“Too many trustees, Sir Walter?” I breathed. “I suppose, not—if they are honest.”
“But bless me, my dear young lady,” his face seemed to be shining like the sun’s in mist; “whose heresies are these? Have they given you a French maid?”
“Fleming; oh, no,” I replied, laughing out, “she’s a Woman of Kent, all but. What I was really thinking is, that I would, if I may—and please forgive me—very much like to show you a letter. I simply can’t make head or tail of it. But it’s dreadfully—suggestive.”
“My dear, I came in certain hope of being shown nothing less vital than your heart,” he retorted gallantly.
So off I went—with my visitor all encouraging smiles as he opened the door for me—to fetch my lawyer’s bombshell.
Glasses on tip of his small, hawklike nose, Sir Walter’s glittering eyes seemed to master this obscure document at one swoop.
“H’m,” he said cautiously, and once more communed with the bust of Heliogabalus. “Now what did you think of it all? Was it worth six and eightpence, do you think?”
“I couldn’t think. It frightened me. ‘The Shares,’ you know. Whose Shares? Of what? I’m terribly, terribly ignorant.”
“Ah,” he echoed, “the Shares—as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree. And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You didn’t answer it?”
“Nobody,” said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts over my knees.
“Why, of course not,” he sparkled. “You see how admirably things work out. Miss Fenne, Mr. Pellew, Mrs. Bowater, my wife, Tom o’ Bedlam, Hypnos, Mrs. Monnerie, Mr. Bowater, Mrs. Bowater, the Harrises, me. ’Pon my word, you’d think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter—could you trust it with me for a while?—and supposing I see these gentlemen, and make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime—we—we bottle the Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father, my dear. Let’s just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand.”
I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father’s affairs, and of how I had been “left.”
“And Miss Fenne, now?” he peered out, as if at my godmother herself. “Why didn’t she send word to France? Where is this providential step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead too?”
Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired. “It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my nature.”
“Well, well, it may be so.” He smiled at me, as if out of the distance, with the serenest kindliness. “But you and I are going to share the temperate zone—a cool, steady, trade wind.”
“If only,” I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, “if only I could keep clear of the Tropics—and that Sargasso Sea!”
At this little sally he gleamed at me as goldenly as the spade guinea that dangled on his waistcoat. Then he rose and surveyed one by one a row of silent, sumptuous tomes in their glazed retreat: “The Sargasso Sea; h’m, h’m, h’m; and one might suppose,” he cast a comprehensive glance at the taciturn shelves around and above us, “one might suppose the tuppenny box would afford some of these a more sociable haven.”
But this was Greek to me. “Mrs. Monnerie is generous?” he went on, “indulgent? Groundsel, seed, sugar, and a Fleming. Yet perhaps the door might be pushed just an inch or two farther open, eh? What I’m meaning, my dear, is, will you perhaps wait in patience a little? And if anything should go amiss, will you make me a promise to send just a wisp of a word and a penny stamp to an old friend who will be doing his best? The first lawyer, you know, was a waif that was adopted by a tortoise and a fox. Now I’m going to be a mole—with its fur on the bias, as Miss Rossetti happened to notice—and burrow. So you see, all will come well!”
I must have been sitting very straight and awkward on my stool, and not heeding what my face was telling.
“Is there anything else distressing you, my dear?” he asked anxiously, almost timidly.
“Only myself,” I muttered. “There doesn’t seem to be any end to it all. I grope on and on, and—the kindness only makes it worse. Can there be a riddle, Sir Walter, that hasn’t any answer? I remember reading in a book that was given me that Man ‘comes into the world like morning mushrooms.’ Don’t you think that’s true; even, I mean, of—everybody?”
But his views on this subject were not to be shared with me for many a long day. Our half-hour was over; and there stood Mrs. Monnerie, mushroom-shaped, it is true, but suggesting nothing of the evanescent, as she looked in on us from the mahogany doorway.
“How d’ye do, Sir Walter,” she greeted him. “If it hadn’t been for an exceedingly interesting young creature disguised, I understand, as a Miss Bowater, I should have had the happiness of seeing you earlier. And how is our Peri looking, do you think?”
“How is our Peri looking?” he repeated musingly, poising himself, and eyeing me, on his flat, gleaming boots; “why, Mrs. Monnerie, as I suppose a Peri should be looking—into Paradise.”
“Then, my Peri,” said Mrs. Monnerie blandly, “ask Sir Walter to be a complete angel, and stay to luncheon.”
