Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.
"If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a field brings you face to face?"
"There"s no chance about it, believe me," James Challoner returned.
For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. "The old ladies lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me," and he spread out his hands in indignation. "Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious people too!"
"If they did lie," Robert Daventry burst in, "they did the best thing they ever did in all their good lives."
James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept his eyes fixed upon Joan"s face.
"Yes, they lied to me," he said. "I gave them the day and the month and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!"
and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan, "You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be."
Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of her face.
"It"s a matter of indifference to me," she replied, "since Cynthia is not your child."
She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true.
She would not have it that this man was Cynthia"s father.
"Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!" said Challoner ironically. "I will tell you something that won"t be. Those old ladies lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls, they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they were committing. A child could have seen they were lying--as I did who am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It wasn"t very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one they didn"t want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who could give the girl a position."
At the word "rich" Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were they disconcerted by Challoner"s knowledge and a.s.surance that now they hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.
"So I began to make inquiries," continued Challoner. "I found out who were the patrons, who took most interest in the inst.i.tution, and amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end." And again he began to laugh. "Those poor innocent old women had actually given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child"s death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I reached you. But I have reached you," he exclaimed, lolling back in his chair, "and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;" and Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which would discredit every word of his story.
"Recognized her!" she repeated scornfully. "And the last time, when, on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!"
Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.
"If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn"t be so high,"
he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.
"Speak respectfully to my wife," he cried.
"What, are you b.u.t.ting in again?" asked Challoner, with a look of surprise. "You didn"t do any good, you know, the last time you interfered."
Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of that conviction.
"How did you recognize her?" she asked, smiling in her turn. "How did you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?"
"I"ll tell you," said Challoner confidently. "And, by the way, she"s not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She"s seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July."
"Keep to the point," said Joan.
"Certainly, I will," replied Challoner, "though it"s by no means necessary to substantiate my authority--yes," and his voice suddenly rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, "yes, my authority. I don"t say that she"s like what she was when she was three. I don"t even say she"s like her mother. She isn"t. She"s a Challoner--and in the Challoner"s home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire, there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped right out of that picture frame. That"s how I recognized her."
He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan"s confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but just as Challoner"s description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the particular detail of the girl"s resemblance, now that she was seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners" dining-room he could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and, so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true.
She looked him over again with new eyes.
"But you can"t prove that," she said. "Even if it were true, you couldn"t prove it."
"Should I need to?" asked Challoner. "After I had put those old ladies from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs.
Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could turn "em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But they wouldn"t try--and you know it as well as I do."
Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys"
position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.
"There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile,"
Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.
"But you wouldn"t be mad enough to go to law with us," he cried, and Challoner laughed.
"Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I wouldn"t bring my action here, of course, in this district. You"ve got your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don"t you forget it."
Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James Challoner and Cynthia"s father. His story was too circ.u.mstantial to be disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it.
There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to Challoner: "How much do you want?"
Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer it was to admit the claim.
"What are you saying, Robert?" she cried.
Robert turned to her quietly.
"It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it?
How much?"
A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner"s face. Outside the door Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony of suspense. Why didn"t he answer? Why was he so long?
The answer came at length:
"I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right to her; I"ll take her away with me to-night."
Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field.
He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:
"You want to take her away? Cynthia?" And as though the meaning of Challoner"s demand for the first time broke in on him, "Never!" he cried violently.
"I want to take her away to-night;" and now the malice in Challoner"s voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what Cynthia herself had said: "He seemed to hate me."
"You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!" she exclaimed; and Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.
"Is it strange?" he cried. "All these years here she has been sitting soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? "Look at yourself in a gla.s.s"--That"s what you said," and he turned to Robert Daventry.
"I told you I"d remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I"ve lost my looks."
All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own a.s.siduous cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.
"I have had enough of it," cried James Challoner. "It"s now her turn."