Produced by Charles Bowen from page scans provided by the
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A SECRET OF THE SEA.
Transcriber's Notes (Volume 1):
1. Page scan source: Web Archive
https://archive.org/details/secretofseanovel01spei
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
A SECRET OF THE SEA.
A Novel.
By T. W. SPEIGHT,
AUTHOR OF
"IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT," "UNDER LOCK AND KEY," ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON.
1876.
(_All Rights Reserved_.)
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER
I. IN THE LAWYER'S OFFICE.
II. MISS BELLAMY.
III. THE STORY OF THE MURDER.
IV. A BROKEN LIFE.
V. GERALD AT PEMBRIDGE.
VI. "THAT'S THE MAN!"
VII. MISS DEANE FINDS A NEW HOME.
VIII. GERALD AT STAMMARS.
IX. FOUND.
X. IN HARLEY STREET.
XI. IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.
XII. THE FACE IN THE GLASS.
A SECRET OF THE SEA.
CHAPTER I.
IN THE LAWYER'S OFFICE.
It was a December morning, clear and frosty. The timepiece in the
office of Matthew Kelvin, attorney-at-law, Pembridge, Hertfordshire,
racing noisily after the grave old Abbey clock which had just done
chiming, pointed to the hour of ten. With his back to the welcome
fire, and turning over yesterday's _Times_ with an air of contemptuous
indifference, stood Mr. Podley Piper--whose baptismal name was
universally shortened into "Pod"--a short, thickset young gentleman of
the mature age of sixteen. His nose was a pure specimen of a pug, and
his short scrubby hair was of a colour sufficiently pronounced to earn
him the nickname of "Carotty Pod" from sundry irreverent small boys of
his acquaintance. His nose and his hair notwithstanding, Pod was a
keen, bright-looking lad, with an air of shrewdness and decision about
him by no means common in one of his age.
"Awfully dry reading--the _Times_," muttered Pod, tossing the paper on
Mr. Kelvin's desk. "Only one suicide, and not a single murder in it.
It's not worth buying. And yet there must be something in it, or so
many people wouldn't read it. I suppose that by the time I'm fifty,
and wear creaky shoes and carry a big gold watch in my fob, and have
to count my hairs every morning to see that I haven't lost one
overnight,--I suppose, when that time comes, I shall think as much of
the _Times_ as Sir Thomas Dudgeon does. But just at present I'd rather
read the 'Bounding Wolf of the Prairies.'"
Hardly were the last words out of Pod's mouth, when the inner door was
opened, and Matthew Kelvin walked silently into the room. In silence
he sat down at his desk, after one sharp glance at Pod and another at
the fire, and set to work at once at the task immediately before him.
This task was the opening of the pile of post letters which had been
placed ready to his hand by Pod. A brief glance at the contents of
each was generally sufficient. In very few cases did he trouble
himself to read a letter entirely through. Three or four of the more
important documents were put aside to be attended to specially by
himself; the rest of them had a corner turned up on which Pod
pencilled down in shorthand Mr. Kelvin's instructions for the guidance
of Mr. Bray, his chief clerk. It was his cleverness at shorthand that
had gained Pod his present situation.
"That will do," said Mr. Kelvin, after a few minutes of this sharp
work. "Give those papers to Mr. Bray, and tell him not to come in till
I ring."
Something out of the ordinary way was evidently the matter with Mr.
Kelvin this morning. After making one or two futile attempts to read
over for the second time, and more carefully than before, the letters
left behind by Pod, he gave up the attempt as a bad job.
"I don't feel as if I could settle down to anything this morning," he
said. "And no wonder. How well the secret has been kept! Even I had
not the remotest suspicion of such a thing. What a strange example of
the irony of events that I, of all men in the world, should have to
break these tidings to Eleanor! What will my proud beauty say when I
tell her? I could never have devised so exquisite a revenge. And yet
it is not my hand that will drag her down. It is the hand of Jacob
Lloyd that smites her from out his grave."
He fell into a reverie which lasted till he was disturbed by a knock
at the door. "Come in," he said mechanically, and the head of Pod was
thrust into the room.
"A lady to see you, sir. Says her name is Miss Deane."
"Olive Deane!" said Mr. Kelvin, in surprise. "Show her in."
Matthew Kelvin at this time was thirty-five years old. He was a
handsome, large-nosed man, with full grey eyes and rather prominent
teeth. He was already partially bald; but what hair he had left was
carefully trimmed and parted down the middle, while his bushy
dark-brown whiskers showed no traces of age. He always dressed well,
and was very particular as to his boots and gloves and the cut of his
trousers. He had studied the art of dress as carefully as he had
studied many other things, and the result was a success.
For his inferiors and those in his employ, Mr. Kelvin had a brusque,
imperious manner that was not unmixed with a sort of hard
contemptuousness. For his rich clients and those above him in the
social scale, he had a pleasant, smiling, dégagé style, which sat upon
him so easily and naturally that it was impossible to doubt its
genuineness. To such people he was a man who never seemed to have much
to do beyond trimming the nails of his very white hands, and sniffing
at the choice flowers in his button-hole, and now and then dashing off
his signature at the foot of some document which he never seemed to be
at the trouble of reading.
Yet no one ever seemed to doubt Matthew Kelvin's ability in his
profession, unprofessional as he was--judged by the ordinary types of
provincial lawyers--in many of his ways and doings. But, then, he was
a sort of second cousin to Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, and that
perhaps made some difference. Many people thought it did, for the
Carstairs were a very old family; and where's the use of having good
blood in one's veins unless it declares itself in some shape or other?
Mr. Kelvin was fond of hunting, and subscribed liberally to the
Thorndale pack. Few faces were more familiar in the field than his,
and he was always nominated as one of the stewards of the Hunt Ball.
Having a good voice, and being fond of singing, it was only natural
that he should be a member of the Pembridge Catch Club; besides this,
he was chairman of the Literary Institute. One winter he gave a couple
of lectures on "Some Recent Discoveries in Astronomy," with
illustrative drawings by himself; while on more than one occasion he
had treated the whole of the workhouse children to an Orrery or a
Panorama, and even to that wicked place--the Circus.
Matthew Kelvin lived with his mother, in the house where he had been
born. His father had been dead some twelve years when we first make
his acquaintance. The business had come down from his grandfather, who
had been the first Matthew Kelvin known in Pembridge.
Perhaps the finest trait in Matthew's character was his love and
reverence for his mother, who had been more or less of an invalid for
many years. For her sake, when she was ill, and hungered for his
presence by her bedside, he would give up his most pressing
engagements, and sit by the hour together reading novels to her--a
class of literature to which he rarely condescended at other times.
Mrs. Kelvin, who was a sensible, clear-sighted woman enough in the
ordinary affairs of life, still cherished a strange preference for the
milk-and-water novels and vapid romances of the Minerva Press school,
such as had been fashionable when she was a girl; and it was pleasant
to see her son reading out this rubbish to her with the gravest air
possible, hiding his contempt and weariness under a well-feigned
interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of some book-muslin heroine,
or some hero with chiselled features who was never anything less than
a lord in disguise.
Of such books as these Mrs. Kelvin never seemed to tire. It may be
that they carried her back for a little while to the days of her
youth, when she too was young and blooming; and that when buried in
their pages she forgot for a brief hour or two that she was nothing
now but a grey-haired woman--old, sickly, and a widow.
There were people still alive in Pembridge, to whom the one romantic
episode in the life of Barbara Kelvin was known in all its details. It
was this:--The present Mathew Kelvin's father had run away with and
married Miss Barbara Carstairs, an orphan niece of the late Sir
Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, one of the chief magnates for twenty
miles round. Miss Carstairs, to be sure, had not a penny that she
could call her own, and was living the life of a genteel dependent at
Wemley, when young Kelvin--who was passing backwards and forwards
between Sir Frederick and his father, in connection with certain law
business--persuaded her to elope. But the fact that Miss Carstairs'
sole earthly possessions consisted of the clothes on her back and a
solitary spade guinea in her purse, by no means lessened the magnitude
of the offence of which the audacious young lawyer had been guilty.
There was an outcry of horror, accompanied by a turning up of eyes and
a holding up of hands, as the news spread from one country house to
another; but nothing could be done save to excommunicate the late Miss
Carstairs, with "bell, book, and candle," and try to forget that any
such creature had ever had an existence.
Whether, when the romance of girlhood was over, Mrs. Kelvin ever
regretted that she had forgotten the obligations of caste in order to
become the wife of a provincial lawyer, was a fact best known to
herself; but if any such regret ever made itself felt at her heart, it
never found expression at her lips. Her husband was fond of her, and
never stinted her in any way, and her life, quiet though it was, was
not without its consolations. It was surely better to have a husband
and a home, and to be the recognized leader of middle-class Pembridge
society, than to live and die in single blessedness, a wretched
nobody, in her uncle's grand cold mansion at Wemley. Like a sensible
woman, she made the best of her position. She had her little
re-unions, her Tuesdays, when everybody that was worth knowing in
Pembridge, met in the little drawing-room over her husband's office,
and where her simple hospitalities were dispensed with a grace and
refinement that would have done no discredit to Wemley itself. But all
those things now belonged to the past. At the time we make Mrs.
Kelvin's acquaintance she had seen her sixtieth birthday, and was a
confirmed invalid.
This home of the Kelvins for three generations was a
substantially-built red-brick house that dated from the era of the
second George. It was not in the Pembridge main street, but formed one
of a dozen houses similar to itself in a short retired street that
opened out of the busier thoroughfare. It was the kind of house
that--if houses could do such things--you would naturally expect to
shrink into its foundations with horror, if ever compelled to have for
its next-door neighbour anything so vulgar as a shop. The massive
front door, with its lion's head knocker, opened into a good-sized
entrance-hall, at the far-end of which was a tiny glass-fronted den
sacred to the use of Mr. Piper; from which coign of vantage that
ingenuous youth could see everybody who came in or went out, could
tell this person to wait or usher that one into his master's office,
and answer all inquiries; and could furthermore refresh himself by
keeping up a guerilla warfare of repartee and chaff with the clerks as
they passed into or out of their office. On the left as you entered
from the street was the door which opened into Matthew Kelvin's
private office. On the right hand were, first, the door which opened
into the clerk's office, and secondly, the door of a waiting-room.
Beyond these was a door which opened on to a private staircase. The
real entrance to the private part of the house was down a covered
passage at the side. Such passages were by no means infrequent in
Pembridge. Many of the best houses in the place opened, not from the
street, but from these side entries. Behind the house was an extensive
piece of garden ground, containing fruit trees and rustic seats, and
any quantity of old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers such as our
grandfathers and grandmothers dearly loved, but which look so
dreadfully out of place in these days of riband-gardening and floral
mathematics.
"Why, who on earth expected to see you?" said Mr. 'Kelvin, as he shook
hands heartily with Miss Deane.
"Not you, I daresay, Matthew," answered Miss Deane, with a blush and a
little sigh, as she looked straight into his handsome face.
"Why not I as much as anyone?" queried her cousin with a smile, as he
placed a chair for her at no great distance from his own. "You always
were fond of change, Olive."
She smiled again, a little bitterly. "Why don't you add--like all my
sex?"
"Because I was speaking to one of your sex. Had I been talking to a
man, I should probably have used those very words. Olive, I'm really
glad to see you, whether you come holiday-making, or whether you come
because you have left Lady----Lady----?"
"Lady Culloden. Yes, I have left her. I grew tired of my situation.
Slights innumerable; one petty insult after another: my position not
properly recognised: till at last I felt that I must speak my mind or
die. I did speak my mind, and in a way that her ladyship is not likely
to forget. We parted. I felt a longing to see Pembridge and my old
friends. I wanted to see my aunt--and you."
"You know that you are always sure of a welcome here."
"But my aunt--how is she?" asked Miss Deane.
"No better, I am sorry to say; neither do I see much prospect of her
ever being so. She is confined very much to her own room."
"Poor dear aunt! I am very very sorry to hear that she is no better.
Does she keep up her good spirits?"
"Yes," replied Mr. Kelvin; "her spirits are, as they have always been,
something wonderful."
"I believe, Matthew, that I love her better than I ever loved my own
mother."
"No one can know my mother without liking her," he returned.
"And then what a gentlewoman she is!" said Olive. "There is as much
difference between her and Lady Culloden as there is between a flower
cut out of a turnip and a real camellia."
Olive Deane at this time was twenty-eight years old. The money which
her mother--a sister of the second Matthew Kelvin--had taken as a
dowry to her husband had soon been squandered in wild speculations,
and it had been impressed upon Olive's mind, almost from the time when
she could remember anything, that she would have to earn her own
living; and she started with that idea the very first day she went to
school. Her mother died when she was ten years old, and her father
when she was fifteen; and from the latter age till now she had been
altogether dependent on her own exertions for her daily bread. The
Kelvins would gladly have assisted her, both then and subsequently,
but the girl would accept no help. She went out as nursery governess
in the first instance, and had gone on, step by step, till she could
now command her ninety or hundred guineas a year as finishing
governess in families of distinction. Olive Deane had taken to
teaching as naturally as a duck takes to water. She had had five years
at a really good French school before her father's death, but
everything else she owed to her own love of knowledge and indomitable
perseverance. The wasteful extravagance of which she had been a
witness when a child at home, had not been without its effect upon
her. She grew up thrifty, self-denying, economical in every way; and
now, at twenty-eight years of age, she was mistress of four hundred
pounds, which her cousin Matthew had advantageously invested for her
in Pembridge gas shares.
Olive's sole recreation was a visit now and then to the theatre. A
classical play of the sterling old school, she delighted in. She was
an omnivorous reader. Anything, from a French novel to the last
philosophical essay, had an interest for her. To learn: to know: was
all she asked. The quality of the knowledge mattered little or
nothing. Wherever she might be, she generally contrived to have half
an hour's reading of the _Times_, so as to keep herself _au courant_
with the chief political movements of the day. She had a clear, hard
masculine intellect, with no sentimental nonsense about it, as her
cousin Matthew often declared--and he was a great admirer of Olive: in
fact, he had been heard to say that if Olive had been a man he would
have made her his partner long ago.
Miss Deane was a little above the ordinary stature of her sex. She had
a lithe, slender figure, and in all her movements she was graceful,
easy, and self-possessed. She had clearly-cut, well-defined features,
and many people would have called her handsome. But she certainly
lacked colour. Her clear olive complexion--strangely in accordance
with her name--was too clear and too colourless. Only on very rare
occasions was its waxen pallor flushed through with the faintest tinge
of damask. She had magnificent eyebrows, and eyes of the darkest
brown, that looked jet-black by candlelight, with a keen, watchful
look in them, begotten, perhaps, of the time when, little more than a
child, she had to fight her way through the world and found a thorn or
a pitfall at every step she took. Her hair, too, was black, but a
dull, dead, lustreless black, without the slightest gloss of
brightness in it, and very fine in quality. She almost invariably
dressed in black, with white linen cuffs turned up from the wrist, and
a white linen turn-down collar fastened with a simple bow of mauve or
violet riband. No ear-rings, no brooch, no ornaments of any kind
visible, except an inch of the gold chain that held her watch.
"I thought we should have heard the news of your wedding before now,
Olive," said Mr. Kelvin.
"The news of my wedding, Matthew! You will never hear that."
"Never is a long word, Olive. Such a nice, clever girl as you are
can't be destined to live and die an old maid."
Olive's black eyebrows came together for a moment, and she tapped the
floor impatiently with her foot.
"It almost seemed at one time, Olive, as if you and I would have come
together," went on Kelvin, while his fingers toyed absently with a
paper-knife. "Those were pleasant days--those old days on the sands at
Redcar, when I was recovering from my sprain, and you did your best to
nurse me. You used to read novels to me, and play to me on that vile
old lodging-house piano; and out of gratitude I taught you cribbage
and écarté. I have never enjoyed a holiday like that. Do you remember
our long row by moonlight, and how we kissed as we stepped out of the
boat on to the wet sands?"
No word from Olive: only a far-away look in her eyes, and the thin
straight line of her lips looking thinner and straighter than before.
"And yet it all came to nothing!" resumed Kelvin, glancing carelessly
at her. "It might have come to something: who knows? Only, two hours
later, I was telegraphed for to London, and----
"And, as you say, Matthew," interrupted Olive, "it came to nothing. So
much the better probably for both of us."
"Certainly so much the better for you, Olive; but whether or not for
me, may be open to doubt. Why, even in those old days that now seem so
far away, when you and I were girl and boy together, how fond we were
of each other! Do you remember that afternoon when the swing broke
down and I pitched on my head, and how you cried over my bruises as if
your heart would break?"
"I have not forgotten," said Olive, in a low voice.
"Whenever I go into a chemist's shop, it takes me back in memory to
your father's little surgery. How cleverly you used to help him with
his drugs and mixtures! You seemed to know the contents of every
gallipot and bottle almost as well as he did. If you had been a man
you would have been a doctor."
"Possibly so," said Olive.
"I remember when Farmer Sinclair's dog bit you," continued Mr. Kelvin,
"how bravely you bore the pain. The dog died a week after, and some
people said you had poisoned it; but I scouted the idea."
"But I did poison the brute," replied Olive.
"You did?"
"Why not? It bit me in the wrist. I have the scar now. It was not fit
to live."
Matthew Kelvin shrugged his shoulders, but did not rejoin.
"But why call up such reminiscences?" said Olive. "I want to hear
about yourself. A rising man like you, Matthew--a man born to fight
his way upward--how is it that you are still unmarried? A rich wife
would do so much to help forward your ambitious schemes!"
"My ambitious schemes, indeed;" said Kelvin, with a sly twinkle in his
eye. "What has a simple-minded country lawyer like me to do with
ambition?"
"I know you too well, Matthew, not to feel sure that in ten years from
this time you hope to be in a very different position."
Kelvin dropped the paper knife with which he had been playing, and
gazed steadily at his cousin for a moment before speaking.
Her eyes met his unshrinkingly.
"You are right, Olive," he said, speaking 'gravely enough now. "I _do_
cherish some strangely bold dreams. I _am_ an ambitious man; but you
are the only person who seems to have divined that fact. I am far
richer than the world knows of; and, but that it would almost break my
mother's heart, I should have given up the old business years ago. In
any case, I shall dispose of it before long. I can afford now to put
it behind me. The first step in my ambition is to get into Parliament.
And so you think I ought to get married, eh?"
"Yes--to a woman who could help you forward in your career by
sympathizing with and comprehending the aims and objects of your
ambition. No mere drawing-room doll must be your wife, but a woman
fitted in heart and brain to be your companion."
"I won't say that you are not right," said Mr. Kelvin. "But in these
matters men rarely do that which their friends think they ought to do.
Cupid, you know, never went to school, and his problems cannot be
worked out by rule-of-three."
"That may apply to a very young man, who lacks sense to know what is
best for him and where to look for it; but not to you."
"That is just where you make a mistake, Olive. What will you say of my
strength of mind--of my common sense--when I tell you that I have
fallen in love with a simple country girl with nothing to recommend
her save a pretty face and the finest eyes in the world?"
Olive Deane rose slowly to her feet. Her face grew whiter; her eyes
blacker; her thick brows made a straight, unbroken line across her
forehead. If looks had power to slay, Mr. Kelvin would have been
annihilated on the spot. But his face was turned the other way. His
own thoughts held him. He was gazing meditatively into the fire.
"And she--she accepted you, of course?" said Olive, at last, her voice
hardly raised above a whisper.
"On the contrary, she rejected me."
"How I hate her for it!" Then she added, under her breath, "But I
should have hated her worse if she had accepted him."
"You are the only person in the world, Olive, to whom I have breathed
a word of this."
"Your confidence is safe with me, Matthew."
"I am sure of that, and it is a relief to me to talk to you. To you,
Olive, I can always talk as to a sister."
"Yes--as to a sister," she said, with a slow nod of the head. Then she
shivered slightly, as if with cold, and held out her hands to the
blaze. "Go on, Matthew. You are sure of my sympathy in any case."
"Need I tell you any more, Olive?"
"I want you to tell me all about the affair, from beginning to end.
You have piqued my curiosity, and now you must satisfy it."
Kelvin paused for a moment or two, as if to pull himself together.
"It seems strange to take even you into my confidence," he said, "and
yet I feel as if I must tell some one--especially after what happened
yesterday. To begin, then. I fell in love with this girl, Eleanor
Lloyd--madly, desperately in love. Her father, Jacob Lloyd, was a
well-to-do small landowner, whose affairs I managed for him. He
seconded my suit, but, as I have said already, the girl rejected me. I
am a patient man. I waited six months, and then I spoke to Miss Lloyd
again--spoke more warmly and strongly than a less infatuated man would
have done. Again she rejected me; this time in a way that I can
neither forget nor forgive. I vowed that I would some day humble her
haughty pride--and that day has come. Six months ago Jacob Lloyd died
without a will. He had been speculating greatly for years, and Eleanor
Lloyd, much to her own surprise and that of everyone else, found
herself an heiress to the amount of something over twenty thousand
pounds. When I first knew this, I thought that the day of my revenge
had gone by for ever. But I was wrong. Such was the state of affairs
yesterday: to-day they are very different."
"In what way are they different to-day?"
"Listen. Before administering to Mr. Lloyd's will, it was necessary
that I should be in a position to prove that Miss Lloyd was really the
person the world believed her to be. Jacob Lloyd left an immense mass
of papers behind him, amongst which I was not long in finding his
marriage certificate; but I failed to find any document having
reference either to the birth or baptism of his daughter. Having some
other important matters on hand just then, and there being no
particular hurry in the affair, I did not prosecute my search very
vigorously. I knew that about the time Miss Lloyd was born, Jacob
Lloyd and his wife were travelling, either for health or pleasure,
from place to place, and I had little doubt that when a proper search
came to be made I should be able to find the information I wanted. A
few days ago, however, there came into my hands certain documentary
proofs, full and complete, of the truth of what I am now going to tell
you. Eleanor Lloyd is not the daughter of Jacob Lloyd, nor any
relation of his whatever. She is neither more nor less than a child
adopted in infancy by him and his wife, they having no family of their
own. The fortune left by Jacob Lloyd is the property of a nephew,
Gerald Warburton, now living somewhere on the Continent. The woman who
rejected me is an 'absolute pauper."
"A strange story--a very strange story, indeed, cousin Matthew!"
"Eleanor Lloyd has to come here two hours hence to sign certain deeds.
She will enter this room a rich woman; she will leave it penniless!"
"And you will be revenged?"
"And I shall be revenged."
They were both silent, thinking their 'own thoughts.
"Where has she been living since the death of her father?" said Olive.
"She has been living very quietly at Bridgely, her own home."
"But has it not been her intention to take up a position in society,
such as her supposed wealth would entitle her to occupy?"
"Lady Dudgeon, the wife of one of out Pembridge magnates, has taken
her by the hand, and has constituted herself Miss Lloyd's chaperone.
Eleanor is to accompany her ladyship to London in the spring, and will
then make her début."
"To how many people is Miss Lloyd's true parentage known?"
"Not a soul in the world knows of it except myself--and you."
"Good. And your idea of revenge is to break this news to Miss Lloyd
suddenly here--this very morning--and so crush her?"
"It is."
"A man's idea--poor and commonplace. Shall I tell you what mine--a
woman's idea of revenge--would be in such a case?"
"You are a clever girl, Olive, and you pique my curiosity."
"Were I in your place, I would keep my discovery a profound secret for
some time to come. I would let her for a little while taste all the
pleasures that wealth can confer. I would let her go on till a life
of ease and self-indulgence should have become as it were a second
nature to her I would let her live on in blissful ignorance, of
the thunderbolt you have in store for her till she has learned to
love--perhaps even till she is engaged to be married."
"Eleanor married to another! I never thought of that," said Kelvin,
under his breath.
"Then, when you think the comedy has lasted long enough, you shall go
to her some day when she is surrounded by her fine friends--on her
wedding morning itself, if it so please you--and, touching her on the
shoulder, you shall say to her, 'Eleanor Lloyd, you are a beggar!' Her
fall from wealth to poverty will then seem infinitely greater than it
would do now, and yours will be a revenge worthy of the name."
"A devilish scheme, Olive, and one which only an Italian--or a
woman--would have thought of!"
"You flatter me," said Olive, with a little lifting of the shoulders,
and the ghost of a smile playing round her thin lips.
To say that Mr. Kelvin was thoroughly startled, is to say no more
than the truth. Olive was right. There would be a refinement--a
subtlety--about such a scheme which his own scheme altogether lacked.
But, would it not be a mean and dastardly advantage to take of an
innocent girl like Eleanor Lloyd? He got up from his chair and crossed
to the window, and then walked slowly back again and sat down without
a word. He was a man whom circumstances had never before tempted to
step out of the beaten track of morality. The orthodox path had for
him been paved with golden guineas. So far as he had seen, it was only
reprobates who went astray, or were foolish enough to do anything
which the general opinion of society condemned; simpletons, in fact,
who could not understand that to do right--in a worldly point of
view--was a far better paying game than to do its opposite. But
Olive's words had found the weak place in his armour. His judgment did
not fail him so utterly as to mislead him with regard to the meanness
of what he meditated, but his own wishes and desires in the matter
threw a sort of lime-light glamour over it, which made it seem
something altogether different from what it really was.
"I'll do it, Olive," he said at last. "Yes; for good or for evil, I'll
do it! I'll crush her proud spirit to the dust. I will humiliate her
as she humiliated me. She shall suffer as I suffered. I will repay
scorn with scorn: insult with insult. At the moment of her greatest
triumph I will strip her of love, of wealth, of friendship; and show
her to the world for what she really is--a pauper and an outcast!"
"Bravely spoken, Matthew! Don't let her soft looks or winning ways
melt you from your purpose," said Olive, as she pushed back her chair.
"And now I will go upstairs to my aunt."
Kelvin put his elbows on the table, and rested his face in his hands.
Olive stood looking down at him for a moment. There was a tear in the
corner of her eye, but a smile played round her mouth. She went up to
him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder. "I shall see you later
in the day, shall I not?"
"Yes--later in the day," he answered, absently, without looking up.
Olive went; and presently Mr. Piper's head was seen.
"Captain Dixon, sir, has sent for you. He's been taken ill and wants
his will drawn up without delay."
Kelvin roused himself from his abstraction. "Another fool who has put
off till the day of his death what he ought to have done years ago."
He began to put his papers together, but still in an absent-minded
way. "This is a damnable thing to do. I despise myself for promising
to do it," he muttered. "And yet why should she not suffer? I have
only to call to mind her words--her looks--that summer evening in the
garden, when for the second time I pleaded my love before her: I have
only to remember how she turned on me, as if I were a reptile, to feel
my purpose harden within me, and every grain of pity melt out of my
soul!"