"Well, Mrs. Ford," said Miss Carol, looking up from the letter she was reading, "who might that be? This is pretty early for a morning call."
"The gentleman"s name is Sir Arthur Maxwell, Miss."
"What!" said Miss Carol, colouring up and rising quickly from her chair.
"Sir Arthur Maxwell. What on earth does _he_ want?"
"He said, miss, that he"d be very much obliged to you if you could give him the pleasure of half-an-hour"s conversation."
"Oh, dear, I suppose he was the gentleman who stopped at the corner last night just when my new acquaintance got out. His father, of course. I suppose he"s come to row me about making friends with his son and heir last night."
"One of the penalties of your fascinations, dear," said Dora, with a smile which parted a pair of eminently kissable lips and showed a very pretty set of teeth behind them.
Dora was nearly a couple of inches taller than Miss Carol, and some three years older. She had soft, lightish-brown hair, brown eyebrows, a trifle browner, perhaps, than nature had painted them, and dark blue eyes, which made a very pretty contrast.
"Well," she went on, "I suppose there"s nothing for you but to go and interview the irate papa. But whatever did young hopeful want to go and tell him all about it for, and even give him your address!"
"If you"ll excuse me, Miss," said the housekeeper, "I don"t think that"s it. The gentleman isn"t at all angry. He was as polite and nice to me as ever could be. Such a _nice_ gentleman."
"Dear me, Mrs. Ford, you seem quite impressed," said Miss Carol, gathering up her correspondence. "Well, I"d better go and have it over, whatever it is. I don"t suppose I shall be very long. Meanwhile, Dora, you may as well make yourself useful and dust the bikes. The old gentleman won"t eat me, I suppose. In fact, if Master Vane told him everything, he ought to be very much obliged to me for my virtuous reserve."
And then, with a saucy smile at her own reflection in the gla.s.s as she pa.s.sed the mantelpiece, she walked towards the door.
Carol, being a young lady of many and various experiences, did not often find herself in a situation, however awkward it might be, which gave her much cause for embarra.s.sment. There were not many circ.u.mstances under which she did not feel capable of taking perfect care of herself. Still, she confessed to Dora afterwards that when she went into the little sitting-room and faced the stately old gentleman who was waiting for her she felt distinctly nervous--in short, "in something very like a tremble," as she put it later on.
The moment she looked at his face she could see his likeness to Vane, and therefore in a measure to herself. She had, of course, nothing to be afraid of, and therefore there was no cause for fear, but for some reason or other she felt less at ease than she had done in many more difficult situations.
The same was almost equally true of Sir Arthur. In fact, when the door opened and Miss Carol, looking exquisitely neat and pretty in a dainty, grey, tailor-made cycling costume, walked into the room, he was unable to restrain a very visible start. It was, indeed, as much as he could do to keep himself from uttering an exclamation of astonishment.
As he looked at her, more than thirty years vanished in a second, and he saw himself a lad of twenty-four with his brand new Oxford degree, and his first place on the Indian Civil Service list only just published, walking down a country lane by the side of a girl, who, but for the difference in costume, might have been this very girl standing before him.
"Good morning! Our housekeeper tells me that you wish to speak to me."
Yes, the voice was the same, too, and so were the expression, the intonation, the att.i.tude, everything. But the words brought him back to the present, and to the recollection of all that had happened since that walk in the country lane.
"Yes, Miss Vane," he heard himself saying, "I have taken the liberty of calling to ask you if you would have any objection to a little conversation with me. I won"t detain you more than half an hour."
"With pleasure," she said; "but won"t you sit down?" she went on, seating herself on the sofa. "I suppose I am right in thinking that you are Mr. Vane Maxwell"s father, and I suppose, too, you are the gentleman who was at the corner of Warwick Gardens when he got out of the cab? I"m afraid you were a good bit shocked," she continued, smiling rather faintly.
"I was not by any means so much shocked as astonished," Sir Arthur replied gravely, "and, to avoid any misunderstanding, I had better say at once that, though I was naturally a little bit startled, I was infinitely more astonished, by the marvellous likeness----"
"What, to him!" said Miss Carol, interrupting him with a pretty little gesture of deprecation. "Yes, of course, I can quite understand that a gentleman like you would be a bit disgusted to find a likeness between your son and a girl like me, for I suppose he told you all about me? I mean, you know the sort of disreputable person that I am?"
Miss Carol said this with a distinct note of defiance in her voice. A note which seemed to say, "I know what I am, and so do you, and if you don"t want to talk to me any longer you needn"t." But she was considerably astonished when Sir Arthur, leaning forward in his chair and speaking very gravely, said:
"My dear child--you are younger than Vane, you know, and I may call you that without offence--I do know what you are, or perhaps it would be more just to say what circ.u.mstances have made you. I don"t want you to think that I have come here to preach at you. That is no business of mine. Still, I am deeply grieved, though I daresay you have no notion why--I mean no notion of the real reason. I am afraid I am expressing myself very awkwardly, but just now I don"t quite seem to be able to keep my thoughts in order."
There was something in the gentle gravity of his tone and manner which inspired Miss Carol with an unaccountable desire to go away and cry. She didn"t exactly know why, but she was certainly experiencing a very uncomfortable feeling which was more like apprehension than anything else. She couldn"t think of anything else to say at the moment, and so she said simply:
"I don"t know why you should be grieved, I mean in particular about me.
There are plenty of others like me, you know, a good many thousands in London alone, I believe, and I suppose you would feel sorry for any of them. There are lots worse off than I am, I can tell you. But why should you be sorry for me particularly?"
As she said this she crossed her legs and folded her hands over her knee, leaning forward slightly and looking keenly at him.
"Because," he replied, with a little quaver in his voice, but looking steadily into her eyes, "because you are the living image of the woman who was once my wife. A little over thirty years ago--by the way, may I ask how old you are?"
"I was eighteen last September," she said, "that is to say, I am getting on for nineteen."
"And your birthday?" he said. "You will forgive me asking you so many questions, I know, when I tell you why I ask them; but of course, you needn"t answer them unless you choose."
"There is no reason why I shouldn"t," she said, "as far as I know. I was born on the twentieth of September. What were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if my wife, I mean I should rather say the woman who was my wife, could be put beside you now as she was thirty years ago, dressed as you are now, it would be almost impossible to tell the difference between you. You told my son, I think, that you take your name Vane from your mother."
"Yes," replied Miss Carol, "she told me that that was her name. I don"t know whether I was ever really christened or not, but an English musician in Dresden, one of my mother"s friends, called me Carol when I was quite a little mite of a thing because I was always singing, and as that was as good a name as any other, I suppose it stuck to me."
"Do you know whether your mother was ever married?"
"She had been, because she used to talk about it and about all she had lost and all that sort of thing, you know, when she was drunk," replied Miss Carol with a simple directness which went straight to Sir Arthur"s heart. "Of course, that was when I was quite a little thing, about eight or nine. Then I was sent to a sort of boarding-school, half a school and half a convent, and I didn"t like that, so I ran away from it, as I told your son last night."
"I went home and found the house shut up. The concierge told me that my mother had gone away in a carriage with two gentlemen--he said one looked like a police agent--nearly a month before. He didn"t know where she"d gone to, and from that day to this I"ve never heard anything more of her. I told your son the rest of it and I daresay he has told you, so there"s no need for me to go over it again."
"Yes," said Sir Arthur, nodding slowly, "Vane told me, so if you please I will ask you one or two more questions, and then I won"t detain you any longer."
"I am in no hurry," she replied. "Please ask me any number you like."
Her manner was now one of deep interest, for a suspicion was already forming in her mind that this bronzed, grave-faced man had once been her own mother"s husband.
"Thank you," he said. "I should like to ask you first whether you happen to have any photograph of your mother?"
Miss Carol shook her head decisively, and said:
"No. I had one once in a locket, but when I went home and found she"d gone away and left me all alone in Paris--that"s where we were then--I was so angry that I took it out and tore it up. I daresay it was very wrong of me, but I couldn"t help it, and to tell you the honest truth, I can"t say that I ever was as fond of her as a daughter should have been."
"I don"t wonder at it," said Sir Arthur, with a sigh.
Miss Carol looked up wonderingly as he said this, but he took no notice and said:
"But I suppose you would recognise a photograph of her if you saw one?"
"Yes, if it was taken anywhere about the time that I knew her."
"Quite so," said Sir Arthur, taking a leather letter-case out of his pocket. "This was taken quite twenty years ago, a year or two after we were married, in short. It is, or was, my wife."
As he took out the photograph he got up, crossed the room, and held it out to her. Miss Carol got up too, and as she took it she saw that his hand was trembling. She took the old-fashioned, faded photograph and looked at it. He saw that her face flushed as she did so. She gave it back to him and said simply:
"Yes, that is my mother."
As he took the photograph from her he looked at her with sad, grave eyes across the gulf of sin and shame in which the one great love of his life had been lost. She was the daughter of his wife, and yet she was not his daughter--and she was an outcast. The sting of the old shame came back very keenly. The old wound was already open and bleeding again. All the pride and hope and love of his life were centred now on his brilliant son. A few hours before he had learnt that his mother had transmitted to him the terrible, perhaps the fatal taint of inherited alcoholism; and now he had just proved beyond doubt that Vane"s half-sister--for she was that in blood if not in law--was what she had just so frankly, so defiantly even, admitted herself to be.