Charlotte's Inheritance Part 54

"You remember your journey to Dorking, Val, last October, when you went to see that mysterious old aunt of yours, eh?"

Valentine blushed as the Captain recalled this cunningly-devised fable.

"Yes," he said gravely; "I remember telling you that I was going to see an aunt at Dorking."

"An aunt who had a little bit of money, eh, Val?" asked the Captain, with a grin.

"Yes. I may have gone so far as to speak of a little bit of money."

"And neither the aunt nor the bit of money ever existed, eh, Val? They were mere figments of the brain; and instead of going to Dorking you went to Ullerton, eh, Val? You stole a march upon me there. You wanted to throw your old chum off the scent, eh? You thought you had got hold of a good thing, and you were afraid your friend and companion might get a share of it."

"Well, you see, my friend and companion had a knack of getting the lion's share. Besides, this good thing was not my own affair. I had to protect the interest of another person--my employer, in point of fact; and it was by his suggestion, and in compliance with his request, that I invented that harmless fiction about Dorking. I don't think there was any dishonourable dealing in the matter. We were soldiers of fortune both; and the stratagem with which I protected myself against you was a very innocent one. You would have employed any stratagem or invented any fiction under the same circ.u.mstances. It was a case of diamond cut diamond."

"Precisely; and if the older soldier, if the free lance of many a campaign, got the best of it in the long run, the younger freebooter could hardly think himself ill-used--could he now, Val?"

"Well, no, I suppose not," replied Valentine, puzzled by the significance in the face of his old companion. That sly twinkle in the Captain's eyes, that triumphant smile wreathing the Captain's lips, must surely mean mischief.

Valentine Hawkehurst remembered the vague suspicion that had flashed into his mind on that Christmas Eve when Captain Paget and he had dined together at a West End restaurant, and the Captain had toasted Charlotte Halliday with a smile of sinister meaning. He began to antic.i.p.ate some startling and unpleasant revelation. He began to understand that in some manner this inscrutible schemer had contrived to overreach him.

"What are you going to tell me?" he asked. "I see there is some lurking mischief in your mind. How was it you were at Ullerton when I was there?

I met you on the platform of the station, and I had a vague half suspicion that you followed me up on more than one occasion. I saw a glove in a man's parlour--a glove which I could have sworn to as yours.

But when I came back, you were so plausible with your talk of promoting business, and so on, that I was fool enough to believe you. And I suppose you cheated and tricked me after all?"

"Cheated and tricked are hard words, my dear Val," said the Captain, with delightful blandness. "I had as much right to transact imaginary business in the promoting line at Ullerton as you had to visit a fict.i.tious aunt at Dorking. Self-interest was the governing principle in both cases. I do not think you can have any right to consider yourself injured by me if I did steal a march upon you, and follow close upon your heels throughout that Ullerton business. I do not think that you can have, on moral grounds, any justification for making a complaint against your old ally."

"Well, I suppose you are right enough in that," said Valentine.

"Shake hands upon it, then. I have not very long to live, and I want to feel myself at peace with mankind. You see, if you had come to me in the first place, in a frank and generous spirit, and had said, 'My dear friend, here is a good thing; let us go into it together, and see what there is to be made out of it,' you would have placed the matter on such a footing that, as a man of honour, I should have been bound to regard your interests as my own. But when you set up a separate interest, when you try to throw dust in my eyes, to hoodwink me--me, Horatio Paget, a man of the world, possessed of some little genius for social diplomacy--you attempt to do that which no man ever yet succeeded in doing, and you immediately release me from those obligations which an honourable man holds sacred. It was my glove which you saw in Mr.

Goodge's parlour. I had a very satisfactory interview with that reverend person while you were absent from Ullerton on some short excursion, as to the purpose of which I am still in the dark. On certain terms Mr. Goodge agreed to give me the privilege of selecting a stated number from the letters of Mrs. Rebecca Haygarth. I have reason to believe that I made a judicious choice; for the information thus obtained placed me at once upon a track which I followed industriously until it led me to a triumphant result."

"I do not understand--" began Valentine; but the Captain did not allow him time to say more.

"You do not understand that there could be any other genealogical line than that which you and George Sheldon fitted together so neatly. You have neither of you the experience of life which alone gives wideness of vision. You discovered the connections of the Haygarth and the Meynell families in the past. That was a step in the right direction. The discovery, so far as it went, was a triumph. You allowed the sense of that triumph to intoxicate you. In a business which of all businesses within the range of man's intellect most requires deliberation and sobriety, you went to work in a fever of haste and excitement. Instead of searching out _all_ the descendants of Christian Meynell, you pounce upon the first descendant who comes to hand, and elect her, at your own pleasure, sole heiress to the estate of the deceased John Haygarth.

You forget that there may be other descendants of the said Christian Meynell--descendants standing prior to your wife Charlotte in the line of succession."

"I can imagine no such descendants existing," said Valentine, with a puzzled manner. "You seem to have made yourself master of our business; but there is one point upon which you are mistaken. George Sheldon and I did not go to work in a fever of haste. We did fully and thoroughly examine the pedigree of that person whom we--and legal advisers of considerable standing--believe to be the sole heir-at-law to the Haygarth estate; and we took good care to convince ourselves that there was no other claimant in existence."

"What do you call convincing yourselves?"

"Christian Meynell had only three children--Samuel, Susan, and Charlotte.

The last, Charlotte, married James Halliday, of Newhall and Hyley farms; the other two died unmarried."

"How do you know that? How do you propose to demonstrate that Samuel and Susan Meynell died unmarried?"

"Susan was buried in her maiden name. Mrs. Halliday, her sister, was with her when she died. There was no question of marriage; nor is there the record of any marriage contracted by Samuel."

"All that is no proof."

"Indeed! I should have thought the evidence sufficient. But, in any case, the _onus probandi_ is not upon us. Can you prove the marriage of the Samuel Meynell who died at Calais, or of the Susan Meynell who died in London?"

"I can. Susan Meynell's legitimate son is in the next room. It's an unpleasant kind of revelation to make, Val; as he, the son of one sister, stands prior to your wife, the granddaughter of the other sister, in the order of succession. AND HE TAKES ALL!"

"He takes all!" repeated Valentine, bewildered. "He! Susan Meynell's son?--in the next room? What does all this mean?"

"It means that when Susan was deserted by the scoundrel who took her away from her home, she found an honest fellow to marry her. The name of her husband was Len.o.ble. Gustave Len.o.ble yonder, my daughter's husband, is her only child by that marriage. A perfectly legal marriage, my dear Val--everything _en regle_, I a.s.sure you. The business is in the hands of Messrs. Dashwood and Vernon of Whitehall--a first-cla.s.s firm; counsel's opinion most decided as to Len.o.ble's position. They have been rather slow about the preliminary steps; and, _entre nous_, I have not cared to hurry them, for I wanted to get my daughter's marriage over quietly before we began our proceedings in Chancery. It comes rather hard upon you, Val, I allow; but, you see, if you had acted generously, not to say honourably, towards me in the first instance, you'd have had the advantage of my experience. As it is, you have been working in the dark. However, things are not so bad as they might be. You might have married some ugly old harridan for the sake of this Haygarth estate; you have secured a pretty and amiable wife, and you mustn't be downhearted if you find yourself, from a financial point of view, most outrageously sold."

The Captain could not refrain from a laugh as he contemplated his young friend's surprise. The laugh degenerated into a fit of coughing, and it was some little time before the enfeebled Horatio was ready to resume the interrupted conversation. In this pause Valentine had leisure to face this new position. There was for the moment a sharp sense of disappointment. It is not possible for humanity to be quite indifferent to a hundred thousand pounds. So much of the "light and sweetness" of life is attainable for that sum,--such pleasures, of the purest and n.o.blest, are in the power of the possessor. But in this moment Valentine fully realized the fact that he had never taken the idea of this fortune into his mind--never made it part and parcel of himself, to be plucked out of his heart with anguish, and to leave a bleeding wound in the place where it had grown. It seemed to him as if he had been wakened abruptly from some bright bewildering dream; but the sharp pang of mercenary desires disappointed, of sordid hopes suddenly reft, was not for him.

Beyond this sense of uncertainty, which had made the Haygarthian fortune seem at best such "stuff as dreams are made of," there had been ever present in his mind of late the dismal a.s.sociation connected with this money. For this, and to get power over this through the rights of his weak wife, had Philip Sheldon plotted against the life of that sweet girl who was but newly rescued from the jaws of the grave. The bitter memory of those days and nights of suspense could never have been quite dissociated from the money that had been the primary cause of all this slow torture.

"Do you think I shall love my wife any less because she has no claim to the Haygarth estate?" he exclaimed presently, looking with half-contemptuous indignation upon the broken-down Bohemer. "I loved her long before I knew the name of Haygarth; I should have loved her if I had found her a beggar in the London streets, a peasant-girl weeding for sixpence a day in some dismal swamp of agricultural poverty and ignorance. I am not going to say that this money would not have brought us pleasure; pictures and gardens, and bright rooms, and books without number, and intercourse with congenial acquaintance and delightful journeyings to all the fairest places upon the earth, and the power to do some good in our generation, and a sense of security for our future, and by-and-by, perhaps, for the future of dear children, for whose prosperity we should be more anxious than for our own. Pleasure the money would most probably have brought for us in abundance; but I doubt if it could buy us more perfect happiness than we may know in the simplest home that my toil can support. Ah, Captain, I question if you ever knew the sweetest sensation life can give--the delight of working for those we love."

Captain Paget stared at his sometime protege in a kind of rapture of wonder, not entirely unmingled with admiration.

"Egad!" he exclaimed, "I have read of this kind of thing in novels; but in the whole course of my experience I never met with anything equal to it. My son-in-law, Len.o.ble yonder, is a generous foo--fellow enough; but then, since infancy, he has never known the want of money. And generosity from that kind of man is no more of a virtue than the foolhardiness of a child who pokes his finger into the candle, not knowing the properties of the thing he has to deal with. But anything like generosity from you, from a man reared as you were reared, is, I freely confess, a little beyond my comprehension."

"Yes; it is a transformation, is it not? But I don't think I was ever inordinately fond of money. Your genuine Bohemian rarely is. He is too well schooled in the art of living without cash, and he asks so little here below. His pipe, his friend, his dog, his books, his garret, his billiards, his beer. It is all a question of a few pounds a week. And if, some day, the divine enchanter Love takes the poor fellow underbids guidance, and teaches him to do without billiards and beer, your Bohemian settles down into the purest and best of men. Think what Goldy might have been if some good woman had taken compa.s.sion upon him and married him, and henpecked him ever afterwards. He might have written as many novels as Sir Walter Scott, and died master of some Hibernian Abbotsford, some fair domain among the bright green hills that look down upon broad Shannon's silvery falls. No, Captain; your intelligence has not annihilated me. I can face the future boldly with my dear young wife upon my arm."

"Upon my soul, Val, you're a very n.o.ble fellow!" exclaimed Horatio Paget, with real enthusiasm; "and I am sorry I have kept you in the dark so long."

"You have kept me in the dark? Yes; to be sure. How long have you known this--about Susan Meynell?"

"Well, my dear boy, not very long."

"But how long? A month--two months? Yes; you have known Len.o.ble's position ever since you knew him; and Charlotte told me three months ago of Diana's engagement to Len.o.ble. Do you know that if Sheldon had succeeded, Charlotte's blood would have been upon your head? If you had not concealed the truth, his villany would never have been attempted."

"But, my dear Val," exclaimed the Captain piteously, "I was not to know--"

"No; you were not to know that there could be such a wretch as Philip Sheldon upon this earth. We will say no more of that. I kept my secret, you kept yours. Mischief unspeakable well-nigh came of all this underhand work. But heaven has been merciful to us. We have pa.s.sed through the valley of the shadow of death; and if anything could make my wife dearer to me than she was when first I won her promise to be mine, it would be the sorrow of the last few months. And now I will go and shake hands with Len.o.ble, my wife's kinsman. He is a fine fellow, and well deserves his good fortune. Stay; one word. Did Diana know this? did she know that her lover is heir to the Haygarth estate?"

"She does not know it now. She has never heard the name of Haygarth. And, between you and me, Val, it cost me a world of trouble to persuade her to say yes to Len.o.ble's offer, though he is a very decent match for her, even without reference to the Haygarth estate."

"I am glad she knew nothing of this," said Valentine; "I am very glad."

After this he again shook hands with Captain Paget, at that gentleman's request, and the Captain expressed himself much relieved by the conversation, and by his late protege's very generous behaviour. He called to his daughter and the rest presently, and they came at his summons.

"Is your long talk finished, papa?" asked Diana.

"And is the secret told?" demanded Charlotte of her obedient husband and slave.

"Yes, dear, it is told," he answered gravely.

"I hope it is a pleasant secret."

"I do not think the knowledge of it will give you much pain, dearest.

You have learnt to think yourself a--a kind of an heiress of late, have you not?"

"Papa--Mr. Sheldon--told me that I had a claim to some money; but I have not thought much about it, except that I should give you Grote and Macaulay in dark-brown calf, with bevelled boards and red edges, like that edition you saw at the auctioneer's in Bond Street, and have talked about ever since; and a horse, perhaps; and a gla.s.s porch to our cottage."