“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 forever. 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 tomorrow 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
