There & Back Part 56

All this pa.s.sed swiftly through sir Wilton's mind. He rang the library bell furiously, and sent a groom after the bookbinder. They drove in at the gate, but stopped a little way from the house. Richard ran to the great door, found it open, and went straight to the library. There sat the baronet as at first.

"I bethought me," said sir Wilton the moment he entered, "that I had given you a cheque on the branch at Ba.r.s.et, when it would probably suit you better to have one on headquarters in London!"

"It was very kind of you to think of it, sir," answered Richard.

"Kind! I don't know about that! I'm not often accused of that weakness!"

returned sir Wilton, rising with a grin--in which, however, there was more of humour than ill nature.

He went to the table in the window, sat down, unlocked a drawer, took out a cheque-book, and began to write a cheque.

"What did you say was your name?" he asked: "these cheques are all made to order, and I should prefer your drawing the money."

Richard gave him again the name he had always been known by.

"Tuke! What a beast of a name!" said the baronet. "How do you spell it?"

Richard's face flushed, but he would not willingly show anger with one who had granted the prayer of his sorest need. He spelled the name to him as unconcernedly as he could. But the baronet had a keen ear.

"Oh, you needn't be crusty!" he said. "I meant no harm. One has fancies about names, you know! What did they call your mother before she was married?"

Richard hesitated. He did not want sir Wilton to know who he was. He felt that, the relation between them known by both, he must behave to his father in a way he would not like. But he must, nevertheless, speak the truth! Wherever he had not spoken the truth, he had repented, and been ashamed, and had now come to see that to tell a lie was to step out of the march of the ages led by the great will. "Her name, sir, was Armour," he said.

"Hey!" cried the baronet with a start. Yet he had all but expected it.

"Yes, sir,--Jane Armour."

"Jane!" said his father with an accent of scorn. "--Not a bit of it!--_Jane_!" he repeated, and muttered to himself--"What motive could there be for misinforming the boy as to the _Christian_ name of his mother?"

For, the moment he saw the youth again, the spell was upon him afresh, and he felt all but certain he was his own.

Richard stood perplexed. Sir Wilton had taken his mother's name oddly for any supposition. He had said Mrs. Manson was a liar: might not her a.s.sertion of a relation between them be as groundless as it was spiteful? He had at once acknowledged the Mansons, but showed no recognition of himself on hearing his mother's name? There might be nothing in Mrs. Manson's story; he might after all be the son of John as well as of Jane Tuke! Only, alas, then, Alice and Arthur would not be his sister and brother! They would be G.o.d's children all the same, though, and he G.o.d's child! they would still be his brother and sister, to love and to keep.

"Here, put your name on the back there," said the baronet, having blotted the cheque. "I have made it payable to your order, and without your name it is worth nothing."

"It will be safer to endorse it at the bank, sir," returned Richard.

"I see you know what you're about!" grinned sir Wilton--saying to himself, however, "The rascal will be too many for me!--But," he continued, "I see too you don't know how to sign your own name! I had better alter it to _bearer_, with my initials! d.a.m.n it! your paltry cheque has given me more trouble than if it had been for ten thousand!

Sit down there, will you, and write your name on that sheet of paper."

Richard knew the story of Talleyrand--how, giving his autograph to a lady, he wrote it at the top left-hand corner of the sheet, so that she could write above or before it, neither an order for money nor a promise of marriage: yielding to an absurd impulse, he did the same. The baronet burst into loud laughter, which, however, ceased abruptly: he had not gained his end!

"What comical duck-fists you've got!" he cried, risking the throw. "I once knew a man whose fingers and toes too were tied together that way!

He swam like a duck!"

"My feet are more that way than my hands," replied Richard. "Only _some_ of my fingers have got the web between them. My mother made me promise to put up with the monstrosity till I came of age. She seemed to think some luck lay in it."

"Your mother!" murmured the baronet, and kept eyeing him. "By Jove," he said aloud, "your mother--! Who is your mother?"

"As I told you, sir, my mother's name is Jane Tuke!"

"Born Armour?"

"Yes, sir."

"By heaven!" said the baronet to himself, "I see it all now! That terrible nurse was one of the family--and carried him away because she didn't like the look of my lady! Don't I wish I had had half her insight! Perhaps she was cousin to Robina--perhaps her own sister!

Simon, the villain, will know all about it!" He sat silent for a moment.

"Hm!--Now tell me, you young rascal," he said, "why didn't you put in a claim for yourself instead of those confounded Mansons?"

"Why should I, sir? I didn't want anything. I have all I desire--except a little more strength to work, and that is coming."

The baronet kept gazing at him with the strangest look on his wicked, handsome old face.

"There is something you _should_ have asked me for!" he said at length, in a gentler tone.

"What is that, sir?"

"Your rights. You have a claim upon me before anyone else in the whole world!--I like you, too," he went on in yet gentler tone, with a touch of mockery in it. Apparently he still hesitated to commit himself. "I must do something for you!"

His son could contain himself no longer.

"I would ask nothing, I would take nothing," he said, as calmly as he could, though his voice trembled, and his heart throbbed with the beginnings of love, "from a man who had wronged my mother!"

"d.a.m.n the rascal! I never wronged his mother!--Who said I wronged your mother, you scoundrel? I'll take my oath _she_ never did! Answer me directly who told you so!"

His voice had risen to a roar of anger.

His son could do the dead no wrong by speaking the truth.

"Mrs. Manson told me," he began, but was not allowed to finish the sentence.

"d.a.m.ned liar she always was!" cried the baronet--with such a fierceness in his growl as made Richard call to mind a certain bear in the Zoological gardens. "Then it was she that had you stolen! The beast ought to have died on the gallows, not in her bed! Ah, she was the one to plot, the snake! In this whole curse of a world, _she_ was the meanest devil I ever came across, and I've known more than a few!"

"I know nothing about her, sir, except as the mother of Arthur, my schoolfellow. She seemed to hate me! She said I belonged to you, and had no right to be better off than her children!"

"How did she know you?"

"I can't tell, sir."

"You are like your mother, but the snake never can have set eyes on her!--Give me that cheque. Her fry shan't have a farthing! Let them rot alive with their dead dam!"

He held out his hand: the second cheque lay on the table, and Richard had the former still in his possession. He did not move, nor did sir Wilton urge his demand.

"Did I not tell you?" he resumed. "Did I not say she was a liar? I never did your mother a wrong--nor you neither, though I did swear at you a bit, you were so d.a.m.ned ugly. I don't blame you. You couldn't help it!

Lord, what a display the woman made of your fingers and toes, as if the webs were something to be proud of, and atoned for the face!--Can you swim?"

"Fairly well, sir," answered Richard carelessly.