The story which Lady Culvers said she would herself put into circulation among the domestics was to the effect that Ida, overdone with the day’s fatigues, had fainted on her mother’s grave; had been thus found by the verger of the church, who had escorted her to his cottage at the back of the churchyard, there to rest and recover herself. There Captain Culvers had found her, and there he had left her while he had gone back at her request to tell her father that she did not feel equal to undertaking the proposed wedding tour, but instead would, after a day’s rest in Hastings, go down to Devon on a visit to Captain Culvers’s mother.
Thither Ida’s maid, who was at that moment waiting at Saint Leonard’s railway-station with trunks and boxes innumerable, was to be at once sent, and there she was to be told to remain awaiting farther orders.
“Of course,” said Captain Culvers, “such a story won’t bear criticism, and there isn’t a servant in the house who’ll be fool enough to believe it. But I can’t concoct a better, so I suppose it must do. Now I’ll ring for the cart to be brought round.”
“One thing is certain,” said Lady Culvers, her aptitude for fibbing far from exhausted, “the story will grow into something quite different long before it reaches town, and then we can correct and modify it according to circumstances. But it seems to me to suit our present disgraceful necessity.”
Captain Culvers had a word to say to Juliet as he bid her goodbye.
“It was an immense relief to me to hear your energetic disclaimer of connivance with Ida in her folly,” he said, looking at her steadily.
She gave him look for look.
“I made no energetic disclaimer, as you call it,” she replied. “I would not condescend to such a thing.”
For a moment they looked each other full in the face; but no more was said.
As Captain Culvers drove out through the lodge gates, Clive, weary-footed and dispirited, was coming in. His tramp along the high-road had been an unsuccessful one. The little organ-boy had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened to receive him.
IV
“It’s a puzzle, Clive, from first to last. I feel as if we were trying to reason the matter out from an insufficient statement of facts. Come, have you nothing more to tell me?”
So spoke Joshua Redway, and then, leaning back in his chair, with eyes steadily fixed on his son’s face, he awaited Clive’s reply.
They were seated in a private room, opening off the offices of the firm in Lombard Street; a room in which big loans had been negotiated, and contracts of worldwide importance had been signed and sealed; a room, too, to which others beside Clive were in the habit of resorting in times of perplexity for wisdom and counsel from the successful financier.
For Joshua Redway had a great reputation for shrewdness and clear-headedness not only within but beyond the limits of his home circle; and when Clive had asked Lord Culvers’s permission to take his father into his confidence respecting Ida’s strange disappearance, the permission was not only readily granted, but Lord Culvers had added that counsel from Mr. Redway at such a juncture would be most highly esteemed by him.
Three days had passed since the wedding. No letter had been received from the missing girl, nor had tidings of her reached her people from any quarter.
The Culvers’s family had returned to town, and had resumed the even tenor of their way; or, perhaps it would be more correct to say “the busy tenor of their way,” for the London season was in full swing, and the Culvers family were, as the phrase goes, “very much in the vortex.”
Clive answered his father’s question with another.
“Do you not think that the Culvers’s, one and all, take the matter very coolly?” he asked.
“I do. So far, however, as Lord Culvers is concerned, I’m not surprised. Do you remember the fire at the back of his house in Belgrave Square?”
The incident alluded to had exhibited Lord Culvers in a most characteristic light. Two or three frightened servants had rushed into his room in the dead of night, exclaiming, “A fire, my lord, in the mews at the back of the house; pray get up.” “A fire,” Lord Culvers had repeated, calmly, without opening his eyes; “well, I dare say it will go out again,” and he had turned over on his other side to finish his night’s rest.
“The impression in the house seems to be,” continued Clive, “that Juliet knows more than she feels inclined to tell.”
“Can’t you induce her to speak?”
“Not about Ida; although she’ll talk by the hour about the brute Ida has married.”
The father for a moment looked keenly at his son.
“Let me see,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “you are not taking up this matter out of friendship to Captain Culvers?”
“Good heavens, no!” cried Clive, hotly. “I’ve not spoken to the man half-a-dozen times in my life.”
“Then I suppose it is because she is Juliet’s sister that you have thus thrown yourself heart and soul into the affair?”
There came no reply from Clive. His face flushed crimson. His lips tightened.
Mr. Redway’s eyes did not lift from his face.
“Clive,” he said, after waiting in vain for an answer, “you are only giving me a half confidence. Why did you not marry this girl yourself?”
Then Clive’s words came in a torrent.
“Because,” he said, passionately, “she would have nothing to do with me treated—me as if I were something too vile for her to notice. When I went into a room she would walk out of it; if I joined a game of tennis in which she was playing she would immediately lay down her racket; she would not even dance in a set in which I should have been her vis-à-vis, and have had to touch her hand.”
The father looked his surprise.
He was
