Dorothy's Double Volume I Part 15

Mr. Levine's eyebrows went up again in surprise at the question. 'My impression so far is,' he said, 'as between solicitor and counsel, that there is not the slightest doubt in the world about it. The girl had got into some bad sort of sc.r.a.pe; some blackguard had got her under his thumb. She had a good marriage on hand; it was absolutely necessary to shut the fellow's mouth. A largish sum was wanted, and she dared not ask her father, so she played a bold stroke--a wonderfully bold stroke I must say--relying upon brazening it out and getting her father to believe--as she evidently has succeeded in doing--that there is a double of herself somewhere about, who represented her. All the first part of the case is a comparatively ordinary one. This is curious, even to me--in its daring audacity, it is really magnificent. Of course, her father must pay the money; to defend it would be to ruin her utterly. Do you mean to say you don't agree with me?'

'I hardly know what to think,' Danvers said, doubtfully. 'I know Miss Hawtrey intimately, and have done so for some years, and in spite of the apparent impossibility of her innocence, I own that I cannot bring myself to believe in her guilt. She is one of the brightest, frankest, and most natural girls I know.'

The lawyer looked at him with a smile of almost pity.

'You surprise me, sir. My experience is that in the majority of cases of this kind it is just the very last girl one would suspect who goes wrong. Why, my dear sir, if we were to set up such a ridiculous defence as this in an action to recover the price of the jewels, we should simply be laughed out of court.'

'Mr. Hawtrey tells me that his daughter is most anxious that he should defend the case.'

Again the eyebrows went up.

'Of course she would say so. She must know well enough that, whether her father put himself into my hands or any one else's, the advice would be the same: Pay the money; you have no shadow of a chance of getting a verdict, and to bring it into court would utterly ruin your daughter's prospects. Of course, it is her cue to appear anxious for a trial, knowing perfectly well that such a thing is out of the question.'

'I think you might alter your opinion if you saw her.'

'I certainly should be glad to see her,' Charles Levine said. 'I admire talent, and she must be amazingly clever. I have a great respect for audacity, and I never heard in all my experience of a more brilliant piece of boldness than this. She must be a great actress, too; of the highest order. Altogether I should be very glad to see her. She deserves to succeed, and as there is no doubt that you and I will be able to persuade her father that there is nothing for it but to pay the money. I think her success is pretty well a.s.sured.'

'I agree with you that this money must be paid, but I am not prepared to go further yet.'

'My dear sir,' the lawyer said, 'you confirm the opinion I have always held, that the judgment of no man under fifty is worth a penny where a young and pretty woman is concerned. Mind, there are many men, perhaps the majority, who cannot be trusted in such a matter up to any time of life, but up to fifty the rule is almost universal.'

'I am glad to hear it,' Danvers said, 'for in that case your own judgment cannot be accepted as final.'

'I rather expected that, Mr. Danvers, but you must remember that in matters of this kind I have had more experience than a dozen ordinary men of the age of eighty. Now, I really cannot spare any more time. I have given your client a good two hours, and my waiting-room must be full of angry men. I shall write to Mr. Hawtrey to-morrow to say that upon thinking the matter well over my first impressions are more than confirmed, and that I am of opinion that no jury in the world would give him a verdict, and that it would be nothing short of insanity to go into Court. I shall mention, of course, that I am much struck with his theory of the affair, which indeed appears to me to furnish the only complete explanation of the matter, but that in the absence of a single confirmatory piece of evidence it would be hopeless for the most eloquent counsel to attempt to persuade twelve British jurymen to entertain the theory. I think it would be as well if you were to call on him this evening or to-morrow morning and shew him that your view agrees with mine. That much you can honestly say, can you not?'

'Certainly. However difficult I may find it to persuade myself that Miss Hawtrey is in any way the woman you picture her, I am as convinced as you are that it is absolutely necessary that the money should be paid.'

On Mr. Hawtrey reaching his home he found Mrs. Daintree upon the sofa in tears, while Dorothy, with a book in her hand, was sitting with an unconcerned expression a short distance from her.

'What is the matter now?' he asked testily. 'Upon my word I believe my annoyances would have upset Job.'

'Would you believe it? Cousin Dorothy has just declared to me her intention of writing to Lord Halliburn to break off the match.'

Mr. Hawtrey did not explode as his cousin had expected that he would do.

'It is not a step to be taken hastily,' he said, gravely, 'but it is one upon which Dorothy herself is the best judge. You have not written yet, child?'

'No, father. I should not think of doing so without telling you first. I have, of course, been thinking a good deal about it, and it certainly seems to me that it would be best.'

'Well, a few hours will make no difference. The idea is at present new to me: I will think it over quietly this afternoon, and this evening we will talk it over together.'

'It would be nothing short of madness for her to do so,' Mrs. Daintree said, roused to a state of real anger by Mr. Hawtrey's defection, when she had implicitly relied upon his authority being exerted to prevent Dorothy from carrying out her intention. 'It would be madness to break off so excellent a match. It would make her the talk of the whole town, and would seem to confirm all the wicked rumours that have been going about.'

'As to the match, cousin, there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. As to the public talk, it is better to be talked about for a week or two than to have a life's unhappiness. That is the sole point with which I concern myself.'

Dorothy, with a softened face now, got up and kissed her father.

'That is right dear,' he said. 'Now let us put the matter aside for the present. I have been busy all the morning and want my lunch badly; so even if you are not hungry yourself, come down and keep me company.

Come, cousin, dry your eyes, and put your cap straight, and come down to lunch.'

'Food would choke me,' Mrs. Daintree said; 'I have a dreadful headache, and shall go and lie down.'

CHAPTER VIII

'Mr. Danvers is in the library, sir,' a servant announced at nine o'clock that evening.

'Will you come down, Dorothy?'

'No, father, I do not want to hear what is said. No doubt he will suppose I took the diamonds.'

'No, no, my dear, you should not say that.'

'But I do say that, father. When even Captain Hampton was willing enough to believe me guilty, what can I expect from others?'

'You are too hard on Ned altogether, Dorothy, a great deal too hard. He spent a month of his leave entirely in your service, and now because he could not disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes you turn against him.'

'I am obliged to him for the trouble he has taken, father, but that is not what I want at present. I want trust; and I thought that if any one would have given it to me fully it would have been Ned Hampton, and nothing would have made me doubt him.'

'Well, my dear,' her father said, dryly, 'you may think so now, but if you were to see him filling his pockets out of a bank till, I fancy for a moment your trust in him would waver. However, I will go down to Danvers.'

He returned at the end of twenty minutes.

'His advice is the same as that which, as I mentioned this afternoon, Levine gave when I told him of the circ.u.mstances, and which I have no doubt he will repeat when he has further thought the matter over, namely, that unless we can obtain some evidence to support your denial, we have no chance of obtaining a verdict if we go into court. Danvers says that, of course, to those who know you, the idea of your taking these diamonds is absolutely preposterous; still, as the jury will not know you, and the public who read the report will not know you, they can only go by the evidence. He says that trying to look at it as a stranger, his opinion would be that it was an extraordinary case, but that unless we believed thoroughly that you had not taken the things, we should never have taken so hopeless a case into court. Still, he thinks that the verdict of those who only look at the outside of things would be that the denial was almost worse than the act. Had it not been for the unfortunate rumours previously circulated, many people might be of opinion that it was a case of kleptomania, and that no woman in her senses would have thus openly carried the things away from a place where she was well known.'

'I see all that, father; the more I have thought it over, the more I feel that it is certain that every one will be against me.'

'Then in that case, Dorothy, why fight a battle we are certain to lose?

From the money point of view alone, it would be better to pay this twenty-five hundred pounds than the twenty-five hundred pounds plus the costs on both sides, which we might put down roughly at another thousand. If we pay it now, the matter may never become public, for even if the scoundrel was malicious enough to try and get a rumour about it into one of these so-called society papers I should doubt whether he could do so. In the last case they got the report, no doubt, from some one in Scotland Yard, but no editor would be mad enough to risk an action for libel with tremendous damages merely on an anonymous report, or at best, a report given only on the authority of an impecunious hanger-on of the turf. It seems to me, therefore, that we should have everything to lose, and nothing to gain, by bringing the matter into court.'

'But the same thing may be done again, father; if they have succeeded so well now they are sure to try and repeat it.'

'We might take measures to prevent their doing that. The moment the thing is settled we will go down into the country, and when we return to town next season I will get a companion for you--some bright, sensible woman, who will not be half her time laid up with headaches, and who will always go with you whenever you go out; so that were such an attempt made again, you would be in a position to prove conclusively where you were at the time. Danvers suggested that if I pay the money to Gilliat I should do so with a written protest, to the effect that I was convinced that you had not been in his shop on the day in question, but that as I was not in a position to prove this I paid the money, reserving to myself the right to reclaim it, should I be at any time in a position to prove that you had not been at his shop on that day, or be able to produce the woman who represented you. Should the matter by any chance ever crop up again, a copy of this protest would be an advantage.'

'At any rate, father, I could never marry Lord Halliburn unless this matter were entirely cleared up; it would be unfair to him in the extreme. He might receive an anonymous letter from these people, and if he asked me if it was true, what could I say? He has been greatly upset by the other business, what would he say did he know that I have been accused of theft? That brings us back to the subject of my engagement.

You have been thinking it over since lunch, father?'

'Yes, dear, I have been thinking it over as well as I could, and I again repeat that the only light in which I can regard it is that of your happiness. I quite see that your being engaged to a man in his position does add to the embarra.s.sment and difficulty of the position. We have to consider not only ourselves but him. Still, that matters after all comparatively little. Supposing this matter were all cleared up satisfactorily, how would you stand then? You might then bitterly regret the step you now want to take.'

'No, father; up to the time when this trouble first began I don't think that I thought very seriously about it. Lord Halliburn was very nice, I liked him as much as any man I have met. I suppose I was gratified by his attentions; every one spoke well of him; I own that I was rather proud of carrying him off, and it really seemed to me that I was likely to be very happy with him. Since then I have looked at it in a different way. I knew, of course, that husbands and wives are supposed to share each other's troubles, but it had never really seemed to me that there was a likelihood of troubles coming into my life. Well, troubles have come, and with them I have come to look at things differently. To begin with, I have learnt more of Lord Halliburn's character than I probably should have done in all my life if such troubles had not come.

'I have been disappointed in him. I do not say that in the first matter he doubted me for an instant--it was not that; but I found out that he is altogether selfish. He has thought all through, not how this affected me, but how it would affect himself; he has been querulous, exacting, and impatient. Had he been the man I thought him he would have been kinder and more attentive than before; he would have tried to let every one see by his manner to me how wholly he trusted me; he would have striven to make things easier for me; but he has made them much harder.

If I held in my hands now the proofs [missing text] against me, I would send them to him and at the same time a letter breaking off my engagement. When I think it over, I am sometimes inclined to be almost grateful to this trouble, because it has opened my eyes to the fact that I have been very nearly making a great mistake, and that, had I married Lord Halliburn, my life might have gone on smoothly enough, but that there would never have been any real community of feeling between us. He would have regarded me as a useful and, perhaps, an ornamental head to his house, but I should never have had a home in the true sense of the word, father; that is, a home like this.'

'Then that is settled, my dear. Now that you have said as much as you have, we need not say another word on the matter. I must say, frankly, that I have of late come almost to dislike him, and it has several times cost me no inconsiderable effort to keep my temper when I saw how entirely he regarded the matter in a personal light, and how little thought he gave to the pain and trouble you were going through. I am in no hurry to lose you, my dear, and the thought that it might be a few months has given me many a heartache. And now, how will you do it?--Will you write to him or see him?'