid had arranged for the little Italian a picturesque dress of dark blue silk, from a gown of her mistress', by which the emaciation of the girl's small frame was somewhat disguised; while the beauty of the material, and of the delicate embroideries on the collar and sleeves, strangely heightened the grace of her curly head, and the effect of her astonishing eyes, so liquidly bright, in a face too slight for them.
In forty-eight hours, even, of comfort and cosseting her elfish thinness had become a shade less ghastly; and the self-possession which had emerged from the state of collapse in which she had arrived amazed Victoria. A week before, so it appeared, she had been earning a franc a day in the vineyard of a friendly contadino. And already one might have thought her bred in castles. She was not abashed or bewildered by the luxuries of Duddon, as Netta clearly was. Rather, she seemed to seize greedily and by a natural instinct upon all that came her way—motors, pretty frocks, warm baths in luxurious bathrooms, and the attentions of Victoria's maid. Victoria believed that she had grasped the whole situation with regard to Threlfall. She was quite aware, it seemed, of the magnitude of her father's wealth; of all that hung upon her own chances of inheritance; and of the value, to her cause and her mother's, of the support of Duddon. Her likeness to her father came out hour by hour, and there were moments when the tiny creature carried herself like a Melrose in miniature.
Victoria's advent was awaited at Green Cottage, she having telephoned to Mrs. Penfold in the morning, with something of a flutter. Her visits there had not been frequent; and this was the first time she had called since Tatham's proposal to Lydia. That event had never been avowed by Lydia, as we have seen, even to her mother; Lydia and Victoria had never exchanged a word on the subject. But Lydia was aware of the shrewd guessing of her family, and she did not suppose for one moment that Lady Tatham was ignorant of anything that had happened.
Mrs. Penfold, scarcely kept in order by Susy, was in much agitation. She felt terribly guilty. Lady Tatham must think them all monsters of ingratitude, and she wondered how she could be so kind as to come and see them at all. She became at last so incoherent and tearful that Lydia prepared for the worst, while Susy, the professed psychologist, revelled in the prospect of new "notes."
But when Victoria arrived, entering the cottage drawing-room with her fine mannish face, her stately bearing, and her shabby clothes, the news she brought seized at once on Mrs. Penfold's wandering wits, and for the moment held them fast. For Victoria, whose secret object was to discover, if she could, any facts about Lydia's doings and feelings during the interval of separation, that might throw light upon her Harry's predicament, made it cunningly appear that she had come expressly to tell her neighbours of the startling event which was now agitating Duddon, as it would soon be agitating the countryside.
Mrs. Penfold—steeped in long years of three-decker fiction—sat entranced. The cast-off and ill-treated wife returning to the scene of her misery—with the heiress!—grown up—and beautiful: she saw it all; she threw it all into the moulds dear to the sentimentalist. Victoria demurred to the adjective "beautiful"; suggesting "pretty—when we have fed her!" But Mrs. Penfold, with soft, shining eyes, already beheld the mother and child weeping at the knees of the Ogre, the softening of the Ogre's heart, the opening of the grim Tower to its rightful heiress, the happy ending, the marriage gown in the distance.
"For suppose!"—she turned gayly to her daughters for sympathy—"suppose she were to marry Mr. Faversham! And then Mr. Melrose can have a stroke, and everything will come right!"
Lydia and Susy smiled dutifully. Victoria sat silent. Her silence checked Mrs. Penfold's flow, and brought her back, bewildered to realities; to the sad remembrance of Lydia's astonishing and inscrutable behaviour. Whereupon her manner and conversation became so dishevelled, in her effort to propitiate Lady Tatham without betraying either herself or Lydia, that the situation grew quickly unbearable.
"May I see your garden?" said Victoria abruptly to Lydia. Lydia rose with alacrity, opened the glass door into the garden, and by a motion of the lips only visible to Susy appealed to her to keep their mother indoors.
A misty October sun reigned over the garden. The river ran sparkling through the valley, and on the farther side the slopes and jutting crags of the Helvellyn range showed ghostly through the sunlit haze.'
A few absent-minded praises were given to the phloxes and the begonias.
Then Victoria said, turning a penetrating eye on Lydia:
"You heard from Harry of the Melroses' arrival?"
"Yes—this morning."
Bright colour rushed into Lydia's cheeks. Tatham's letter of that morning, the longest perhaps ever written by a man who detested letter-writing, had touched her profoundly, caused her an agonized searching of conscience. Did Lady Tatham blame and detest her? Her manner was certainly cool. The girl's heart swelled as she walked along beside her guest.
"Everything depends on Mr. Faversham," said Victoria. "You are a friend of his?" She took the garden chair that Lydia offered her.
"Yes; we have all come to know him pretty well."
Lydia's face, as she sat on the grass at Lady Tatham's feet, looking toward the fells, was scarcely visible to her companion. Victoria could only admire the beauty of the girl's hair, as the wind played with it, and the grace of her young form.
"I am afraid he is disappointing all his friends," she said gravely.
"Is it his fault?" exclaimed Lydia. "Mr. Melrose must be mad!"
"I wonder if that excuses Mr. Faversham?"
"It's horrible for him!" said Lydia in a low, smothered voice. "He wants to put things right?"
It was on the tip of Victoria's tongue to say, "Does he too write to you every day?" but she refrained.
"If he really wants to put things right, why has he done nothing all these seven weeks?" she asked severely. "I saw Colonel Barton this morning. He and Mr. Andover are in despair. They felt such confidence in Mr. Faversham. The state of the Mainstairs village is too terrible! Everybody is crying out. The Carlisle papers this week are full of it. But there are scores of other things almost as bad. Mr. Faversham rushes about—here, there, and everywhere—but with no result, they tell us, as far as any of the real grievances are concerned. Mr. Melrose seems to be infatuated about him personally; will give him everything he wants; and pays no attention whatever to his advice. And you know the latest report?"
"No." Lydia's face was bent over the grass, as she tried to aid a bumble-bee which was lying on its back.
"It is generally believed that Mr. Melrose has made him his heir."
Lydia lifted a face of amazement, at first touched strangely with relief.
"Then—surely—he will be able to do what he wants!"
"On the contrary. His silence has been bought—that's what people say.
Mr. Melrose has bribed him to do his work, and defend his iniquities."
"Oh! Is that fair?" The humble-bee was so hastily poked on to his legs that he tumbled over again.
"Well, now, we shall test him!" said Victoria quietly. "We shall see what he does with regard to Mrs. Melrose and her daughter. Harry will have told you how he went to him yesterday. We had a telephone message this morning to say that a letter would reach us this afternoon from Mr. Faversham. Harry will bring it on here; and I asked him to bring Felicia Melrose with him in the car. We thought you would be interested to see her."
There was a pause. At last Lydia said slowly:
"How will you test Mr. Faversham? I don't understand."
"Unless the man is an adventurer," said Victoria, straightening her shoulders, "he will, of course, do his best to put this girl—who is the rightful heiress—into her proper place. What business has he with Mr. Melrose's estates?"
Lady Tatham spoke with imperious energy.
Lydia's eyes showed an almost equal animation.
"May he not share with her? Aren't they immense?"
"At present he takes everything—so they say. It looks ugly. A complete stranger—worming himself in a few weeks or months into an old man's confidence—and carrying off the inheritance from a pair of helpless women! And making himself meanwhile the tool of a tyrant!—aiding and abetting him in all his oppressions!"
"Oh, Lady Tatham! no, no!" cried Lydia—the cry seemed wrung from her—"I—we—have only known Mr. Faversham this short time—but how can one believe—"
She paused, her eyes under their vividly marked eyebrows painfully searching the face of her companion.
Victoria said to herself, "Heavens!—she is in love with him—and she is letting Harry sit up at nights to write to her!"
Her mother's heart beat fast with anger. But she held herself in hand.
"Well; as I have said, we shall soon be able to test him," she repeated, coldly; "we shall soon know what to think. His letter will show whether he is a man with feeling and conscience—a gentleman—or an adventurer!"
There was silence. Lydia was thinking passionately of Mainstairs and of the deep tones of a man's voice—"If you condemn and misunderstand me—then indeed I shall lose heart!"
A humming sound could be heard in the far distance.
"Here they are," said Lady Tatham rising. Victoria's half-masculine beauty had never been so formidable as it was this afternoon. Deep in her heart, she carried both pity for Harry, and scorn for this foolish girl walking beside her, who could not recognize her good fortune when it cried out to her.
They hastened back to the drawing-room; and at the same moment Tatham and
Felicia walked in.
Felicia advanced with perfect self-command, her small face flushed with pink by the motion of the car. In addition to the blue frock, Victoria's maid had now provided her with a short cape of black silk, and a wide straw hat, to which the girl herself had given a kind of tilt, a touch of audacity, in keeping with all the rest of her personality.
As she came in, she glanced round the room with her uncannily large eyes—her mother's eyes—taking in all the company. She dropped a little curtsey to Mrs. Penfold, in whom the excitement of this sudden appearance of Melrose's daughter had produced sheer and simple dumbness. She allowed her hand to be shaken by Lydia and Susy, looking sharply at the former; while Susy looked sharply at her. Then she subsided into a corner by Lady Tatham. It was evident that she regarded herself as under that lady's particular protection.
"Well?" said Lady Tatham in an eager aside to her son. She read his aspect as that of a man preoccupied.
Tatham shrugged his shoulders with a glance at Felicia. Victoria whispered to Lydia: "Will you tell your mother I want to speak a few words to Harry on business?"
Mother and son passed into the garden together.
"A declaration of war!" said Tatham, as he handed a letter to her. "I propose to instruct our solicitors at once."
Victoria read hastily. The writing was Faversham's. But the mind expressed was Melrose's. Victoria read him in every line. She believed the letter to have been simply dictated.
"DEAR LORD TATHAM:
"I have laid Mrs. Melrose's statement before Mr. Melrose. I regret to say that he sees no cause to modify the arrangements made years ago with regard to his wife, except that, in consideration of the fact that Miss Melrose is now grown up, he will add £20 yearly to Mrs. Melrose's allowance, making it £100 a year. Provision will be made for the continuance of this allowance to Mrs. Melrose till her death, and afterward to the daughter for her lifetime; on condition that Mr. Melrose is not further molested in any way. Otherwise Mr. Melrose acknowledges and will acknowledge no claim upon him whatever.
"I am to add that if Mrs. Melrose is in difficulties, it is entirely owing to the dishonest rapacity of her family who have been living upon her. Mr. Melrose is well acquainted with both the past and recent history of Mr. Robert Smeath, who made a tool of Mrs. Melrose in the matter of a disgraceful theft of a valuable bronze from Mr. Melrose's collection—"
"The Hermes!" cried Victoria. "She has never said one word to me about it."
"Miss Melrose has been telling me the story," said Tatham, smiling at the recollection. "By George, that's a rum little girl! She glories in it. But she says her mother has been consumed with remorse ever since. Go on."
"And if any attempt is made to blackmail or coerce Mr. Melrose, he will be obliged, much against his will, to draw the attention of the Italian police to certain matters relating to Mr. Smeath, of which he has the evidence in his possession. He warns Mrs. Melrose that her father's career cannot possibly bear examination.
"I regret that my reply cannot be more satisfactory to you.
"Believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"CLAUDE FAVERSHAM."
Victoria had turned pale.
"How abominable! Why, her father is bedridden and dying!"
"So I told Faversham—like a fool. For it only—apparently—gives Melrose a greater power of putting on the screw. Well, now look here—here's something else." He drew another letter from his pocket, and handed it to her.
Victoria unfolded a second note from Faversham—marked "confidential," and written in evident agitation.
"MY DEAR TATHAM:
"I am powerless. Let me implore you to keep Mrs. Melrose quiet! Privately a great deal may be done for her. If she will only trust herself to me, in my private capacity, I will see that she is properly supplied for the future. But she will simply bring disaster on herself if she attempts to force Melrose. She—and you—know what he is. I beg of you to be guided—and to guide her—as I advise."
"An attempt, you see, to buy us off," said Tatham scornfully. "I propose to take the night train from Pengarth this evening, and consult old Fledhow to-morrow morning."
"Old Fledhow," alias James Morton Fledhow, solicitor, head of one of that small group of firms which, between them, have the great estates of England in their pigeon-holes, had been the legal adviser of the Tatham family for two generations. Precipitation is not the badge of his tribe; but Victoria threw herself upon this very natural and youthful impulse, before even it could reach "old Fledhow."
"My dear Harry, be cautious! What did Mrs. Melrose say? Of course you showed her the letter?"
Tatham candidly admitted that he hardly knew what Mrs. Melrose had said. The letter had thrown her into a great state of agitation, and she had cried a good deal. "Poor pápa, poor pápa!" pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, seemed to have been all that she had been able to articulate.