Cynthia's father did not get his question answered, because at that
moment a thundering knock at the front-door announced the return of
Madame, and there was rather a hasty struggle to get him away from the
house without encountering that lady's sharp eyes and vivacious
questioning, which Cynthia was not at all sure that he could meet with
equanimity. For herself she felt at that moment equal to any struggle
involving either cunning or courage. She could combat to death for one
she loved.
"Who was that man, _carissima_? Why was he here at this hour of the
night? You are a little imprudent, are you not, to receive such visitors
without me?" said Madame, having caught a glimpse of the intruder's
retiring figure.
Cynthia laughed.
"He is venerable, Madame--white-bearded, old, and a relative--an uncle
from America whom I have not seen since I was a child. I believe that he
has made a fortune and wants to endow me with it. We shall see!"
"Ah, my angel, if he would do that," cried Madame cheerfully, "we would
welcome him at any hour of the day or night, would not we? Bid him to
dinner with thee, little one, or to tea, after thy English fashion--as
thou wilt. The uncle with money is always a desired visitor."
And thus Cynthia escaped further questioning, although at the cost of an
untruth which she did not consider it her duty to repent. "For surely,"
she said to herself, "it is right for a daughter to sacrifice anything
and everything to her father's safety! I was ashamed of having to tell
Hubert what was not true just for my own benefit; but I am not ashamed
of deceiving Madame for my father's sake. I am sorry--ah, yes, I am
sorry! But what can I do?" And in the solitude of her own room Cynthia
wrung her hands together, and shed a few bitter tears over the hardness
and strangeness of her fate.
To one who knew all the facts of her story and her father's story, it
might indeed have been a matter for meditation that "wrong-doing never
ends"--that, because Sydney Vane had been an unprincipled man and
Florence Lepel a woman without a conscience, therefore a child of whom
they never heard had grown up without the presence of a father's love,
or the innate reverence for truth that prevailed in the heart of a
Jeanie Deans. Cynthia was no Jeanie Deans; she was a faulty but
noble-hearted woman, with a nature that had suffered some slight warping
from the effect of adverse circumstance.
Cynthia and her father met the next morning under the spreading branches
of the trees in Kensington Gardens; and there, as they walked up and
down together, Westwood unfolded his plans. From what he let
slip--although he tried not to be too definite--it was evident that he
had made considerable sums of money, or what he thought such; and he
wanted Cynthia to give up working, and "go West" with him. He assured
her that she should have every comfort, every luxury; that he was likely
to make more and more money as time went on, and that he might even
become a millionaire. Would she not partake of the magnificence that was
in store for her? But Cynthia shook her head. And then he spoke of his
loneliness, of his long absence from his only child, and his desire to
have a home of his own; now that he began to feel the infirmities of
age, he not only wanted a daughter as an ornament to his house, but as
the prop of his declining years. And at this Cynthia shed tears and
began to waver. Ought she not to go with her father? she asked herself.
It might be better for Hubert, as well as for her, if she went away;
and, even if at the end of two years she became Hubert's wife, she would
at any rate have had two years with her father. And, if Hubert married
"the other girl," she would stay with her father until his life's
end--or hers. But the fact remained at the end of all arguments--she did
not want to go.
"What do you want to stay in England for?" Westwood said at length. "Is
it to make money? I've got enough for both of us. Is it to sing in
public? You'll get bigger audiences over there, my girl. If you love
your old father as you say you do, why won't you come along with him?"
He paused, and added, almost in a whisper, "Unless there's somebody you
like better, I don't see why you want to stay."
Cynthia's face turned crimson immediately. Her father's words made her
feel very guilty. She loved him--true; but she loved Hubert better, and
she had not known it until that moment. She knew it thoroughly now.
"Well," said Westwood, in a peculiarly dogged tone, "I see what's up.
Who is he?"
"He is a very clever man, father," said Cynthia, keeping her hot face
away from him as much as possible--"a literary man; he writes plays and
novels and poetry. He is thought a great deal of in London."
"As poor as a rat, and wants you to keep him. Is that it?"
"Oh, no, indeed, father! He makes a great deal of money. It was he who
sent me to Italy to study music; he paid for me to live where I do, with
Madame della Scala."
They were in a quiet part of the Gardens, and her father suddenly laid
an iron grip upon her wrist.
"Look at me," he burst out--"tell me the truth! You--you ain't--you
ain't bound to him in any way?" He dare not, after all, put his sudden
suspicion into plainer words. "It's all fair and square? He's asked you
to be his wife, and not----"
Cynthia wrenched away her arm.
"I did not think that my own father would insult me!" she said, in a
voice which, though low, vibrated with anger. "I am quite well able to
take care of my own honor and dignity; and Mr. Lepel would never dream
of assailing either."
Then she broke down a little, and a few tears made their way over the
scarlet of her cheeks; but of these signs of distress her father took no
notice. He stood still in the middle of the path down which they had
been walking, and repeated the name incredulously.
"'Lepel'! 'Lepel'! Is that your sweetheart's name?"
"'Hubert Lepel.' It is a well-known name," said Cynthia, with head
erect.
"Hubert Lepel! Not the man at Beechfield, the cousin of those Vanes?" He
spoke in a whisper, with his eyes fixed on his daughter's face.
Cynthia turned very pale.
"I do not know. Oh, it can't be the same," she said.
"It's not likely that there are two men of the same name. He was a
cousin of the man who was killed, I tell you; and he was the
brother--the brother----" Suddenly Westwood stopped short; his eyes fell
to the ground, his breathing quickened; he thrust his hands into his
pockets and frowned heavily as he reflected. "Have I got a clue?" he
said, more to himself than to Cynthia. "He's the brother of that
woman--the woman that Sydney Vane used to meet in the wood so often, and
thought that nobody knew. Did he--did he----" But, raising his eyes
suddenly, he saw the whiteness of Cynthia's face, and did not finish his
question. "Listen to me!" he said, with sudden sternness. "This man
belongs to them that put me in prison and believe me to have murdered
Sydney Vane. Do you understand that, girl?"
"Father, he would trust you--he would believe in you--if once he saw you
and talked to you."
"So you mean to betray me to him, do you?"
"Father--dear father!"
"If you say a word to him about my being in England, Cynthia, you may
just as well put a rope round my neck or give me a dose of poison. For
buried alive at Portland I never will be again!"
"He would no more betray you, father, than----"
"Promise me that you'll not breathe a word to him about me!"
"I promise."
"And swear?"
"I swear, father--not until you give me leave."
"I shall never give you leave. Do you want to kill me, Cynthia? I'd
never have thought it of you after all you said! Come, my girl, you
needn't cry; I did not mean to suspect you; but I'm so used to being on
my guard. Does he know whose daughter you are?"
"No, father."
"You haven't dared to tell him, and yet you wanted to put my safety in
his hands!"
"I am sure he is too kind, too noble, to think of betraying any one!"
Cynthia pleaded; but her father would not hear.
"Tut! If he thinks I murdered his cousin, he wouldn't feel any
particular call to be kind to me, I guess. I should like to understand
all about this affair, Cynthia. Come, sit down on this bench here under
the trees, and tell me about it. Don't vex yourself over what I said; I
was but carried away by the heat of the moment. Now are you promised to
this Mr. Lepel--engaged to him, as you young folk call it?"
"I don't know whether I can tell you anything, father," murmured
Cynthia.
"You'd better," said Westwood quietly, "because it hangs on a thread
whether I ain't going to denounce Mr. Lepel as the man that killed Mr.
Sydney Vane. I never thought of him before, although I did see him at
the trial and knew that he'd been hanging round the place. He was her
brother, sure enough--he had a motive. Well, Cynthia?"
"Father, if you are thinking such terrible things of Hubert, how can I
tell you anything? You know I--I love him; if you accuse him of a crime,
I shall cling to him still--and love him still--and save him if I can."
"At your father's expense, girl?"
She writhed at the question, and twisted her fingers nervously together,
but did not speak. Westwood waited for a minute or two, and then
resumed--this time very bitterly.
"It's always so! The lover always drives the parent out of the young
folks' hearts. For this man--that you haven't known more than a few
months, I suppose--you'd give up your father to worse than the
gallows--to the misery of a life sentence--and be glad, maybe, to see
the last of him! If it was him or me, you would save him--and perhaps
you're in the right of it. I wish," said the man, turning away his
face--"I wish to God that I'd never come back to England, nor seen the
face of my girl again!"
Cynthia had been physically incapable hitherto of stemming the flow of
his words; but now, although she was trembling with excitement and
sorrow and indignation, she answered her father's accusation resolutely.
"You are wrong, father. I will not sacrifice you to him. But you must
not expect me to sacrifice him to you either. My heart is large enough
to hold you both."
There was a pathos in the tone of her last few words which impressed
even Westwood's not very plastic nature. He turned towards her, noting
with half-unconscious anxiety the whiteness of the girl's lips, the
shadow that seemed to have descended upon her eyes. He put out his rough
hand and touched her daintily gloved fingers.
"Don't be put out by what I say, my girl! If I speak sharp, it's because
I feel deep. I won't be hard on any one you care for, I give you my
word; but it'll be the best thing for you to be fair and square with me
and tell me all about him. Are you going to marry him?"
"He wishes to marry me," said Cynthia, yielding, with a sigh; "but there
has been an arrangement--a sort of family arrangement, I understand--by
which he must--ought to marry a young lady in two years, when she is
twenty or twenty-one, if she consents and if she is strong enough. She
is ill now, and she does not seem to care for him. That is all I know. I
have promised to marry him if he is free at the end of the two years."
It sounded a lame story--worse, when she told it, than when she had
discussed it with Hubert Lepel or wept over it in her own room. Westwood
uttered a growl of anger.
"And you're at his beck and call like that! He is to take you or leave
you as he pleases! Pretty state of matters for a girl like you! Why,
with your face and your pretty voice and your education, I should think
that you could have half Lunnon if you chose!"
"Not I," said Cynthia, laughing with a little of her old spirit--"or, if
I had, it would be the wrong half, father. Besides, Mr. Lepel is not to
blame. He--he would marry me to-morrow, I believe, if I would allow it;
it was I that arranged to wait. I would rather wait. Why should I marry
anybody before I have seen the world?"
"Where does Mr. Lepel live, Cynthy?" said Westwood slowly, as if he had
not been attending very much to what she said.
Cynthia hesitated; then she gave him Hubert's address. She knew that her
father could easily get it elsewhere, and that it would only irritate
him if she refused. Besides, she had too much confidence in her lover to
think that harm could come of her father's knowledge of the place in
which he lived. But she was a little surprised when her father at once
stood, up and said, with his former placidity of tone--
"Well, then, my dear, I'm a-going round to look at Mr. Lepel. I'm not
going to harm him, nor even maybe to speak to him; but I want to have a
little look at him before I see you again. And then I shall maybe go out
of town for a bit. There are one or two places I want to look at again.
So you needn't be surprised if you don't hear from me again just yet a
while. I'll write when I come back."
"Oh, father, you will not run into any danger, will you?"
"Not a bit, my dear. There's not a soul on earth would know me as I am
now. Don't you be afraid! I'll walk back with you to the gate, and, then
we'd better say good-bye. If you want anything special, write to
me--Reuben Dare, you know--at the address I gave you; but even then, my
girl, don't you mention names. It's a dangerous thing to do on paper."
"I'll remember," said Cynthia, with unwonted submissiveness.
They parted at the gate, and Westwood, without looking round, went some
paces in the easterly direction which he had chosen to take. But all at
once he heard a light footstep behind him, and a small gloved hand was
laid upon his arm. It was Cynthia, slightly flushed and panting a
little, her eyes unusually bright. She ran after him with a last word to
say.
"Father," she said, "you will remember, will you not, that, although I
love him, I love you too?"
"Do you, Cynthia?" said the man, rather sadly. "Well, maybe--maybe."
"And that you are to take care of yourself for my sake?"
"Eh? For your sake? Yes, my dear--yes."
"Good-bye, dear father!"
He nodded simply in reply; but, as he pursued his way eastward, his
heart grew softer towards his child's lover than it would otherwise have
been. How beautiful she had looked with those flushed cheeks and shining
eyes! What was he that he should interfere with her happiness? If the
man that she loved was good and true why should he not marry her,
although he was a kinsman of the Vanes and the brother of a woman whom
Westwood held in peculiar abhorrence? For accident had revealed to him
many years before the relation between Sydney Vane and Florence Lepel,
and she had seemed to him then and ever since to be less of a woman than
a fiend. Yet, being somewhat slow in drawing conclusions, he had never
associated her or her brother with Mr. Vane's death, until, in the
solitude of his cell, he had laboriously "put two and two together" in a
way which had not suggested itself either to himself or to his defenders
at the time of the trial. He himself, from a strange mixture of delicate
feeling and gruff reserve, had not chosen to tell what he knew about
Miss Lepel and Sydney Vane; and only when it was too late did it occur
to him that his silence had cost him his freedom, and might have cost
him his life. He saw it all clearly now. It was quite plain to him that
in some way or other Mr. Vane's death had been caused through his
unfaithfulness to his wife. Some one had wished to punish him--some
friend of hers, some friend of Miss Lepel's. Right enough he deserved to
be killed, said Westwood to himself, as he elaborated his theory. If
only the slayer, the avenger, had not refused to take the responsibility
of his act upon his own shoulders! "If only he hadn't been cur enough;"
Westwood muttered to himself, as he went along the London streets, "to
leave me--a poor man, a common man, that only Cynthia loved--to bear the
blame!"