Birds of Prey Part 11

"No one else in this place. But in England you have your old friend,--the woman with whom you were at school. Do you think she would refuse to give you a temporary home if you sued to her _in forma pauperis?_"

"No, I don't think she would refuse. She was very good to me. But why am I to go back to London?"

"Because to stay here would be ruin and disgrace to you; because the tie that links you to Horatio Paget must be cut at any hazard." "But why?"

"For the best or worst of reasons. Your father has been trying a trick to-night which has been hitherto so infallible, that I suppose he had grown careless as to his execution of it. Or perhaps he took a false measure of the man he was playing with. In any case, he has been found out, and has been arrested by the police."

"Arrested, for cheating at cards!" exclaimed the girl, with a look of unspeakable disgust and horror. Valentine's arm was ready to support her, if she had shown any symptom of fainting; but she did not. She stood erect before him, very pale but firm as a rock.

"And you want me to go away?" she said.

"Yes, I want you to disappear from this place before you become notorious as your father's daughter. That would be about the worst reputation which you could carry through life. Believe me that I wish you well, Diana, and be ruled by me."

"I will," she answered, with a kind of despairing resignation. "It seems very dreary to go back to England to face the world all alone.

But I will do as you tell me."

She did not express any sympathy for her father, then languis.h.i.+ng under arrest, whereby she proved herself very wicked and unwomanly, no doubt.

But neither womanly virtues nor Christian graces are wont to flourish in the school in which Diana Paget had been reared. She obeyed Valentine Hawkehurst to the letter, without any sentimental lamentations whatever. Her scanty possessions were collected, and neatly packed, in little more than an hour. At three o'clock she lay down in her tawdry little bed-chamber to take what rest she might in the s.p.a.ce of two hours. At six she stood by Valentine Hawkehurst on the platform of the railway station, with her face hidden by a brown gauze veil, waiting till the train was wade ready to start.

It was after she was seated in the carriage that she spoke for the first time of her father.

"Is it likely to go very hard with him?" she asked.

"I hope not. We must try to pull him through it as well as we can. The charge may break down at the first examination. Good bye."

"Good bye, Valentine."

They had just time to shake hands before the train moved off. Another moment and Miss Paget and her fellow-pa.s.sengers were speeding towards Liege.

Mr. Hawkehurst drew his hat over his eyes as he walked away from the station.

"The world will seem very dull and empty to me without her," he said to himself. "I have done an unselfish thing for once in my life. I wonder whether the recording angel will carry that up to my credit, and whether the other fellow will blot out any of the old score in consideration of this one little bit of self-sacrifice."

BOOK THE THIRD.

HEAPING UP RICHES.

CHAPTER I.

A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE.

Eleven years had pa.s.sed lightly enough over the glossy raven locks of Mr. Philip Sheldon. There are some men with whom Time deals gently, and he was one of them. The hard black eyes had lost none of their fierce brightness; the white teeth flashed with all their old brilliancy; the complexion, which had always been dusky of hue, was perhaps a shade or two darker; and the fierce black eyes seemed all the blacker by reason of the purple tinge beneath them. But the Philip Sheldon of to-day was, taken altogether, a handsomer man than the Philip Sheldon of eleven years ago.

Within those eleven years the Bloomsbury dentist had acquired a higher style of dress and bearing, and a certain improvement of tone and manner. He was still an eminently respectable man, and a man whose chief claim to the esteem of his fellows lay in the fact of his unimpeachable respectability; but his respectability of to-day, as compared with that of eleven years before, was as the respectability of Tyburnia when contrasted with that of St. Pancras. He was not an aristocratic-looking man, or an elegant man; but you felt, as you contemplated him, that the bulwarks of the citadel of English respectability are defended by such as he.

Mr. Sheldon no longer experimentalised with lumps of beeswax and plaster-of-paris. All the appalling paraphernalia of his cruel art had long since been handed over to an aspiring young dentist, together with the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street, the furniture, and--the connexion. And thus had ended Philip Sheldon's career as a surgeon-dentist. Within a year of Tom Halliday's death his disconsolate widow had given her hand to her first sweetheart, not forgetful of her dead husband or ungrateful for much kindness and affection experienced at his hands, but yielding rather to Philip's suit because she was unable to advance any fair show of reason whereby she might reject him.

"I told you, she'd be afraid to refuse you," said George Sheldon, when the dentist came home from Barlingford, where Tom Halliday's widow was living with her mother.

Philip had answered his brother's questions rather ambiguously at first, but in the end had been fain to confess that he had asked Mrs.

Halliday to marry him, and that his suit had prospered.

"That way of putting it is not very complimentary to me," he said, drawing himself up rather stiffly. "Georgy and I were attached to each other long ago, and it is scarcely strange if----"

"If you should make a match of it, Tom being gone. Poor old Tom! He and I were such cronies. I've always had an idea that neither you nor the other fellow quite understood that low fever of his. You did your best, no doubt; but I think you ought to have pulled him through somehow.

However, that's not a pleasant subject to talk of just now; so I'll drop it, and wish you joy, Phil. It'll be rather a good match for you, I fancy," added George, contemplating his brother with a nervous twitching of his lips, which suggested that his mouth watered as he thought of Philip's good fortune.

"It's a very nice thing you drop into, old fellow, isn't it?" he asked presently, seeing that his brother was rather disinclined to discuss the subject.

"You know the state of my affairs well enough to be sure that I couldn't afford to marry a poor woman," answered Philip.

"And that it has been for a long time a vital necessity with you to marry a rich one," interjected his brother.

"Georgy will have a few hundreds, and----"

"A few thousands, you mean, Phil," cried Sheldon the younger with agreeable briskness; "shall I tot it up for you?"

He was always eager to "tot" things up, and would scarcely have shrunk from setting down the stars of heaven in trim double columns of figures, had it seemed to his profit to do so.

"Let us put it in figures, Phil," he said, getting his finger-tips in order for the fray. "There's the money for Hyley Farm--twelve thousand three hundred and fifty, I had it from poor Tom's own lips. Then there's that little property on Sheepfield Common--say seven-fifty, eh?--well, say seven hundred, if you like to leave a margin; and then there are the insurances--three thou' in the Alliance, fifteen hundred in the Phoenix, five hundred in the Suffolk Friendly; the total of which, my dear boy, is eighteen thousand five hundred pounds; and a very nice thing for you to drop into, just as affairs were looking about as black as they could look." "Yes," answered Mr. Sheldon the elder, who appeared by on means to relish this "totting-up" of his future wife's fortune; "I have no doubt I ought to consider myself a very lucky man."

"So Barlingford folks will say when they hear of the business. And now I hope you're not going to forget your promise to me."

"What promise?"

"That if you ever did get a stroke of luck, I should have a share of it--eh, Phil?"

Mr. Sheldon caressed his chin, and looked thoughtfully at the fire.

"If my wife lets me have the handling of any of her money, you may depend upon it I'll do what I can for you," he said, after a pause.

"Don't say that, Phil," remonstrated George. "When a man says he'll do what he can for you, it's a sure sign he means to do nothing.

Friends.h.i.+p and brotherly feeling are at an end when it comes to a question of 'ifs' and 'cans.' If your wife lets you have the handling of any of her money!" cried the lawyer, with unspeakable derision; "that's too good a joke for you to indulge in with me. Do you think I believe you will let that poor little woman keep custody of her money a day after she is your wife, or that you will let her friends tie it up for her before she marries you?"

"No, Phil, you didn't lay your plans for that."

"What do you mean by my laying plans?" asked the dentist.

"That's a point we won't discuss, Philip," answered the lawyer coolly.