‘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 for ever. 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 to-morrow 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 before he sent it off to the batik. There was a little over a hundred pounds in the box, in notes and gold. John Treverton counted a hundred; the crisp notes, the bright gold, lay in a tempting heap on the table before him, but he kept his hand upon the money for a minute or two, while he sat looking at it with a meditative countenance.
‘By the way, Mr. —— Mansfield;’ he began, after that thoughtful silence, ‘when, after a lapse of so many years, you presented yourself to your daughter, what credentials did you bring with you?’
‘Credentials?’
‘Yes. In other words, how did you prove your identity? You had parted with her when she was a child of six years old. Did her memory recall your features when she met you as a girl of seventeen, or did she take your word for the fact that you were the father she had believed to be in his grave?’
‘She remembered me when I recalled myself to her. At first her memory was naturally vague. She had a dim recollection of my face, but no certainty as to when and where she had last seen it; until I recalled to her the circumstances of her childhood, the last days we spent together before my serious illness, her mother, the baby brother that died when she was three years old. John Treverton, you libel nature if you suppose that a daughter’s instinct can fail her when a father appeals to it. Had material proofs been wanted to convince my child that her father stood before her, I had those proofs, and I showed them to her — old letters, the certificate of her birth, her mother’s picture. The portrait I gave to Laura. I have the documents about me to-night. I have never parted with them.’
He produced a bloated pocket-book, the leather worn greasy with long usage, the silk lining frayed and ragged, and from this receptacle brought forth half-a-dozen papers, yellow with age.
One was the certificate of Laura Malcolm’s birth. The other five were letters addressed to Stephen Malcolm, Esq., Ivy Cottage, Chiswick. One of these, the latest in date, was from Jasper Treverton.
‘I am deeply grieved to hear of your serious illness, my poor friend,’ he wrote; ‘your letter followed me to Germany, where I have been spending the autumn at one of the famous mineral baths. I started for England immediately, and landed here half an hour ago. I shall come on as fast as rail and cabs can bring me, and indeed hope to be with you before you get this letter.
‘Yours in all friendship, ‘JASPER TREVERTON. ‘The Ship Hotel, Dover,
‘October 15th, 185 — .’
The other letters were from friends of the past, like Jasper. One had enclosed aid in the shape of a post office order. The rest were sympathetic and regretful refusals to assist a broken-down acquaintance. The writers offered their impecunious friend every good wish, and benevolently commended him to Providence. In every case the respectability and the respectful tone of Stephen Malcolm’s correspondents went far to testify to the fact that he had once been a gentleman. There was a deep descent from the position of the man to whom these letters were written to the status of Mr. Desrolles, the second-floor lodger in Cibber Street.
So far as they went his credentials were undeniable. Laura had recognised him as her father. What justification could John Treverton find for repudiating his claim? For the money the man demanded he cared not a jot; but it pained him unspeakably to accept this dissipated waif, soaked in alcohol, a
s the father of the woman he loved.
‘There is your hundred pounds, Mr. Mansfield,’ he said, ‘and since you have taught the little world of Hazlehurst to consider my wife an orphan, the less you show yourself here the better for all of us. Villages are given to scandal. If you were to be seen at this house, people would want to know who you are and all about you.’
‘I told you I should start for Paris to-morrow night,’ answered Desrolles, strapping his pocketbook, which was now distended to its uttermost with notes and gold. ‘I shan’t change my mind. I’m fond of Paris and Parisian ways, and know my way about that glorious city almost as well as you, though I never married a French wife.’
John Treverton sat silent, with his thoughtful gaze bent on the fire, apparently unconscious of the other man’s sneer.
“Ta ta, Jack. Any message for your old friends in the Quartier Latin? No? Ah, I suppose the Squire of Hazlehurst has turned his back on the companions of Jack Chicot; just as King Harry the Fifth threw off the joyous comrades of the Prince of Wales. The desertion broke poor old Falstaff’s heart; but that’s a detail. Good night, Jack.’
Laura re-entered the room at this moment, and drew back startled at hearing her father address her husband with such friendly familiarity.
‘I have told Mr. Treverton everything, my dear,’ said Desrolles.
‘I am so glad of that,’ answered Laura, and then she laid her hand upon the old man’s shoulder, with more affection than she had ever yet shown him, and said, with grave gentleness, ‘Try to lead a good life, my dear father, and let us hear from you sometimes, and let us think of each other kindly, though Fate has separated us.’
‘A good life,’ he muttered, turning his bloodshot eyes upon her for a moment with a look that thrilled her with a sudden horror. ‘The money should have come sooner, my girl. I’ve travelled too far on the wrong road. There, goodbye, my dear. Don’t trouble yourself about an old scapegrace like me. Jack, send me my money quarterly to that address,’ — he threw down a dingy looking card, ‘and I’ll never worry you again. You can blot me out of your mind, if you like; and you need never fear that my tongue will say an evil word of you, go where I may.’
‘I will trust you for that,’ answered John Treverton, holding out his hind.
Desrolles either did not see the gesture, or did not care to take the hand. He snatched up his greasy-looking hat and hurried from the room.
‘Dearest, do you think any worse of me now you know that man is my father,’ asked Laura, when the door had closed upon Desrolles, and the bell had been rung to warn Trimmer of the guest’s departure.
‘Do I think any worse of a pearl because it comes out of an oyster,’ said her husband, smiling at her. ‘Dear love, if the parish workhouse were peopled with your relations, not one of them more reputable than Mr. Mansfield, my love and reverence for you would not be lessened by a tittle.’
‘You don’t believe in hereditary genius, then. You don’t think that we derive our characters mainly from our fathers and mothers.’
‘If I did I should believe that your mother was an angel, and that you inherited her disposition.’
‘My poor father,’ said Laura, with something between a sigh and a shudder. ‘He was once a gentleman.’
‘No doubt, love. There is no saying how low a man may descend when he once takes to travelling down-hill.’
‘If he had not been a gentleman my adopted father could never have been his friend,’ mused Laura. ‘It would not have been possible for Jasper Treverton to associate with anything base.’
‘No, love. And now tell me, when first your father presented himself to you, was not his revelation a great surprise, a shock to your feelings?’
‘It was indeed.’
‘Tell me, dear, how it happened. Tell me all the circumstances, if it does not pain you.’
‘No, dear. It pained me for you to know that my father had fallen so low, but now that you know the worst, I feel easier in my mind. It is a relief to me to be able to speak of him freely. Remember, Jack, he had bound me solemnly to secrecy. I would not break my promise, even to you.’
‘I understand all, dear.’
‘The first time I saw my father,’ Laura began falteringly, as if even to speak of him by that sacred name were painful to her, ‘it was summer time, a lovely August evening, and I had strolled out after dinner into the orchard. You know the gate that opens from the orchard into the field. I saw a man standing outside it smoking, with his arms resting on the top of the gate. Seeing a stranger there, I turned away to avoid him, but before I had gone three steps he stopped me. “Miss Malcolm, for God’s sake let me speak to you,” he said. “I am an old friend whom you must remember.” I went up to him and looked him full in the face; for there was such earnestness in his manner that it never occurred to me that he might be an impostor. “Indeed, I do not remember you,” I said, “when have I ever seen you?” Then he called me by my Christian name. “Laura,” he said, “you were six years old when Mr. Treverton brought you here. Have you quite forgotten the life that went before that time?’”
She paused, and her husband drew her to the low chair by the fire, and seated himself beside her, letting her head rest on his shoulder.
‘Go on, love,’ he said, gently, ‘but not if these memories agitate you.’
‘No, dear. It is a relief to confide in you. I told him that I did remember the time before I came to the Manor House. Some events I could remember distinctly, others faintly, like the shadows in a dream. I remembered being in France, by the sea, in a place where the fisherwomen wore bright-coloured petticoats and high caps, where I had children of my own age to play with, and where the sun seemed always shining. And then that life had changed to dull grey days in a place near a river, a place where there were narrow lanes, and country roads and fields; and yet there was a town close by with tall chimneys and busy streets. I remembered that here my mother was ill, lying in a darkened room for many weeks; and then one day my father took me to London in the omnibus, and left me in a large cold-looking house in a great square — a house where all the rooms were big and lofty, and had an awful look after our little parlour at home, and where I used to sit in a drawing-room all day with an old lady in black satin, who let me amuse myself as best I could. My father had told me that the old lady was his aunt, and that I was to call her aunt, but I was too much afraid of her to call her anything. I think I must have stayed there about a week, but it seemed ages, for I was very unhappy, and used to cry myself to sleep every night when the maid had put me to bed in a large bleak room at the top of the house; and then my father came and took me home again in the red omnibus. I could see that he was very unhappy, and while we were walking in the lane that led to our house he told me that my dear mamma had gone away, and that I should never see her again in this world. I had loved her passionately, Jack, and the loss almost broke my heart. I am telling you much more than I told the stranger. I only said enough to him to prove that I remembered my old life.’
‘And how did he reply?’
‘He took a morocco case from his pocket and gave it into my hand, telling me to look at the portrait inside it. Oh, how well I remembered that sweet face. The memory of it flashed upon me like a dream one has forgotten and tried vainly to recall, till it comes back suddenly in a breath. Yes, it was my mother’s face. I could remember her looking just like that as she sat at work on the rocks by the sends where I played with the other children, at that happy place in France. I remembered her sitting by my cot every night before I fell asleep. I asked the stranger how he came to possess this picture. “I would give all the money I have in the world for it,” I said. “You shall do nothing of the kind,” he answered. “I give it you as a free gift, but I should not have done that if you had not remembered your mother’s face. And now, Laura, look at me and tell me if you have ever seen me before?”’
‘You looked and could not remember him,’ said John Treverton.
‘No. Yet there was so
mething in the face that seemed familiar to me. ‘When he spoke I knew that I had heard the voice before. It seemed kind and friendly, like the voice of someone I had known long ago. He told me to try and realize what chancre ten years of evil fortune would snake in a man’s looks. It was not time only which had altered him, he told me, but the world’s ill-usage, bad health, hard work, corroding sorrow. “Make allowance for all this,” he said, “and look at me with indulgent eyes, and then try to send your thoughts back to that old life at Chiswick, and say what part I had in it.” I did look at him very earnestly, and the more I looked the more familiar the face brew. “I think you must be a friend of my father’s,” I said at last. “Poverty has no friends,” he answered, “at the time you remember your father was friendless. Oh, child, child, can ten years blot out a father’s image? I am your father.”’
Laura paused, with quickened breathing, recalling the agitation of that moment.
‘I cannot tell you how I felt when he said this,’ she continued, presently. ‘I thought I was going to fall fainting at his feet. My brain clouded over; I could understand nothing; and then, when my senses came slowly back, I asked him how this could be true? Did not my father die a few hours after I was taken away by Jasper Treverton? My benefactor had told me that it was so. Then he — my father — said that he had allowed Jasper Treverton to suppose him dead, for my sake; in order that I might be the adopted child of a rich man, and well placed in life, while he — my real father — was waif and stray, mid a pauper. Mr. Treverton had received a letter announcing his old friend’s death — a letter written in a feigned hand by my father himself, and had never taken the trouble to inquire into the particulars of the death and burial. He felt that he had done enough in leaving money for the sick man’s use, and in relieving him of all care about his daughter. This is what my father told me. How could I reproach him, Jack, or despise him for this deception, for a falsehood which so degraded him. It was for my sake he had sinned.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 610
