It was a very ordinary tale of human folly. When the cousins’ great-uncle, Paul Dresser, of Dresser’s Bank, retired with his ample pension, his son Martin was just entering his twenties. Brought up in comfortable circumstances, with a generous allowance from his father, the young man made no attempt to settle down to steady work. He hated office life, and wanted, said Miss Ardmore vaguely, to be a journalist or something. She believed he had actually tinkered at writing, among other pursuits. In the same amateur fashion, as she put it, he also got himself married. He could not have chosen a worse juncture, for his father, having cast overboard the provident habits of a lifetime, was rapidly losing in speculation the capital sum for which he had commuted his pension. In short, very soon, at the age of twenty-six, Martin had to find a job, and urgently, for he now had a son of his own to support as well as a wife. He was fortunate in obtaining employment in the local branch of the joint stock bank, which had absorbed the old private business.
This was in 1914, when the mental powers of his grandfather, old Rutland Shearsby, were beginning to fail, though he had another twelve years of life before him, and when Paul Dresser’s health and spirits were breaking under financial disaster. It was in the following year that Paul’s wife made her fruitless appeal for aid to her stepmother. Martin, in the meantime, was applying himself with unexpected industry to his career of banking. Family burdens and a weak chest enabled him to escape the army; and by the time he was in the middle thirties he had risen to be a cashier.
And then, in 1925, when he was thirty-seven, the erratic streak in his father’s character blossomed suddenly to full growth in Martin, though in a different way. He went right off the rails. Some girl was involved, and he took’ the bank’s money, and went to prison for twelve months.
His wife took the boy, Sydney, to her parents’ home in Birmingham, and there, at fifteen, Sydney was already working in the office of a firm of house agents when Martin Dresser was released from prison and disappeared. A year later, ignoring his wife, who in fact was instituting proceedings for divorce on the ground of desertion, Martin somehow got in touch with his son. Having travelled abroad as a young man, and possessing a gift for languages, it was to Belgium that the ex-cashier had fled when he vanished. How he supported himself there, Miss Ardmore did not know. Her mother had a story that he had been a waiter.
With determination and self-possession remarkable in one of his years, Sydney defied his mother and went to Belgium during his next holiday. Later in that year, 1927, he went again, to find Martin Dresser on his death-bed. That, at least, was the story Sydney told on his return. With the exception of Euphemia Ardmore, Vivien’s mother, none of the family, not even the exile’s sister Caroline Boulanger, had shown much sympathy for Martin, and the news of his death was received with equanimity. The attitude seemed to be that a regrettable blot of the family record could now be forgotten. No attempt apparently was made to verify Sydney’s story. After all, he ought to know. He had been there.
Euphemia Ardmore, however, was made of different stuff. She had always been fond of her cousin Martin, and attributed his downfall to his wife, whom she detested; and either because she made inquiries, or had other ground for doubts, to the end of her life she never referred to the death-bed scene at Bruges without a smile. Her daughter again was rather vague about all this; she was working out of London at the time, and never really discussed the family mystery (if such it was) with her mother, who herself died within a year or two. Vivien indeed confessed that she had thought so little about it that on the few later occasions when she met Sydney she had not mentioned his father. Anyway, she said, she was not greatly interested in her family: she always thought families were rather a curse, and what was now happening tended to confirm this view.
When Miss Ardmore had finished her narrative, Cecile Boulanger remarked in a curiously resentful tone that to produce this novel theory from up one’s sleeve, as it were, made the present perplexing situation more perplexing still. Cecile, perhaps, resented the suggestion that her mother had not extended to Martin Dresser the affection he might have expected from his sister. She continued to ridicule the notion that he was alive. Mr. Mainward, however, who had listened to the story with becoming gravity, pointed its moral. If Martin were indeed alive, he would be no more than fifty-seven, and should the survivors of the younger generation come under any scrutiny on account of the recent fatalities in the family, it would be in their interests to divert that scrutiny in a fresh direction. Tactfully though this was put, in Mr. Mainward’s most graceful style, the outright reference to the predicament in which the three remaining cousins might find themselves evoked another little interlude of tension. Vivien Ardmore and Cecile Boulanger looked at one another, and then away. Neither spoke. Mr. Mainward hastened to dissipate the slight awkwardness in the atmosphere by bustling about refilling glasses.
Mr. Tuke had made no comments. But when the glasses were full again he turned to his hostess.
“I seem
