Miss Ferriby's Clients

by Florence Warden

  Chapter 10

  Welton Keynes reeled under the blow, and at first remained almost stupefied from the effect of Miss Ferriby's startling statement.

  Then recovering himself, he repeated as fiercely as she, "I tell you, my father never was a bankrupt. Whoever told you such a thing about him has told you a lie."

  Miss Ferriby shrugged her shoulders. "You are contending over a word only," she said. "If you are technically correct, as you may be, in saying that Richard Keynes was never actually declared bankrupt, you know as well as I do that he left England on account of his debts."

  The red blood rushed into the young man's face. "It is brutal, hideous, to put it like that -- to me," he said in a hoarse voice. "I know he was in debt. I know he was ruined, that our house -- everything he had, was sold to pay his debts, and that there remained a great deal that he could not pay. But to say that he ran away to avoid paying isn't true. How could it be when, if he had stayed, he could have done no more than was done, paid no shilling more than was paid. We were left absolutely stranded, my brother and I, without anything but the few pounds lent us by friends to start us in life. And you talk as if my father had been a fraudulent debtor, one of those men who have money which they keep for themselves and their families, instead of paying it away to their lawful creditors. For shame, Miss Ferriby, for shame!"

  But the woman showed neither shame nor contrition for what she had done. Seating herself by the fire with an air of calmness, which perhaps was scarcely real, she repeated in a lower voice, with great deliberation, "If it was not to avoid his creditors, why did your father go away by the Ostend boat, on the morning after the crash came?"

  Welton, with an expression of the keenest anguish and anxiety upon his face, stood, white but collected, on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking steadily at her. Then he said, "I didn't say that it was not to avoid his creditors. I dare say the feeling -- that he couldn't face them -- had something to do with his going away. My poor father, who was passionately attached to us, couldn't bear to face either the men to whom he owed money, or us, whom he had always treated so well and so generously. But that's not the thing you accuse him of. You say he went to avoid paying. That's not true. He went because he couldn't pay, and because it had broken his heart."

  "His heart is mended now," replied Miss Ferriby quietly. "He is in England and passes under another name, but he doesn't appear to be without money."

  Welton felt as if an icy hand had been laid upon his throat. If this were true, that his father was alive and in England, it certainly seemed probable that he had got money from somewhere, since Miss Ferriby was not in the habit of dealing with penniless clients. Her rules on that subject appeared to be very strict indeed, and "No pay, no help" appeared to be the fixed principle upon which her charity was exercised.

  Welton felt sick at heart, bewildered, miserable, and at the same time fiercely, defiantly, incredulous. His father had been unlucky in his speculative career, but that, he felt, was the very worst that could be said of him. For years his father had been prosperous, and during the time of his prosperity no father could have been more affectionate or more devoted, no friend more generous or more true, than Richard Keynes. To hear this suggestion that he was living in England in some sort of comfort, if not of luxury, without making any effort to see or help his own sons, was a blow under which Welton felt that his brain reeled.

  "I can't believe it," he cried at last, passionately.

  Miss Ferriby looked up at him, and he, catching her eye, full of indignation as he was, could not help seeing a tenderness, a concern in her face that frightened him, and made him ask himself whether this awful thing that she had told him was really the truth after all.

  Why would she tell him a lie about this? What object could she have in representing Richard Keynes as being still alive, if he was dead, as they had all believed? However, he stood firm.

  "My father was the best father that ever lived," he said. "I can't believe that he would have been able to stay in England all this time without coming to see us. It's a year now since -- as we believe -- he died."

  Over Miss Ferriby's masculine face there passed a look which struck him as being the tenderest, the gentlest he had ever seen upon it. When she spoke, it was in a low-pitched, sweet voice as she leaned forward and looked up at him kindly and remorsefully.

  "Why did you irritate me into telling you?" she said simply.

  Welton turned away to hide the tears which had started to his eyes. He was torn with strong emotions, pity and anxiety for the father who might still be living; resentment against this woman who had stirred up again the old feelings of bitterness and pain; the woman whom he could not understand and could not trust, but who yet wielded some sort of influence over him, as he felt sure she did over everyone with whom she came in contact.

  "I didn't want to tell you. I ought not to have told you," she went on. "But then you ought not to have irritated me by telling me my friends and visitors were thieves. Remember, a man may be called a thief when he is really little or not at all to blame. He may be overtaken by misfortune, be unable to fight against it, may succumb to temptation after resisting a long time."

  Welton flinched at each word, which he knew could be made to apply to his own father. She went on, "Is it fair then to be so hard? Is it fair to condemn me because I am merciful? Ah, I know what you're going to say. I make them pay for it. Why shouldn't I -- if they can -- since the money goes to help others who are unfortunate without blame?"

  "What makes you do it? You know you must be helping some who ought not to be helped," said Welton hoarsely.

  "Perhaps so. Still, that's my affair, isn't it? I have my way of doing what I suppose to be good. And I won't be interfered with. I won't be dictated to. I won't have anybody say to me: You must be charitable in such a way, and such only. Do you hear?"

  She rose to her feet, her voice growing deeper and more passionate as she went on. "Look at me," she cried, raising her hands to her shoulders and pointing out her own deformity with a sudden swift look of pain such as opened his eyes abruptly to the misery her misfortune caused her. "Look at the burden of deformity which I have to carry with me to the end of my days! Think of the wreck this want of all feminine grace or beauty has made of my life. And then tell me, remembering how there is always a twist in the mind of every cripple, whether it is not natural that I should have my own ways of doing what seems to me to be good in the world, whether it is surprising that my way should not be the way of other people!"

  Welton was for the moment almost dazzled into agreeing with this specious argument. But he paused before replying, recovered himself, and said at last, deliberately and earnestly, "Miss Ferriby, nobody could possibly be more sorry for you than I am, or more ready to see with your eyes if it were possible to do so. But it isn't. Surely, surely you can't pretend not to see the difference between a man who is unfortunate through no fault of his own, or no great fault, and the man who commits a foul crime, a crime against society? You are so clever that I understand you may look upon things in a different way from mine. But surely there's only one right way of looking upon a man who's committed an appalling murder, or upon one who has stolen some jewels and then tried to shoot a poor girl who tried to prevent his escape."

  Miss Ferriby was silent for a moment. Then she said obstinately, "What about the English law then, which looks upon a man as innocent until he's proved to be guilty? You would have him condemned off-hand?"

  "No, no. But when there's a clear case against him, I would have him put on trial."

  "And would you treat unfortunate debtors in the same way?"

  The question, put so quietly, caused Welton to blush, to stammer, and to feel the most acute distress.

  "Bring him to me," he cried hoarsely, going straight to the point, and thus acknowledging that he knew what she meant. "Bring my father to me, and let me hear what he has to say. I don't believe that he has done anything wrong -- anything cowardly even. If he
is in hiding, it's because he has some good end to serve, because he sees a way out of his difficulties, a way to pay his creditors, which he couldn't use if they knew him to be alive."

  For a moment Miss Ferriby seemed touched, and he thought she was going to shed tears. But the next instant she had recovered herself, and leaning forward and dropping her voice, she said, "Why don't you see him and ask him?"

  The question caused Welton the most acute distress and emotion. Was it really possible for him to see his father again in the flesh, to confer with him, to feel the touch of his hand, hear the sound of his voice, to look once more upon the face which had always had a kind look for his own children?

  He was almost overwhelmed by the thought, and it was with difficulty that he presently stammered out, "How can I? How is it possible for me to see him, if he does not wish to see me?" Even now there was a note of incredulity in his voice.

  Miss Ferriby smiled shrewdly. "You have only to wait," she said, "and watch. If you remain with me you are bound to see your father before long. He honours me by saying that I've been a good friend to him, and whenever he is in any difficulty, or even when he merely wants to feel the touch of a friend's hand, he comes to see me, by night always."

  Still Welton looked incredulous. "Do your servants know who he is? The relation in which he stands to me?" he asked at last.

  Miss Ferriby looked at him quickly. "No," she said. "They don't know even his real name, only the one he goes by, which I can't tell even to you."

  Reckless of offending her, since he was not even sure that he would ever be under her roof again, at any rate in the capacity of paid dependent or friend, Welton went on, "But your servants seem to know a great deal. One of them locked me into the library this evening, and the other was on the watch for me when I got on the veranda."

  Miss Ferriby smiled grimly. "I have treated my servants so well," she said, "that their interest is my interest, and they know it. No mistress who can say that, is ever other than well served."

  This was an admirable answer, but it did not satisfy Welton. He knew that the two men he had seen about were more than servants, and in particular the one he had seen enter the Mayfair house disguised. He wondered whether Box had said anything to Miss Ferriby about that incident and their mutual recognition. The next words she uttered convinced him that he had.

  "What makes you think they know so much?" she asked after a pause. "Have you ever seen them do anything which surprised you, which seemed a strange thing for them to be doing?"

  He hesitated. For one moment he thought he would challenge her to account for that episode, but the next some wiser instinct told him he had better hold his tongue about that chance meeting. "Only what I've told you," he said at last. "They seemed to be spying upon me."

  She smiled. "Because they knew you to be curious," she said, "and they were right. Never mind, I forgive your curiosity. What I could not forgive, however, would be any attempt to betray my secrets. You look upon them as sacred, I hope?"

  Again he hesitated. In his own mind he felt that he looked upon them very differently, having had his eyes opened that evening in a manner which left no room for doubt that Miss Ferriby was not exactly the beneficent angel of mercy she had represented herself to be.

  Even if her statement were true, that she helped criminals out of pity, and took their money from them in order to help a more worthy class of unlucky ones, there was a taint of commercialism about this philanthropy, at a fixed fee, which repelled him. Even if the money thus collected from thieves and murderers went to the assistance of the friendless and the poor, Welton felt that the method was hideous, repulsive.

  But he had the strongest possible doubts whether the money Miss Ferriby exacted from her clients ever went further than her own pocket.

  All this mystery which surrounded the household, this hiding away of the servants, this strange reincarnation of the footman in the house of an American millionaire in the character of a guest, were incompatible with pure benevolence, with the charity which is untainted and unalloyed.

  Stronger and stronger was the impression growing in his mind that Miss Ferriby's evident prosperity was the result of her fortune-telling, and her tolls upon the criminals she helped to disguise, and he wondered, with an ugly feeling of mistrust, where those jewels had come from with which she adorned her unattractive person.

  Did she levy toll in kind upon her clients, as well as exact money fees? Welton thought it quite possible. Anything was possible in this eccentric woman, in this uncanny household.

  In the meantime Miss Ferriby was waiting for an answer to her question.

  Instead of giving it, he asked another. "What secrets have I of yours to keep, Miss Ferriby?"

  She frowned impatiently, but he went on blandly, "It is no secret that you tell fortunes, I suppose?"

  "Well, we don't speak of it in that crude way," she said. "I don't make any claims to prophecy. All I say is that, from the art I have studied -- or call it science if you like -- of reading the picture which I can conjure up with the aid of another mind that is set on the same idea"

  "Magic lantern," thought Welton.

  "I can make shrewd and pretty accurate guesses at the course events will take in any case before me. There, that is all; absolutely all. You are at liberty to say that about me, and no more."

  "Well, then, you don't call that a secret?"

  "No."

  "Your charity -- the benevolent works upon which everyone consults you -- there is no secrecy about them?" pursued Welton.

  "Oh, no. I am known far and wide for the interest I take in philanthropic works, and for the way in which I work in support of the charities I am interested in."

  "And what else?"

  Miss Ferriby frowned again. She seemed to dislike this attempt to drive her into a corner. "It would not do for it to be known that I have helped people in distress to escape," she said. "It would not do to betray me -- nor could you very well betray your own father."

  Welton gave a convulsive movement. "I can't believe..." he began. And he faced her with a challenge in his voice. "What is my father like?" he asked sharply.

  She peered up info his face. "Why, he is like you," she said.

  Absurdly easy as it might have seemed to make such an answer as this, it was so eminently and conspicuously true, and she said it with such an air of conviction that Welton was confounded. It was the truth that he had always been singularly like his father, and the manner in which she looked at him, as if suddenly struck with the resemblance, did more to convince him that her astonishing story was true than all that she had said before.

  He turned away, shaking from head to foot, troubled and dismayed. He heard the rustling of her silk gown, and the next moment he felt one of her firm, large hands upon his arm.

  "You will come back? You will see him?" she asked in a whisper.

  He bowed his head without a word. Satisfied, she let him go. But he hurried out with a bow and a hurried goodbye, without touching her hand in farewell.

  He felt that he could not. He mistrusted her too much for that.

  As he went out into the lane, and felt the night air upon his face, he drew in large draughts of it, feeling as if he wanted to bathe himself in the purer outer air after that atmosphere of heavy perfume, and that sickening sense of wrongdoing that seemed now to pervade the house and cling round its mistress like a veil.

  As he came in front of the little house where the Ashcots lived, he saw a light in the lower front room, and the curtains were not quite closed. A woman's face was looking out between them.

  Barbara!

  The effect of the sudden discovery that this girl was watching for him, as he did not doubt was the case, was so strong, so welcome to his wounded spirit, that it acted upon him like a tonic, bracing him up after the depressing and devastating experience he had just gone through.

  He felt that he worshipped this tender-hearted creature who had shown so much interest in a stranger, and so wa
rmly, yet so modestly, done her best to warn him of his dangers, and to protect him from the consequences of his own temerity in having dealings with the ill-famed hunchback.

  He lingered a moment outside the little garden, not daring to make her any sign of his presence, yet feeling the comfort of knowing that she saw him, and that she was glad he was safe. Then he passed on, and as he reached the corner, the light went out.

  Now he knew, without any possibility of doubt, that it was for him to pass in safety that Barbara had been watching.