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 goodbye. 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 shrunk 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 everyone 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
