"Thinking what?"
"That it all tallies so very exactly and that this--this Philip de Mountford seems in any case to know a great deal about your Uncle Arthur, and his movements in the past."
"There"s no doubt of that; and----"
Luke paused a moment and a curious blush spread over his face. The Englishman"s inborn dislike to talk of certain subjects to his women folk had got hold of him, and he did not know how to proceed.
As usual in such cases the woman--unmoved and businesslike--put an end to his access of shyness.
"The matter is--or may be--too serious, dear, for you to keep any of your thoughts back from me at this juncture."
"What I meant was," he said abruptly, "that this Philip might quite well be Uncle Arthur"s son you know; but it doesn"t follow that he has any right to call himself Philip de Mountford, or to think that he is Uncle Rad"s presumptive heir."
"That will of course depend on his proofs--his papers and so on," she a.s.sented calmly. "Has any one seen them?"
"At the time--it was sometime last November--that he first wrote to Uncle Rad, he had all his papers by him. He wrote from St. Vincent; have I told you that?"
"No."
"Well, it was from St. Vincent that he wrote. He had left Martinique, I understand, in 1902, when St. Pierre, if you remember, was totally destroyed by volcanic eruption. It seems that when Uncle Arthur left the French colony for good, he lodged quite a comfortable sum in the local bank at St. Pierre in the name of Mrs. de Mountford. Of course he had no intention of ever going back there, and anyhow he never did, for he died about three years later. The lady went on living her own life quite happily. Apparently she did not hanker much after her faithless husband. I suppose that she never imagined for a moment that he meant to stick to her, and she certainly never bothered her head as to what his connections or friends over in England might be. Amongst her own kith and kin, the half-caste population of a French settlement, she was considered very well off, almost rich. After a very few years of gra.s.s-widowhood, she married again, without much scruple or compunction, which proves that she never thought that her English husband would come back to her. And then came the catastrophe."
"What catastrophe?"
"The destruction of St. Pierre. You remember the awful accounts of it.
The whole town was destroyed. Every building in the place--the local bank, the church, the presbytery, the post-office--was burned to the ground; everything was devastated for miles around. And thousands perished, of course."
"I remember."
"Mrs. de Mountford and her son Philip were amongst the very few who escaped. Their cottage was burned to the ground, but she, with all a Frenchwoman"s sense of respect for papers and marks of identification, fought her way back into the house, even when it was tottering above her head, in order to rescue those things which she valued more than her life, the proofs that she was a respectable married woman and that Philip was her lawfully begotten son. Her second husband--I think from reading between the lines that he was a native or at best a half-caste--was one of the many who perished. But Mrs. de Mountford and Philip managed to reach the coast unhurt and to put out to sea in an open boat. They were picked up by a fishing smack from Marie Galante and landed there. It is a small island--French settlement, of course--off Guadeloupe. They had little or no money, and how they lived I don"t know, but they stayed in Marie Galante for some time.
Then the mother died, and Philip made his way somehow or other to Roseau in Dominica and thence to St. Vincent."
"When was that?"
"Last year I suppose."
"And," she said, meditating on all that she had heard, "it was in St.
Vincent that he first realized who he was--or might be?"
"Well, in a British colony it was bound to happen. Whether somebody put him up to it out there, or whether he merely sucked the information in from nowhere in particular, I can"t say: certain it is that he did soon discover that the name he bore was one of the best known in England, and that his father must, as a matter of fact, have been own brother to the earl of Radclyffe. So he wrote to Uncle Rad."
Louisa was silent. She was absorbed in thought and for the moment Luke had come to the end of what he had to say--or, rather, of what he meant to say just now. That there was more to come, Louisa well knew.
Commonplace women have a way of intuitively getting at the bottom of the thoughts of people for whom they care. Louisa guessed that beneath Luke"s levity and his school-boyish slang--which grew more apparent as the man drew to the end of his narrative--that beneath his outward flippancy there lay a deep substratum of puzzlement and anxiety.
The story as told by Luke sounded crude enough, almost melodramatic, right out of the commonplace range of Louisa"s usual every-day life.
Whilst she sat listening to this exotic tale of secret and incongruous marriage and of those earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which had seemed so remote when she had read about them nine years ago in the newspapers, she almost thought that she must be dreaming; that she would wake up presently in her bed at the Langham Hotel where she was staying with aunt, and that she would then dress and have her breakfast and go out to meet Luke, and tell him all about the idiotic dream she had had about an unknown heir to the Earldom of Radclyffe, who was a negro--or almost so--and was born in a country where there were volcanoes and earthquakes.
How far removed from her at this moment did aunt seem, and father, and the twins! Surely they could not be of the same world as this exotic pretender to Uncle Radclyffe"s affection, and to Luke"s. .h.i.therto undisputed rights. And as father and aunt and Mabel and Chris were very much alive and very real, then this so-called Philip de Mountford must be a creature of dreams.
"Or else an imposter."
She had said this aloud, thus breaking in on her own thoughts and his.
A feeling of restlessness seized her now. She was cold, too, for the April breeze was biting and had searched out the back of her neck underneath the sable stole and caused her to shiver in the spring sunshine.
"Let us walk," she said, "a little--shall we?"
CHAPTER IV
NOTHING REALLY TANGIBLE
They walked up the gravelled walk under the chestnut trees, whereon the leaf buds, luscious looking, with their young green surface delicately tinged with pink, looked over ready to burst into fan-shaped fulness of glory. The well-kept paths, the orderly flower beds, and smoothly trimmed lawns looked all so simple, so obvious beside the strange problem which fate had propounded to these two young people walking up and down side by side--and with just a certain distance between them as if that problem was keeping them apart.
And that intangible reality stood between them, causing in Luke a vague sense of shamefacedness, as if he were guilty toward Louisa, and in her a feeling of irritation against the whole world around her, for having allowed this monstrous thing to happen--this vague shadow on life"s pathway, on the life of the only man who mattered.
People pa.s.sed them as they walked: the curious, the indifferent: men with bowler hats pulled over frowning brows, boys with caps carelessly thrust at the back of their heads, girls with numbed fingers thrust in worn gloves, tip-tilted noses blue with cold, thin, ill-fitting clothes scarce shielding attenuated shoulders against the keen spring blast.
Just the humdrum, every-day crowd of London: the fighters, the workers, toiling against heavy odds of feeble health, insufficient food, scanty clothing, the poor that no one bothers about, less interesting than the unemployed labourer, less picturesque, less noisy, they pa.s.sed and had no time to heed the elegantly clad figure wrapped in costly furs, or the young man in perfectly tailored coat, who was even now preparing himself for a fight with destiny, beside which the daily struggle for halfpence would be but a mere skirmish.
Instinctively they knew--these two--the society girl and the easy-going wealthy man--that it was reality with which they would have to deal. That instinct comes with the breath of fate: a warning that her decrees are serious, not to be lightly set aside, but pondered over; that her materialized breath would not be a phantom or a thing to be derided.
Truth or imposture? Which?
Neither the man nor the girl knew as yet, but reality--whatever else it was.
They walked on for awhile in silence. Another instinct--the conventional one--had warned them that their stay in the park had been unduly prolonged: there were social duties to attend to, calls to make, luncheon with Lord Radclyffe at Grosvenor Square.
So they both by tacit consent turned their steps back toward the town.
A man pa.s.sed them from behind, walking quicker than they did. As he pa.s.sed, he looked at them both intently, as if desirous of arresting their attention. Of course he succeeded, for his look was almost compelling. Louisa was the first to turn toward him, then Luke did likewise: and the pa.s.ser-by raised his hat respectfully with a slight inclination of head and shoulders that suggested foreign upbringing.
Once more convention stepped in and Luke mechanically returned the salute.
"Who was that?" asked Louisa, when the pa.s.ser-by was out of ear shot.
"I don"t know," replied Luke. "I thought it was some one you knew. He bowed to you."
"No," she said, "to you, I think. Funny you should not know him."
But silence once broken, constraint fled with it. She drew nearer to Luke and once more her hand sought his coat sleeve, with a light pressure quickly withdrawn.
"Now, Luke," she said, abruptly reverting to the subject, "how do you stand in all this?"
"I?"
"Yes. What does Lord Radclyffe say?"