“Will you sit down,” said Sir Robert. The great man’s voice and manner — to Vaughan’s surprise — were less autocratic and more friendly than he had ever known them. Indeed, in comparison of the lion of last evening he was but a mouse. “In the first place,” he continued, “I am obliged to you for your compliance with my wishes.”
Vaughan murmured that he had come at no inconvenience to himself.
“I hope not,” Sir Robert replied. “In the next place let me say, that we have to speak to you on a matter of the first importance; a matter also on which we have the advantage of knowledge which you have not. It is my desire, therefore, to admit you to a parity with us in that respect, Mr. Vaughan, before you express yourself on any subject on which we are likely to differ.”
Vaughan looked keenly, almost suspiciously at him; and an observer would have noticed that there was a closer likeness between the two men than the slender tie of blood warranted. “If it is a question, Sir Robert,” he said slowly, “of the subject on which we differed last evening, I would prefer to say at once — —”
“Don’t!” Wetherell, who was seated within a long reach of him, struck in. “Don’t!” And he laid an elephantine and not over-clean hand on Vaughan’s knee. “You can spill words as easy as water,” he continued, “and they are as hard to pick up again. Hear what Vermuyden has to say, and what I’ve to say— ’tisn’t much — and then blow your trumpet — if you’ve any breath left!” he added sotto voce, as he threw himself back.
Vaughan hesitated a moment. Then, “Very good,” he said, “if you will hear me afterwards. But — —”
“But and If are two wenches always raising trouble!” Wetherell cried coarsely. “Do you listen, Mr. Vaughan. Do you listen. Now, Vermuyden, go on.”
But Sir Robert did not seem to have words at command. He took a pinch of snuff from the gold box with which his fingers trifled: and he opened his mouth to resume; but he hesitated. At length, “What I have to tell you, Mr. Vaughan,” he said, in a voice more diffident than usual, “had perhaps been more properly told by my attorney to yours. I fully admit that,” dusting the snuff from his frill. “And it would have been so told but for — but for exigencies not immediately connected with it, which are nevertheless so pressing as to — to induce me to take the one step immediately possible. Less regular, but immediately possible! In spite of this, you will believe, I am sure, that I do not wish to take any advantage of you other than,” he paused with an embarrassed look at Wetherell, “that which my position gives me. For the rest I” — he looked again at his snuffbox and hesitated— “I think — I — —”
“You’d better come to the point!” Wetherell growled impatiently, jerking his ungainly person back in his chair, and lurching forward again. “To the point, man! Shall I tell him?”
Sir Robert straightened himself — with a sigh of relief. “If you please,” he said, “I think you had better. It — it may come better from you, as you are not interested.”
Vaughan looked from one to the other, and wondered what on earth they meant, and what they would be at. His cordial reception followed by this strange exordium, the preparations, the presence of the three men seated about him and all, it seemed, ill at ease — these things begot instinctive misgivings; and an uneasiness, which it was not in the power of reason to hold futile. What were they meditating? What threat, what inducement? And what meant this strange illumination of the house, this air of festivity? It could be nothing to him. And yet — but Wetherell was speaking.
“Mr. Vaughan,” he said gruffly — and he swayed himself as was his habit to and fro in his seat, “my friend here, and your kinsman, has made a discovery of — of the utmost possible importance to him; and, speaking candidly, of scarcely less importance to you. I don’t know whether you read the trash they call novels now-a-days— ‘The Disowned’” with a snort of contempt, “and ‘Tremayne’ and the rest? I hope not, I don’t! But it’s something devilish like the stuff they put in them that I’ve to tell you. You’ll believe it or not, as you please. You think yourself heir to the Stapylton estates? Of course you do. Sir Robert has no more than a life-interest, and if he has no children, the reversion in fee, as we lawyers call it, is yours. Just so. But if he has children, son or daughter, you are ousted, Mr. Vaughan.”
“Are you going to tell me,” Vaughan said, his face grown suddenly rigid, “that he has children?” His heart was beating furiously under his waistcoat, but, taken aback as he was, he maintained outward composure.
“That’s it,” Wetherell answered bluntly.
“Then — —”
“He has a daughter.”
“It will have to be proved!” Vaughan said slowly and in the tone of a man who chose his words. And he rose to his feet. He felt, perhaps he was justified in feeling, that they had taken him at a disadvantage. That they had treated him unfairly in trapping him hither, one to three; in order that they might see, perhaps, how he took it! Not — his thoughts travelled rapidly over the facts known to him — that the thing could be true! The punishment for last night’s revolt fell too pat, too à propos, he’d not believe it! And besides, it could not be true. For Lady Vermuyden lived, and there could be no question of a concealed marriage, or a low-born family. “It will have to be proved!” he repeated firmly. “And is matter rather for my lawyers than for me.”
Sir Robert, too, had risen to his feet. But it was Wetherell who spoke.
“Perhaps so!” he said. “Perhaps so. Indeed I admit it, young sir! It will have to be proved. But — —”
“It should have been told to them rather than to me!” Vaughan repeated, with a sparkling eye. And he turned as if he were determined to treat them as hostile and to have nothing farther to say to them.
But Wetherell stopped him. “Stay, young man,” he said, “and be ashamed of yourself! You forget yourself!” And before Vaughan, stung and angry, could retort upon him, “You forget,” he continued, “that this touches another as closely as it touches you — and more closely! You are a gentleman, sir, and Sir Robert’s kinsman. Have you no word then, for him!” pointing, with a gesture roughly eloquent, to his host. “You lose, but have you no word for him who gains! You lose, but is it nothing to him that he finds himself childless no longer, heirless no longer? That his house is no longer lonely, his hearth no longer empty! Man alive,” he added, dropping with honest indignation to a low note, “you lose, but what does he not gain? And have you no word, no generous thought for him? Bah!” throwing himself back in his seat. “Poor human nature.”
“Still it must be proved,” said Vaughan sullenly, though in his heart he acknowledged the truth of the reproach.
“Granted! But will you not hear what it is, that is to be proved?” Wetherell retorted. “If so, sit down, sir, sit down, and hear what we have to tell you like a man. Will you do that,” in a tone of extreme exasperation, which did but reflect the slowly hardening expression of Sir Robert’s face, “or are you quite a fool?”
Vaughan hesitated, looking with angry eyes on Wetherell. Then he sat down. “Am I to understand,” he said coldly, “that this is news to Sir Robert?”
“It was news to him yesterday.”
Vaughan bowed and was silent; aware that a more generous demeanour would better become him, but unable to compass it on the spur of the moment. He was ignorant — unfortunately — of the spirit in which he had been summoned: consequently he could not guess that every word he uttered rang churlishly in the ears of more than one of his listeners. He was no churl; but he was taken unfairly — as it seemed to him. And to be called upon in the first moment of chagrin to congratulate Sir Robert on an event which ruined his own prospects and changed his life — was too much. Too much! But again Wetherell was speaking.
“You shall know what we know from the beginning,” he said, in his heavy melancholy way. “You are aware, I suppose, that Sir Robert married — in the year ‘10, was it not? — Yes, in the year ‘10, and that Lady Vermuyden bore him one child, a d
aughter, who died in Italy in the year ‘15. It appears now — we are in a position to prove, I think — that that child did not die in that year, nor in any year; but is now alive, is in this country and can be perfectly identified.”
Vaughan coughed. “This is strange news,” he said, “after all these years; and somewhat sudden, is it not?”
Sir Robert’s face grew harder, but Wetherell only shrugged his shoulders. “If you will listen,” he replied, “you will know all that we know. It is no secret, at any rate in this room it is no secret, that in the year ‘14 Sir Robert fancied that he had grave reason to be displeased with Lady Vermuyden. It was thought by her friends that a better agreement might be produced by a temporary separation, and the child’s health afforded a pretext. Accordingly, Sir Robert suffered Lady Vermuyden to take it abroad, her suite consisting of a courier, a maid, and a nurse. The nurse she sent back to England not long afterwards on the plea that an Italian woman from whom the child might learn the language would be better. For my part, I believe that she acted bonâ-fide in this. But in other respects,” puffing out his cheeks, “her conduct was such as to alarm her husband; and, in terms perhaps too peremptory, Sir Robert bade her return at once — or cease to consider his house as her home. Her answer was the announcement of the child’s death.”
“And that it did not die,” Vaughan murmured, “as Lady Vermuyden said?”
“We have this evidence. But first let me say, that Sir Robert on the receipt of the news set out for Italy overland. The Hundred Days, however, stopped him; he could not cross France, and he returned without certifying the child’s death. He had indeed no suspicion, no reason for suspicion. Well, then, for evidence that it did not die. The courier is dead, and there remains only the maid. She is alive, she is here, she is in this house. And it is from her that we have learned the truth — that the child did not die.”
He paused a moment, brooding in his fat, melancholy way on the pattern of the carpet between his feet. Sir Robert, with a face hard and proud, sat upright, listening to the tale of his misfortunes — and doubtless suffered torments as he listened.
“Her story,” Wetherell resumed — possibly he had been arranging his thoughts— “is this. Lady Vermuyden was living a life of the wildest gaiety. She had no affection for the child; if the woman is to be believed, she hated it. To part with it was nothing to her one way or the other, and on receipt of Sir Robert’s order to return, her ladyship conceived the idea of punishing him by abducting the child and telling him it was dead. She set out from Florence with it; on the way she left it at Orvieto in charge of the Italian nurse, and arriving in Rome she put about the story of its death. Shortly afterwards she had it carried to England and bred up in an establishment near London — always with the aid and connivance of her maid.”
“The maid’s name?” Vaughan asked.
“Herapath — Martha Herapath. But to proceed. By and by Lady Vermuyden returned to England, and settled at Brighton, and the maid left her and married, but continued to draw a pension from her. Lady Vermuyden persisted here — in the company of Lady Conyng — but I need name no names — in the same course of giddiness, if no worse, which she had pursued abroad; and gave little if any heed to the child. But this woman Herapath never forgot that the pension she enjoyed was dependent on her power to prove the truth: and when a short time back the girl, now well-grown, was withdrawn from her knowledge, she grew restive. She sought Lady Vermuyden, always a creature of impulse, and when her ladyship, foolish in this as in all things, refused to meet her views she — she came to us,” he continued, lifting his head abruptly and looking at Vaughan, “and told us the story.”
“It will have to be proved,” Vaughan said stubbornly.
“No doubt, strictly proved,” Wetherell replied. “In the meantime if you would like to peruse the facts in greater detail, they are here, as taken down from the woman’s mouth.” He drew from his capacious breast-pocket a manuscript consisting of several sheets which he unfolded and flattened on his knee. He handed it to Vaughan.
The young man took it, without looking at Sir Robert: and with his thoughts in a whirl — and underlying them a sick feeling of impending misfortune — he proceeded to read it, line after line, without taking in a single word. For all the time his brain was at work measuring the change. His modest competence would be left to him. He would have enough to live as he was now living, and to pursue his career; or, in the alternative, he might settle down as a small squire in his paternal home in South Wales. But the great inheritance which had loomed large in the background of his life and had been more to him than he had admitted, the future dignity which he had undervalued while he thought it his own, the position more enviable than many a peer’s, and higher by its traditions than any to which he could attain by his own exertions, though he reached the Woolsack — these were gone if Wetherell’s tale was true. Gone in a moment, at a word! And though he might have lost more, though many a man had lost his all by such a stroke and smiled, he was no hero, and he could not on the instant smile. He could not in a moment oust all bitterness. He knew that he was taking the news unworthily; that he was playing a poor part. But he could not force himself to play a better — on the instant. When he had read with unseeing eyes to the bottom of the first page and had turned it mechanically, he let the papers fall upon his knee.
“You do not wish me,” he said slowly, “to express an opinion now, I suppose?”
“No,” Wetherell answered. “Certainly not. But I have not quite done. I have not quite done,” he repeated ponderously. “I should tell you that for opening the matter to you now — we have two reasons, Mr. Vaughan. Two reasons. First, we think it due to you — as one of the family. And secondly, Vermuyden desires that from the beginning, his intentions shall be clear and — be understood.”
“I thoroughly understand them,” Vaughan answered drily. No one was more conscious than he that he was behaving ill.
“That is just what you do not!” Wetherell retorted stolidly. “You spill words, young man, and by and by you will wish to pick them up again. You cannot anticipate, at any rate, you have no right to anticipate, Sir Robert’s intentions, of which he has asked me to be the mouthpiece. The estate, of course, and the settled funds must go to his daughter. But there is, it appears, a large sum arising from the economical management of the property, which is at his disposal. He feels,” Wetherell continued sombrely, an elbow on each knee and his eyes on the floor, “that some injustice has been done to you, and he desires to compensate you for that injustice. He proposes, therefore, to secure to you the succession to two-thirds of this sum; which amounts — which amounts, in the whole I believe” — here he looked at White— “to little short of eighty thousand pounds.”
Vaughan, who had been more than once on the point of interrupting him, did so at last. “I could not accept it!” he exclaimed impulsively. And he rose, with a hot face, from his seat. “I could not accept it.”
“As a legacy?” Wetherell, who was fond of money, said with a queer look. “As a legacy, eh? Why not?” While Sir Robert, with compressed lips, almost repented of his generosity. He had looked for some show of good-feeling, some word of sympathy, some felicitation from the young man, who, after all, was his blood relation. But if this was to be his return, if his advances were to be met with suspicion, his benevolence with churlishness, then all, all in this young man was of a piece — and detestable!
And certainly Vaughan was not showing himself in the best light. He was conscious that he had taken the news ill; but he could not change his attitude in a moment. Under no circumstances is it an easy thing to take a gift with grace: to take one with grace under these circumstances — and when he had already misbehaved — was beyond him, as it would have been beyond most men.
For a moment drawn this way by his temper, that way by his better feelings, he did not know how to answer Wetherell’s last words. At last and lamely, “May I ask,” he said, “why Sir Robert makes me this offer while
the matter lies open?”
“Sir Robert will prove his case,” Wetherell answered gruffly, “if that is what you mean.”
“I mean — —”
“He does not ask you to surrender anything.”
“I am bound to say, then, that the offer is very generous,” Vaughan replied, melting, and speaking with some warmth. “Most generous. But — —”
“He asks you to surrender nothing,” Wetherell repeated stolidly, his face between his knees.
“But I still think it is premature,” Vaughan persisted doggedly. “And handsome as it is, more than handsome as it is, I think that it would have come with greater force, were my position first made clear!”
“Maybe,” Wetherell said, his face still hidden. “I don’t deny that.”
“As it is,” with a deep breath, “I am taken by surprise. I do not know what to say. I find it hard to say anything in the first flush of the matter.” And Vaughan looked from one to the other. “So, for the present, with Sir Robert’s permission,” he continued, “and without any slight to his generosity, I will take leave. If he is good enough, to repeat on some future occasion, this very handsome — this uncalled for and generous offer, which he has now outlined, I shall know, I hope, what is due to him, without forgetting what is due also to myself. In the meantime I have only to thank him and — —”
But the belated congratulation which was on his lips and which might have altered many things, was not to be uttered.
“One moment!” Sir Robert struck in. “One moment!” He spoke with a hardness born of long suppressed irritation. “You have taken your stand, Mr. Vaughan, strictly on the defensive, I see — —”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 522
