The Pit Town Coronet: A Family Mystery, Volume 1 (of 3)

Seventeen uneventful years had passed and had streaked Georgie Haggard's abundant chestnut locks with grey. A lovely woman still. The innocent, healthful, girlish beauty had developed into the sweet matronly dignity which is so frequently seen among the happy wives and mothers of the English aristocracy. Haggard was still proud of his wife, because even he couldn't fail to see her beauty; and as for the old lord, he idolized her much as old Squire Warrender had idolized her twenty years ago at The Warren. Georgie Haggard was not demonstrative.

Always quiet, she was rather timid and subdued in her husband's presence; but with the old lord, though perhaps a little more staid and dignified than of yore, she was still the lovely and affectionate woman of the old happy times. Hers was the beauty of the happy mother, the sweet matronly loveliness which is perhaps the more touching when tinged by the slight dash of sadness which idealises it and saves it from the commonplace. The smile was not ever present, but it was none the less beautiful and touching from its rarity.

Reginald Haggard and his family had been installed at Walls End Castle ever since Lord Hetton's death. They had come originally upon a visit; Mrs. Haggard's health had suddenly broken down, and at the old lord's urgent entreaty the visit had been indefinitely prolonged. Although Haggard was, as we know, a wealthy man, he could not afford to disregard any suggestion of his great-uncle. At first he had looked on the whole thing as a confounded nuisance; he had objected to his wife that they might make themselves ridiculous by a too abject obedience to the whims of the old nobleman.

But after all it was not so very bad for the Haggards. Lord Pit Town took care to make it very apparent to everybody that it was at his special desire that Haggard and his family remained at the Castle. He let it be very plainly perceived that he considered Reginald Haggard almost as his son, as well as his heir; for the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, at the conclusion of his official duties, had quite enough to occupy his mind with his eternal whist at the club till the small hours of the morning. The odd trick was far more to him than the possession of Walls End Castle and the Pit Town title. But Mr. Lancelot Haggard remained a plain esquire till his death, which occurred seven years after that of the unfortunate Lord Hetton. When his man-servant opened the study door one morning, for he had found the bedroom empty, he saw Lancelot Haggard seated at the whist table, upon which the four hands of an unfinished game were spread. Pole's "Treatise on Whist" lay open at "The Echo of the Call," the candles had burnt out in their sockets, there were tricks turned, and three cards were already played of another one; and Lancelot Haggard sat bolt upright, the fourth card between his fingers, stone dead, but with a peaceful smile upon his lips.

Reginald Haggard, then, was practically in the position of Lord Pit Town's son. Of course he was but plain Mr. Haggard still. He had got rid of his father's place, thus "washing his hands," as he had threatened, "of the whole bag of tricks;" for though Cunningham, the Scotch steward, had succeeded in screwing three per cent. out of the place, yet he had made himself so terribly unpopular in the process that he resigned in despair in order to emigrate to New Zealand, and so become, as he phrased it, his "ain mon again." When the steward resigned Haggard had been very glad indeed of the excuse to send the place to the hammer. A set of rooms in the huge mansion of the old lord in Grosvenor Square had been placed at Haggard's disposal, and though he frequently ran up to town, his pied-à-terre was at the house which would one day be his own, and the Haggards had no regular establishment in London. As for Georgie Haggard herself, she invariably passed a portion of the summer with her father at The Warren. She usually made her annual visit accompanied only by the two boys, for Haggard invariably absented himself in the summer either for Norway fishing, lengthy yacht voyages, or as one of a little party of men of his own kidney, who sought their sport further afield and went lion-hunting in South Africa, shooting the hippopotamus on the White Nile, or chasing the fast-disappearing buffalo upon the American prairies. But as a rule he would get home for the shooting. Year by year the head of game in the Walls End preserves, under Haggard's fostering care, had increased. In the old lord's name Haggard had invited every year a select little party of crack shots; he gave them a couple of days' battue shooting, the other four in the stubble and among the turnips, and at the end of the week they went away to "wipe each others' eyes" over some other man's birds. For some years the bags made at these little annual gatherings had been noted in the daily papers. Haggard himself not infrequently headed the list, for he was an enthusiastic sportsman and a brilliant shot.

Reginald Haggard at five-and-forty had quieted down. Years and years ago he had taken his name off the books at the Pandemonium; he no longer gambled, and he took a great interest in politics, as became a man who was destined, in the ordinary course of events, and at no very distant date, to become one of our hereditary legislators. Of course Haggard had many friends, or rather acquaintances, all of whom were ready to kootoo and truckle to the man who would be the next Earl of Pit Town; men whom he would invite to dinner, and who would entertain him; generally men of his own age, or club-room bucks with wrinkled cheeks; men whose clothes were always in the fashion, and who as a rule ate and drank rather more than was good for them; men who rode in the park on three hundred guinea hacks, and who might be seen in the Drive in big mail-phaetons with Brobdingnagian lamps, or driving noisy and rather miscellaneous parties on their four-in-hands towards Richmond.

I don't know what Haggard would have done without that invaluable esquire of his body, Mr. Maurice Capt. Capt accompanied him everywhere; he had camped out with him in the Rockies, and his culinary skill there had more than made up for the deficiencies of Bull-headed Bill, the half-bred titular cook of the expedition. Capt was a silent man, and his fellow servants were never able to extract any gossip from him respecting his master's wanderings. But Haggard was lucky in retaining one real friend; his old fidus Achates, Lord Spunyarn, was his friend still; still a bachelor, no longer the unsuccessful amateur athlete of former days, but developed into a full-blown philanthropist, the friend of mankind in general, but of the destitute East-ender in particular.

Ever since Georgie Haggard, in her just indignation, had banished her cousin from her presence, Miss Lucy Warrender, still a handsome woman, had led a wandering life; the dove had found no rest for the sole of her foot. Homeless and friendless, though her intimates and acquaintances were innumerable, she was as restless and erratic in her movements as the Wandering Jew. Miss Warrender was always in evidence upon the Ascot Lawn; she was to be seen at Brighton during the season, at German watering-places, at Deauville, Biarritz, and Eastbourne or Scarborough in the summer, and occasionally even for a few days at The Warren, where she invariably appeared at Christmas. For Lucy Warrender had eight hundred a year of her own, which she had inherited from the colonel, her father. I am afraid she had become a confirmed old maid; she had flirted and philandered till she was thirty, and there were plenty of the very smartest people who were quite ready to flirt with her now, for Lucy Warrender still retained her good looks, her dreamy blonde beauty, and her eyes still sparkled as of old. We have said Lucy Warrender was homeless and friendless, and she had developed two master vices: to drown her troubles she gambled as only a woman can gamble, and she drugged herself with chloral and other abominations to procure a temporary forgetfulness of a black shadow that incessantly pursued her. The man Capt knew of the long-buried secret, and he persistently blackmailed the unhappy Lucy Warrender; but Capt was far too wise a man to kill the goose with the golden eggs. He considered that if he drove her to extremity, and the trick which had been played upon Reginald Haggard should ever become a public scandal, that he had nothing to gain but everything to lose. He knew that the English laws against what the French call chantage were severe; he also knew enough of his master to be quite certain that if Haggard's just indignation were once aroused, he would be pursued with relentless ferocity. So he contented himself with plundering Lucy Warrender, and kept her secret; not because he was not perfectly ready to betray it, but because he saw no way of bringing his knowledge to a better market.

As for the two young men, for they had already ceased to be adolescents, they were certainty physically decidedly above the average. Lucius, the elder, was, as we know, Lucy Warrender's child. His whole soul was wrapped up in the fact that a few short years would see him the possessor of the courtesy title and heir to his supposed father's ample means and old Lord Pit Town's incalculable wealth. The young fellow had even developed a taste for art, simply because he felt it was his bounden duty to be able to appreciate the innumerable treasures which must inevitably soon be his very own. Young Lucius Haggard had been petted and spoiled from his earliest infancy, he had had his way in everything; his nurses, his schoolmasters and his tutors had bowed down to him; good-looking young fellow that he became in after years, a fact of which he was perfectly aware; he was flattered and toadied to by the golden youth of both sexes, and by most of his elders, who ought to have known better, to an extent sufficient to have turned the head of any ordinary young man of well-regulated mind. But Lucius Haggard's was not a well-regulated mind. He was of his father's religion, but he carried the religion further. Reginald Haggard was a self-worshipper, a man determined to get the greatest amount of pleasure and amusement out of this world, regardless of consequences to others, a man for whom trumps were continually turning up, a man who felt he was a brazen pot among the earthen ones floating down the stream, and to whom the annihilation of the weaker vessels was a matter of utter indifference. Like Napoleon, he believed in his star, and he had been right in doing so, for when at two-and-twenty he had been turned out to take his chance, he had rapidly become the possessor of wealth far beyond his needs; a little later, after a short period of enjoyment of the free wild life in America, he had returned to draw the prize in the matrimonial lottery, which somehow inevitably falls to the lot of such as he. The good lives which stood between him and the Pit Town peerage had all dropped, and nothing now remained between him and what he considered his rights but one frail old man. But the young Lucius had never for an instant been submitted to the healthy influence of even temporary poverty, his existence had never even been troubled by so much as a crumpled rose leaf; the consequence was that his selfishness was utter and unaffected, that he did not even wear it as a garment, but that it was absolutely a part of himself. A tall handsome young fellow enough, fairly clever, who did not conceal that he thought himself rather superior to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world took pretty good care to coincide in the young fellow's opinion.

As for George Haggard, he was the anti-type of Lucius. Equally good-looking, he was the picture of old Squire Warrender in his youth; his fair chestnut hair curled in profusion over his broad square forehead. He was a muscular youth who shone at school and at the university, in the cricket field and upon the river alike. But he was no mere athlete, for he had a taste for reading, and he never forgot the fact, which his father was continually pressing upon his mind, that he, as a younger son, would have to get his own living. And George Haggard was ambitious; he meant if possible to force his way into the arena of political life, and had already determined to make a struggle for name and fame at the Bar. But though George Haggard was ambitious, his was an affectionate disposition; he idolized his mother, and he truckled to no one, not even to his father or the old earl. George Haggard knew well enough that he would be a comparatively poor man-a pauper, as his brother pleasantly put it, but only a pauper from the point of view of Lucius Haggard, the probable future possessor of immense wealth, for The Warren acres would assuredly be his, and had George Haggard so willed it, nothing would have been easier for him than to sit and twiddle his thumbs and wait for old Squire Warrender's death; but as we have said, George Haggard was ambitious.

The great new gallery at Walls End Castle, the Grecian temple which Dr. Wolff had designed over twenty years before, was now less offensive to the eye externally. It was a Grecian temple still, but its spick-and-spanness had passed away. Two old gentlemen arm-in-arm slowly walked down the principal saloon, the one a big grey-haired man whose face was disfigured with many scars; as he walked he gesticulated, and he spoke with a strong German accent in a loud voice. By his side ambled his friend and companion of many years, a very old man this, who stooped considerably and leant frequently upon a crutch-handle stick; the two men were John, Earl of Pit Town, and Dr. Wolff.

"I never thought, Wolff, that I should be spared to fill the last space on these walls. I certainly never expected to see the termination of my labours. In art one cannot be too exacting. We made up our minds years ago that there should be nothing doubtful here, and here is the only remaining space filled at last, and filled, as it should be, by a masterpiece. Yes," said the old nobleman, as he rubbed his hands, "thank heaven there is nothing doubtful here. Nothing remains for me now, Wolff, but to leave the treasures that it has been the labour of my life to accumulate; my sight isn't what it was."

"No man is what he was, my good friend and master, but it is not well to be sad. You set yourself a great task years ago, an almost superhuman task. He is aggomblished."

"No, not accomplished yet, Wolff. I have only got through a part of it. I have caught my white elephant, but what am I to do with him? I know too well that my natural heir looks upon the contents of these galleries but as so many hundred thousand pounds' worth of hard cash. He is an honest man, and makes no secret of it."

"But his son, my lord, the young Mr. Lucius?"

"Ah! he is a mystery, Wolff, that I have failed to fathom. We have known him, my friend, since he was a little child. I can't tell why, Wolff, I have never trusted him. Perhaps the aged are over-suspicious. I confess to you that if I thought he loved art for art's sake, he should have my pictures, as he will ultimately have my title and what goes with it."

"You can tie them up, my lord."

"Yes, I know I can tie them up, but then the pictures I've loved would suffer. Who will care for them, Wolff, when you and I are gone?"

"You have sometimes talked, my lord, of giving them en bloc to the nation."

"Yes, Wolff, I did once think of that; but since that time I have seen that real Chamber of Horrors, the National Portrait Gallery. I should not like to send her there," he said, as he pointed to the portrait of wicked Bab Chudleigh, who simpered and smiled at him from the wall. "No, Wolff, I shouldn't like my pictures to be hawked about as loans to one East End or provincial exhibition after another, to be sneered at by crowds of unappreciating yokels. It's a very heavy responsibility, Wolff."

At this moment Reginald Haggard entered the gallery.

"I hear, my lord," he said, as he shook hands with the old nobleman, "that you have hung the last long-sought treasure this morning. Is it really so?"

The old lord nodded.

"I suppose you will begin the weeding process now?" continued Haggard.

The old man drew himself up a little stiffly. "If you can indicate to me anything that is unworthy, you will confer an obligation; but I think you'll find it difficult. In my opinion, Haggard," he continued, "and in the opinion of others far better able to judge than I am, there is nothing here requiring weeding out."

Haggard slightly flushed.

"I can only plead my ignorance," he said; "it is what most connoisseurs do."

"Yes, there you're quite right; but most men begin collecting as the amusement of their old age. I began it sixty years ago, and I'm afraid my long life's labour is over, and that, useless old man that I am, I've lived too long already."

"You look upon things in a melancholy light, my lord."

"No man is pleased when he finds his occupation gone; and perhaps it's a little sad to me to find that you care for none of these things."

"I know you wouldn't wish me to affect an interest I do not feel," said Haggard with an ingenuous smile.

"No, there you're right. For we should find him out, shouldn't we, Wolff?"

The doctor of philosophy laughed. "It is our business to detect shams," he said. "Yes, I think we should have found you out."

"Then, Dr. Wolff, you'd better try your skill on Lucius; he poses as a man of taste, I don't."

At that moment the two young men entered the gallery.

"Here he is to answer for himself," said Haggard; "and I'll leave him to your tender mercies. If he be a sham Priest of Art, unfrock him by all means, Dr. Wolff," said Haggard with a laugh, as he sauntered away.

The two young men greeted their aged relative with respect, and nodded familiarly to Dr. Wolff.

"I verily believe, my lord, that this younger brother of mine has no soul," said young Lucius Haggard; "he actually tells me that the contemplation of pictures produces in him naught but headache."

"And a pain in the neck, Lucius; don't forget the pain in the neck," said his brother.

"Yes, his pain in his neck was his other symptom. He declares he sees more beauty in a sunlit rustic hedge than in a landscape by Claude Lorraine."

"And I added to my criminality, I fear, Dr. Wolff, by declaring that I only liked a picture when it gave pleasure to my eyes, as does the wicked wanton on the wall yonder," he added, kissing the tips of his fingers to Mistress Barbara Chudleigh.

"Ach, my young friend, do not glory in being a Philister," sighed Dr. Wolff.

"I fear, George, yours is but a low and sensuous ideal, if Sir Peter's commonplace masterpiece is all that rouses your enthusiasm. Why, amidst so much that is beautiful, so much that is spiritual, so much that appeals to the higher nature, you should pick out the one commonplace bit in the whole collection, I can't imagine," said Lucius with a sneer.

"You may call it commonplace if you like, Lucius. All I know is, that whatever else she may have been, if Bab Chudleigh was like that picture, she must have very closely resembled an angel."

"And have you seen them then, these angels, young sir, that you speak so confidently?" said the German doctor, as a great smile ran over his scarred face.

"Seen them? of course I have-hundreds of them. So did you, Dr. Wolff, when you were my age, and I have no doubt so did his lordship there," said the boy with a glance at the old lord, who was peering into a picture at some distance. "I'll be bound that Lucius here sees the angels of his dream-fancies by the dozen. He goes in for poetry, you know, and all that sort of thing, though I for my own part would rather not see his angels, for I haven't been educated up to the pitch where one admires the beauty of decay, as Lucius has, the creatures with the pointed chins, the sandy towzled hair, the great hungry eyes, the uncomfortable poses, the deficiency of adipose tissue and the prehensile toes. I can't say that I appreciate green shadows under the eyes, nor do I see anything poetic in a bilious air. But all these things are very dear to Lucius, at least he says so. No, give me nature and Bab Chudleigh, and I'll make Lucius a present of art and his bony angels, and all Mr. Swinburne's clutching horrors into the bargain."

"Thank you, George; it's very noble and generous on your part to hand over to me what you can't appreciate."

"My dear Lucius, we all have our failings. You go in for art and the artificial, while nature is enough for me."

"When you are my age," said Lucius with the superior wisdom of an elder brother, "you will cease to judge by externals, I trust. You will have learned to peep behind the veil, and you will see the real soul seated on its throne."

"Bosh!" said George shortly.

And so the idle talk went on, and Lucius continued to pose, while the worshipper of nature took pains to fit on the Philistine's skin tighter than ever.

* * *

Mr. Maurice Capt, though an ambitious man and a clever one withal, had risen no higher in the world since we saw him last; he was still Reginald Haggard's valet, but his wages were good and he had a little den of his own where his meals were served to him from the housekeeper's table in solitary state. The valet was by this time a man of property; his wants were few and his little economies, as he called them, were large.

Nobody but his banker was aware of the extent of his accumulations; he couldn't have saved it all out of his pay, but he had managed to amass a comparatively large sum which stood to his credit in four figures. Was Mr. Capt a gambler, a backer of horses, or a dabbler in stocks and shares? Not a bit of it. Mr. Maurice Capt was the proprietor of a secret. For seventeen years Mr. Capt had drawn from this queer property of his a varying but comfortable income. When Lucy Warrender first came into her eight hundred a year, Mr. Capt's income had very sensibly increased. It wasn't paid quarterly or half-yearly; the manner in which it was drawn was sufficiently original. The bills which Mr. Capt drew whenever he thought fit upon Miss Lucy Warrender were always honoured. Mr. Capt was in the habit of writing to the lady in the humble tone of a suppliant. The letters always stated with praiseworthy clearness what was the sum required, and the demand was always met with business-like promptitude. How Miss Warrender managed to satisfy this insatiable bloodsucker I cannot tell, for though she had eight hundred a year of her own, she certainly lived up to it, perhaps beyond it. But Miss Warrender gambled in many ways; she speculated and had quite a large account which she had opened with a very old friend of former years, Mr. Dabbler, once of the firm of Sleek and Dabbler, but now trading by himself, and though dropping his h's as freely as ever, one of the biggest brokers on the Stock Exchange and an alderman of the City of London. I suppose Alderman Dabbler must have been very much in love with Miss Warrender, though he never actually had the impertinence to propose to her. Her transactions with him were numerous, and did not pass through his books. Most of her speculations were made upon his advice, and many a handsome cheque testified either to the astuteness of Miss Lucy Warrender, or to the generosity of Mr. Alderman Dabbler. Poor Dabbler, he was but one of the many irons in Miss Warrender's fire. Miss Warrender betted; it was even said that she ran horses as "Mr. Simpson." She would stand upon the plateau at Monaco at the shooting matches, and in an entrancing costume and a pair of ten-button gloves, her face carefully shaded from the blazing sun by an enormous parasol, she would watch the birds fall right and left and die in agony, or drop wounded into the sea, and still continue to back the bird or the gun, as seemed to her good, with the cosmopolitan habitués of the rather Bohemian but money-spending set in which she moved. It was a very miscellaneous set: peers, members of parliament, journalists, jockeys, people who lived by their wits but who somehow always managed to wear new garments of fashionable cut, actresses, singers, dancers, of European reputation, and some of them with no reputations at all, fashionables of enviable notoriety or the reverse; all these various sorts of people were hail-fellow-well-met with Miss Warrender upon the Plateau at Monte Carlo, or within the walls of the great gambling house.

Lucy Warrender had kept her good looks; I expect if she hadn't she would have gone under long before. She enjoyed herself in a sort of feverish way; she was a notoriously lucky woman when she gambled, and she gambled habitually and heavily. But just on the particular day we meet Miss Warrender again, Fortune had been unkind. The lady was sitting gazing out from her window on the second floor of the Hotel de Russie upon the sunlit tranquil turquoise sea. I don't think that she saw much beauty in the scene, for though she stared at the blue sea and the bluer sky, she appeared to be rapt in thought.

There are some women who are always well dressed, whose flounces and whose furbelows are ever fresh and crisp; Lucy Warrender was one of these. It would be very easy to extract from The Queen a poetic description of the pretty pale blue tea-gown that Lucy Warrender wore, but I must leave it to your imagination, reader. The pale blue and the profusion of delicate filmy lace suited Lucy Warrender's dreamy blonde beauty. Seventeen years had passed lightly over her head; perhaps the golden locks were a trifle more golden than of old, and if their luxuriance was due a little to art, the secret was only known to Lucy and her maid. Her foot, thrust into a heel-less Tunisian slipper of blue velvet embroidered with seed pearls, beat the floor impatiently. The strong sunlight showed that there really were a few tiny wrinkles, faintest lines on the ivory forehead and at the corners of the pretty mouth, whose ruddy lips were arched like Cupid's bow. But though the lips were arched, the mouth was determined, almost cruel; but the cruelty of the mouth suddenly disappeared as the door opened, and the whole face was instantly illuminated by the smile that men termed infantine and angelic, but which rivals of her own sex styled affectedly sentimental.

It was Lucy's maid who entered the room, a big burly woman, still the fine animal of yore, Fanchette-the Fanchette who had succeeded the unhappy Hepzibah, and who had nursed the boys Lucius and George.

"I have got them, mademoiselle," she said in French, as she smoothed out a little heap of blue bank notes; "seven thousand francs as usual; and a brave pair of earrings too, to produce that from the harpies of the Mont de Piété at Nice. The employé made me the usual compliment, mademoiselle, and as he paid me the money he declared that the pair of single stones were the most beautiful he had ever seen. The rascal took care not to say it till we had made our bargain. Ciel, I trust mademoiselle will be en veine to-night, for I shan't feel easy till I see the stones sparkling again in mademoiselle's ears."

Lucy counted the notes, she dismissed the bonne, and then she soliloquized; not in so many words, as do heroines of melodrama, but this is what she said to herself, at all events the substance of it:

"I am sick of life, I am sick of planning and plotting and being looked upon as an adventuress. I am sick of being bowed to and spoken to by people who in the old time would not have presumed to beg for an introduction. I am getting déclassée. Perhaps one doesn't feel it so much here, for we are pretty well all adventurers more or less, here in the gambler's paradise, though some of us have plenty of money." Miss Warrender stood before the smouldering hearth and gazed with stern scrutiny at her own features in the mirror. "Yes," she soliloquized, "Georgie, though she is two years older than I am, has certainly worn the better of the two; she is lovely Mrs. Haggard still. And what am I? A hag, a dreadful grinning hag, a woman to be flirted with, danced with and supped with, a woman who has ceased to be respected. Why, that dreadful old Baron Teufelsdroch called me his belle petite the other day, and I have no champion now to take the old sinner by the throat and shake the life out of him."

Lucy sank into the only comfortable chair in the room, and then she did a dreadful thing. Dreadful to our minds, dear reader, for we are respectable and insular and we have our prejudices, our glorious insular prejudices. We can sympathize with "The Sorrows of Werther," we can even shed tears perhaps over the bread-and-butter cutting Charlotte, but were Charlotte to light a cigarette! Oh horror-fie-for shame-pschutt: the lady would at once be outside the pale of respectability, totally unworthy of our love and sympathy; worse still, to our minds she would cease to be even good-looking or to deserve the lovely and romantic name of Charlotte at all. One can't tell why it is so: the preternaturally hideous heroes of our fashionable lady novelists seek consolation in the strongest and most expensive cigars or in rough cut cavendish. Dirk Hatteraick even places a quid of pigtail in his mouth, and that bold buccaneer and the heroes of the lady novelists still remain dear delightful darlings, and bright eyes grow dim over their hairbreadth escapes, their struggles and their woes. Spare then a little of your sympathy for poor Lucy Warrender, that bankrupt rake, as she coiled herself up in the big easy chair and took from her pocket a tiny silver case and extracted a Laferme cigarette. Remember, reader, that Fanchette, you, and I, are the only accomplices of her guilty weakness. She took an ember from the fire with the tongs and lighted the little cylinder, and as she did so her features once more, as of old, became lighted up with the soft placid smile of girlish enjoyment, as the angel face became surrounded by a halo of tobacco smoke. Why shouldn't poor Lucy seek consolation as did the other villains and heroes of romance? It evidently wasn't the first cigarette by many that Lucy had smoked, for she inhaled the smoke scientifically and ejected it from her nostrils like an habituée.

Nemesis sooner or later finds the sinner out, and when we called Lucy Warrender a bankrupt rake it was done advisedly, for Miss Warrender had come to the end of her tether. The earrings which she had pawned-a sordid act, for they had been a love-token, the souvenir of a reckless, wicked and unhappy attachment-were literally the lady's last stake. She took the little roll of notes from her pocket and methodically counted them once more.

"So this is the end of it all," said Lucy to herself; "a few dirty pieces of paper and that is all. And if I lose them all to-night as something tells me is but too likely, then I must be a beggar, and must stretch out my hands for alms-or bid good-bye to all the bright sunshine and the happy, pleasant memories," and she laughed a hard bitter little laugh. "But why should I be sorry to go? Happiness is not for such girls as I have been. My secret has been well kept, so far, but will it be a secret long? For I can't afford to pay for silence now. If I land a heavy stake, or break the bank, all will be well: if not, I must go where I hope to find forgetfulness. But what if there should be no forgetfulness beyond the grave?" As her thoughts dwelt on the words she shuddered. "The cold, cruel, silent grave. Silent! Yes, that was something-and after-if there be an after." And then the thought of the happy girlish days at The Warren came back to her. The remembrance of the stupid faithful people she had known, and liked, and laughed at, and then the dreadful time at the Villa Lambert and what followed; and then her own triumphantly-successful trick-successful, perhaps, from the very simplicity of its audacity; and then her weary worthless after-life, with its sickening treadmill round of so-called gaiety and amusement. And then the child; why had he not died? It was for no love of her child that, by her agency, young Lucius had been foisted into the position of Haggard's heir. She had thought no further than to hide her shame, and in doing it she had unwittingly disinherited her own cousin's child. Why had Lucius not died?

Lucy's melancholy meditations were disturbed by the entrance of Fanchette, who handed her mistress a letter and left the room as silently as she had entered it. Lucy recognized the hand, and knew full well what the letter would certainly contain. She had guessed aright. Another demand for money from the man Capt. The words were respectful enough, there was no threat, but Lucy Warrender understood what it meant-the money or exposure.

A thousand pounds! As well might the daughters of Danaus try to fill their sieves with water, as Lucy Warrender attempt to satisfy the insatiable greed of the remorseless Capt. Miss Warrender placed the letter in the fire, and saw it consumed to ashes.

"Unless I win heavily," she thought, "you will not be gratified, Maurice Capt. Then, I suppose, you will try your master, but I fancy you will have a bad quarter of an hour with him." The thought gave her evident pleasure; it even made her smile.

And then she darkened the room, and flinging herself upon the sofa lay down to sleep away the hot afternoon till it should be time for dinner and the subsequent roulette.

Eight o'clock saw Miss Warrender in a charming toilette of electric blue. The little bonnet with its short curling feathers did not hide the great wavy masses of golden hair; the little cape with its fur trimming, and the tiny muff, even the gloves and the boots, were of the same colour. As Lucy Warrender entered the Rooms she smiled, and she talked with several of her acquaintances. That hoary old sinner, General Pepper, C.B., bowed profoundly to her, and paid her his old-fashioned compliment.

"Dayvilish pretty little woman," he remarked to his friend Colonel Spurbox, late of the Carabineers; "knew her years ago in Rome. Wears well and don't look her age. Those little plump fair women never do. Gad, she's not got her earrings on; sent them to her uncle's, I suppose. She'll go for the bank, Spurbox, to-night. Plucky little devil. I hope she'll win."

The eyes of the two warriors gazed after the retreating maid with sympathetic admiration.

"Crisp little thing, eh?" continued the general.

"Monstrous," echoed his comrade, with ready acquiescence. "Let's go and drink her health, and then we'll go into the thick of it and see how she gets on."

The two old bucks ambled off to drink Lucy Warrender's health; they wished her well. Much good may it do her.

As Miss Warrender walked towards the great room where the worshippers of the Goddess Fortune most do congregate, the big suisses, in their handsome liveries and chains of office, bowed obsequiously; they all knew her as an habituée and a constant customer of the tables. When she reached the roulette table itself, that veteran diplomatist, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, the Duc de la Houspignolle, offered to vacate his chair, with many a protestation and a succession of courteous bows.

"I have been unlucky, dear Mademoiselle Warrender; Fortune has frowned on me, but now I am far happier, for I exchange her frowns for the smiles of Venus."

"I won't take your chair, duke," said Lucy. "I may lean upon it, and try to be your Mascotte and to bring you luck."

But somehow or other, whether the pretty Englishwoman's presence upset the old gambler's calculations or not I cannot tell, but he lost, and in a quarter of an hour rose from his seat.

"Revenge me on the Philistine, dear lady, if you can," said the old man, "for I am décavé-but don't take my unlucky chair, I pray you. You will?" he continued in astonishment. "Well, if you will you must; at all events take my card, it may help you," and he handed her the little card with the big black-headed pin, by means of which the experienced players mark and register the exact result of each successive coup.

Lucy Warrender took the chair with a smile, and laughed gaily, as with the card she received a little tender squeeze from the wicked old hand, and then she sat down with a full determination, as the Americans put it, "to plank down her bottom dollar." Lucy Warrender was sitting next to the croupier. She handed him one of her thousand-franc notes and he gave her in exchange a little rouleau, neatly sealed at both ends, containing the equivalent in gold. For nearly three-quarters of an hour Miss Warrender confined herself to stakes of one or two Napoleons at a time, which she pushed out before the little glittering pile in front of her, and which were placed upon the desired square with wonderful rapidity by the obsequious croupier. It is a curious fact that your croupier, that well-paid but honest official, for some mysterious reason or other always mentally identifies himself with the bank; it gives him absolute pleasure to rake in the winnings, and he feels some strange vicarious twinge of agony when he commences the process of paying out. But whenever Miss Warrender won, this particular croupier pushed her gains towards her with a little smile, and strange to say didn't seem to feel it in the least. And now Lucy looked at her card. For twenty-seven coups she had placed a single Napoleon upon the number twenty-seven. Of course, at roulette, some number or zero itself is bound to come up every time, but number twenty-seven was invariably unlucky. Lucy Warrender's left hand was thrust into the pocket of her dress; it clutched, as an Ashantee warrior clutches his fetish, the key of her room at the Hotel de Russie, and from the key hung its little brass label-it was number twenty-seven. For three-quarters of an hour then, and for twenty-seven coups, Miss Warrender had pursued her Will-o'-the-Wisp; the one or two Napoleons that she staked each time was mere child's play to her, for as we know she was in the habit of gambling heavily. At the twenty-eighth coup Miss Warrender changed the amount of her stake upon the unfortunate number; for the twenty-franc piece she substituted a hundred-franc note and handed it to the croupier; he thrust it into the great glass and metal cash-box at his side and pushed five Napoleons on to the square marked twenty-seven. "Messieurs, le jeu est fait. Rien ne va plus," said the bald-headed high priest of the table, who sat exactly opposite the gentleman with the rake, who had so deftly carried out Miss Warrender's directions. He seized the big plated handle, gave it the necessary twirl as he said the words, and tossed the little ball of fate, with the usual professional spin, upon the rapidly-revolving disc. Round flew the wheel of fortune, and round flew the ball, making little irregular jumps. As the whirling disc revolves less rapidly, every eye is fixed upon the ball. The wheel is about to stop. The ball jumps into 15, thence into 17. The wheel has almost stopped; the ball will surely rest in No. 23. No, it has not quite stopped, it goes a little further yet. Heads are craned forward. Lucy Warrender clutches the key of her bedroom tighter than ever. And then the bald-headed high priest of Baal calls out in the regulation monotone, "Vingt-sept. Rouge Impair et Passe!" Rhadamanthus, Minos and ?acus stretch out their rakes, and gold, notes, and fat five-franc pieces, which have been staked by the unhappy backers of black, even, the zero and the various numbers (all but twenty-seven, lucky twenty-seven) are swept away in an instant. Then the croupiers cover the stakes of the lucky backers of odd and red with their equivalents; nothing remains on the table now but fortunate Lucy's five Napoleons. The croupier at her side gives it the little professional knock with his rake, sweeps the five Napoleons back towards Miss Warrender, and counts out to her from his cash-box, with unerring rapidity, the sum of three thousand five hundred francs in notes. There is a little hum of applause. "Faites vos jeux, messieurs." Down rained the notes, the Napoleons, the British sovereigns and the five-franc pieces, and the game continues with monotonous regularity.

For three mortal hours Lucy Warrender clutched her hotel key, and played with varying success. At one time there was quite a little heap of notes and gold in front of her, upon which she discreetly laid her fan. She had steadily backed the number twenty-seven for varying but ever increasing amounts. The number twenty-seven had come up no less than eight times and had been the cause of Miss Warrender's winning heavily. The keenest eye at that time could have detected no wrinkle on Lucy's lovely girlish face. But fortune after a while ceased to favour her; the crowd of admiring onlookers, "the gallery," that had stood behind her chair attracted by her successes gradually dwindled, and the heap of gold and notes in front of her slowly but surely took unto themselves wings and flew away. But the gouty old Frenchman, the Duc de la Houspignolle, faithful knight that he was, still stood behind her chair. Old Pepper and the veteran Colonel Spurbox, of the Carabineers, still leered at her, in mingled pity and admiration, from the other side of the great roulette table. Lucy Warrender still clutched her key, and still backed fatal number twenty-seven; her mouth was dry and parched as she took out her last thousand-franc note, and, it not being permitted to stake that sum at roulette, she took it to the Trente et Quarante table, and lost it at a single coup.

The lady had played her last stake and lost it. She rose to leave.

"Let me be your banker, dear Miss Warrender," whispered the aged Mephistopheles who stood behind her chair.

"No, duke, not that. I haven't quite sunk to that yet, you know."

"Always farouche, dear Miss Warrender, but I apologize," he continued as he gave her his arm.

Perhaps the little hand that rested on it trembled slightly, but Lucy was a Warrender, and plucky; she nodded and bowed in every direction; she smiled and simpered as sweetly as of yore; she sat in the great restaurant at one of the little marble tables and sucked an orangeade glacée through two straws, and then the Duc de la Houspignolle escorted her back to the Hotel de Russie with all respect, where Fanchette anxiously awaited her arrival.

Fanchette didn't ask her mistress how she had prospered, for her gesture as she flaccidly dropped into her lounge-chair told the woman all she wished to know.

"You can go, Fanchette," said Lucy; "if I want anything I'll touch the hand-bell."

The woman yawned, courtesied and departed.

Lucy Warrender opened her writing-case and commenced an affectionate letter to her uncle. In it she said incidentally:

"There are quite a number of people here that we know. The old Duc de la Houspignolle, still quite the old beau; and that dreadful old General Pepper, the man we met at Rome, and who was mixed up in Reginald's affair with poor Barbiche, and Colonel Spurbox. They talk of making up a party to run across to Nice. I think of joining them. If we go we shall leave the day after to-morrow; everything of course depends upon the weather. I--"

Here Lucy Warrender deliberately let her pen fall upon the paper. Then she got up, looked at herself in the glass and frowned; and then she did a thing she hadn't done for years. She knelt down at her bed-side and said her prayer to heaven, the very prayer she had been accustomed to say as a little child upon her nurse's lap. Then she took a printed receipt of the Mont de Piété for a pair of brilliant solitaire earrings, and burnt it in the flame of the candle.

"No one will miss me," she muttered to herself, "no one, save Maurice Capt, for I have been an income to him, and Georgie, perhaps. Poor Georgie!" she added with a sigh. She never even thought of Lucius; she knew full well that even had the youth known she was his mother, he would assuredly not have missed her.

"I wonder whether the old duke will be there," she continued to herself; "all the English are sure to come. We never miss a funeral; it's one of our sad pleasures," she added with a hollow laugh. Then she took from her dressing-case a dark blue fluted medicine bottle; it was labelled, "The sedative mixture, a teaspoonful for a dose at bedtime. POISON." The last word had a little special red label all to itself. The bottle was nearly full. Miss Warrender deliberately poured out seven-eighths of its contents into a tumbler, then she recorked the bottle, replaced it in her dressing-case and swallowed the contents of the tumbler at a draught, and then carefully and deliberately washed the glass and dried it with the towel. Then she sat herself down in the lounge-chair. In ten minutes she dozed; she soon slept peacefully and calmly. In half-an-hour she had ceased to exist.

"On the 23rd inst., at the Hotel de Russie, Monte Carlo, Lucy, the only daughter of the late Colonel George Warrender, of the H. E. I. C. Service, aged 35, suddenly of heart-disease."

This was the first intimation to Lucy Warrender's friends in London of her sudden death.

"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Charmington, now quite the old woman, "I wonder how she managed that lovely-coloured hair."

* * *

Mrs. Haggard and her husband, both in deep mourning, sat in the special boudoir at Walls End Castle which had been furnished and set apart for his grand-nephew's wife on her first arrival years ago by old Lord Pit Town. Haggard looked pale and weary, and well he might, for he had gone straight to Monte Carlo and had come straight back, stopping only forty-eight hours there, just time enough to lay Lucy Warrender in her grave. He had not gone alone; at his wife's insistance he had taken the young Lucius with him.

He had been astonished at the determined manner in which Georgie pressed this arrangement upon him; he yielded, though with a bad grace. When he reached the Hotel de Russie, both he and Lucius had declined to look on the face of the dead woman. Haggard had a long interview with Fanchette, and then he called upon the Commissary of Police. The night before his mother was laid in her grave, Lucius Haggard, unknown to his companion, who was shut up in his room writing, visited the Rooms, won a couple of thousand francs, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

The next day the two men stood by the side of the shallow grave; graves are shallow in Monaco, for the ground is very rocky. A wandering English clergyman, of more than doubtful reputation, gabbled through the service for the burial of the dead. The stones and bits of rock rattled upon the coffin with a hollow sound, for the grave-digger didn't trouble himself much about the feelings of the relatives of the foreign heretic.

"I think my aunt Lucy went off tremendously in the last year," said young Lucius to his companion as they left the cemetery.

"Let her rest, boy, let her rest," was all the answer he got.

There was a sort of grey look of horror about Haggard's face, that the boy put down to grief for the departed. He was a hard-hearted youth, and was frankly surprised that Haggard showed any feeling at all.

The husband and wife, as we have said, sat in Georgie's boudoir. This was what passed between them.

"Your cousin seems to have made a nice mess of it," said Haggard. "Why she was penniless."

"Well, that wouldn't much matter, Reginald; she could have written to Coutts' for more."

"Gad, they write me that she drew out the last farthing she had in the world two months ago. And that woman Fanchette, who is a very bad lot indeed, or I'm very much, mistaken, told me she pawned her earrings the day before she-died."

Georgie nodded. "I remember them, a pair of large single-stone earrings. I fancy she must have bought them when she first came into her property. I saw them quite by chance last summer, for the first time; and when I admired them, she said that she had had them for years, that they had been her first folly and had cost her dear."

"Well, here they are at any rate," said Haggard; "she pawned them for seven thousand francs, and I redeemed them after a lot of bother. And that's all that remains. She had spent or gambled away every farthing of the rest. I don't know whether I ought to tell you, Georgie," he continued in a softer tone.

"Tell me, Reginald, tell me what? Did you know?" and the light of love came back into Georgie Haggard's eyes, as she thought that perhaps her careless heartless husband had, from a wish to shield her cousin's honour, silently and deliberately allowed poor Lucy's bastard child to be fathered upon him. But the light quickly faded, and the eyes were suffused with tears, as her husband answered coarsely:

"Did I know what? I know this-she poisoned herself, there's not a doubt of that."

And then, without the slightest attempt to soften the ghastly details, he brutally told his wife the particulars of her cousin's end.

"They manage these things much better there than here," he said. "Twelve Tom Fools are not called upon to sit in one's dining room and give their opinion. The Commissary of Police had the whole matter cut and dried. I saw the official doctor too-a hungry fellow that. Of course I had to bribe the pair of them. Lucy Warrender poisoned herself, Georgie. She did it artfully enough, with chloral. Why, they showed me the bottle; she had swallowed enough to kill half-a-dozen women. What a fool she was, when one comes to think of it! Why, she could have married well any number of times, if she'd liked; she could have had Spunyarn years and years ago, if she had chosen to lift her finger. What a fool she was!"

Yes, that was her epitaph: "What a fool she was!" You couldn't have put it more tersely and more truly, Reginald Haggard. What a thoughtless wicked fool she had been; she had wrecked her own life and her cousin's by her wicked folly. "What a fool she was!"

I verily believe that if Haggard had shown one spark of feeling in the matter of poor Lucy's death, his wife would have spoken, after a silence of twenty years; but his last words had checked the impulse, and Georgie merely nodded, while the tears rolled down her cheeks, as she silently accepted the justice of her husband's verdict.

As she sat and pondered over her cousin's sorry ending, she felt that the least she could do for the dead girl was still to jealously guard her miserable secret.

While the elders were talking, the two young men were walking in the great avenue that for nearly half a mile runs from the principal entrance of the park to the big hall door of Walls End Castle. Lucius had much to tell; he was full of the journey, and he went over all the details of the funeral to the younger man.

"Battling good place, that Hotel de Russie; they gave us an uncommonly good dinner, and ortolans. I didn't think much of them, but the governor was very enthusiastic, and ordered them again for breakfast. By Jove! George," continued the young fellow, "he's so fond of them that I believe if mother, or even I, were to die to-morrow, the governor would order ortolans for breakfast if he could get them. I say, George," he added, "I'm in funds, and I don't mind doing the generous thing, if you like. I know you're hard up-beastly hard up-you always are. I'll make you a present of a pony, George."

Young George Haggard smiled, and took the five-and-twenty pounds, in crisp bank notes, which his father's heir produced from his waistcoat pocket. "I'll take it as a loan, Lucius," he said with a little laugh, "to be repaid when I become Lord Chancellor."

"All right, my boy," said the other. "Now if you can keep a secret, I'll tell you how I got it." And then he went off into a long description of the great Temple of Fortune on the shores of the Mediterranean. How he had retired early, on the plea of fatigue; how he had escaped undiscovered to the Rooms; how he had backed his luck and won his money. "Eighty pounds wasn't bad for a first attempt, you know," he said. "I saw old Pepper," he continued, "in the thick of it; but I had to keep dark, you know, for I shouldn't have cared for the old boy to see me there."

George still held his brother's welcome present in his hand, and the boy twisted the notes nervously in his fingers. He hesitated, but not for long.

"Don't be offended, Lucius," he said; "I think I'd rather not take it, if you don't mind."

"As you please, my boy," said the other, holding out his hand willingly enough. "As they say in the schools, Non olet."

"It does to me, Lucius-it does to me."

The young men continued their walk up and down the great aisle of old beech trees, and Lucius returned to his ecstatic description of the scene in the Halls of Dazzling Delight; but I don't think the other young fellow heard him, for he was thinking of the dead woman who was sleeping in her lonely grave.

Lucky Lucy! dead a week, and you have two human beings who still mourn your loss.

"I always thought you were a fool, George; but you really are a bigger fool than even I ever took you to be. I actually hand you five-and-twenty pounds, which you decline with thanks. I don't understand you, George. You neglect your opportunities. Why don't you make up to the old man, or cultivate a taste for art, as I do; I mean to make art pay, my boy."

"Well, you see, Lucius, it might be awkward if his lordship found me out. I'm afraid I find more pleasure in walking up and down this big avenue and staring up at the rooks, than in spending my time in the Pit Town galleries."

"Oh! I see; Child of Nature, and all that sort of thing. Why don't you go in for being a poet, George? It's the only real business that I know of suited for a thorough-paced fool, though as a rule it don't pay."

"Simply because I'm not a humbug, my boy."

"You might do a good deal with a rhyming dictionary, you know; particularly if you let your hair grow."

"I don't think there's much poetry about me, Lucius. I like the air, and the light, and the green leaves, and those black chaps who hop about from branch to branch, and who look like a lot of disreputable parsons, all preaching at once about nothing at all."

"Oh, I see, you admire the beauties of nature. Now I look upon this old avenue from quite another standpoint. Sooner or later it'll be mine, and all the rest of the pomps and vanities too, I suppose-the plate and the pictures, and the title, George. Yes, there's something in a title. But they're a precious long while coming."

"Don't be a brute, Lucius," was all his brother replied.

While the two young fellows carelessly talked and smoked in the great avenue, old Lord Pit Town sat in his study and held a momentous conversation with Georgie's husband. Reginald Haggard stood before the fire looking exceedingly uncomfortable.

"I wish you'd be candid with me, Haggard. Was there any informality about your marriage with Georgina?"

"Good gracious, no. What makes your lordship hint at such a thing?"

"That I will explain to you directly. In the meantime answer me honestly; don't forget that as the head of the family I stand in the position of a father to you. Anything you may say to me will of course be between ourselves. Can you assure me, as between gentlemen, that you made no previous marriage? Was there any such entanglement in America?"

"It seems to me that your lordship is asking me to say that I am an unmitigated villain. Still, to satisfy you as the head of the family, I give you my word that nothing of the sort ever occurred. Of course like most young fellows I have made a fool of myself with dozens of women, or rather perhaps they made a fool of me. I sighed and dangled, perhaps I even hinted at marriage. Doubtless I was a young idiot, like most young fellows of my age, but my peculiar form of idiotcy never developed itself in a matrimonial direction."

"I'm uncommonly glad to hear it, Reginald, for I have been uncomfortable for a day or two, and now that my mind is at rest, you shall see what caused my apparently indiscreet questions."

The old lord opened a despatch-box which lay upon his writing-table, and taking from it a letter, handed the document to his heir. Haggard seated himself, opened the letter, and read it carefully through. It was a strangely written manuscript on ordinary thick note-paper. If the writer had intended to prevent any attempt at identification, he had thoroughly succeeded. The precaution he had taken was simple, but sufficiently ingenious. Your ordinary anonymous letter writer is content to slope his writing the wrong way, or if very acute he uses his left hand; but the expert, if placed upon his trail, generally succeeds in detecting some peculiarity sufficient to identify him. The writer of the letter which Lord Pit Town handed to Haggard was evidently a man of originality, for the letter and its address were not written in a running hand, but in carelessly printed Roman capitals.

As Haggard perused the letter his brow grew black as night, but when he had ended it, he tossed it with a contemptuous laugh upon the table.

Here is the letter verbatim:

"MY LORD,

"I ADDRESS YOU TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I AM POSSESSED OF INFORMATION WHICH WILL ENABLE ME, SHOULD I FEEL SO DISPOSED, TO ENTIRELY ALTER THE SUCCESSION TO YOUR TITLE AND TO UPSET ANY DISTRIBUTION OF YOUR PROPERTY THAT YOU MAY MAKE. I AM PREPARED TO SELL TO YOU THE INFORMATION FOR THE SUM OF ￡5000. I MAKE YOUR LORDSHIP THE FIRST OFFER, SIMPLY BECAUSE I THINK THAT YOU WILL AT ONCE SEE THE WISDOM OF ACCEPTING IT. SHOULD YOU DECIDE NOT TO DO SO, I SHALL STILL GET MY PRICE, THOUGH I MAY HAVE TO WAIT TILL YOUR LORDSHIP'S DEATH. LITIGATION WILL, OF COURSE, ENSUE, AND A DISGRACEFUL SCANDAL WILL BECOME COMMON PROPERTY. SHOULD YOUR LORDSHIP FEEL DISPOSED TO LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO TELL, A LINE ADDRESSED TO 193B, BROWN'S NEWS ROOMS, CHEAPSIDE, WILL BE SUFFICIENT. THE FACT OF MY NOT ASKING FOR PAYMENT FOR MY INFORMATION UNTIL I HAVE GIVEN IT SHOULD BE TO YOUR LORDSHIP A SUFFICIENT GUARANTEE OF ITS GENUINENESS."

"What can the fellow mean?" said the old lord. "Can Hetton have contracted a secret marriage?"

Haggard shook his head. "It's probably a mere vulgar trick to obtain money," said he. "Shall you see the fellow?"

"It would, perhaps, be better that you saw him, Reginald; you are as much concerned as I am, nay more so. Make an appointment to see the man in town. I will write to him, and if the secret he alludes to be genuine it is cheap at the money, if it were only to prevent expensive litigation and the worse horror that he hints at-the dragging of our name through the mire."

So it was arranged. A letter was dispatched to 193 B, making an appointment for the astute writer of the letter to see Mr. Reginald Haggard upon a certain day at the old lord's house in Grosvenor Square. Reginald Haggard sat for a whole hour waiting in vain. Nobody came to him with a mysterious communication, and at the end of a week both he and the old lord had dismissed the matter from their minds as an impudent and stupid hoax.

To the mind of the shrewd reader the name of the writer of the anonymous letter is no mystery. Mr. Maurice Capt had been seriously disappointed when, for the first time in his life, one of his applications to Lucy Warrender had been unsuccessful. But Lucy Warrender was now beyond his reach. Capt felt aggrieved; he considered that his demands upon Miss Warrender had been excessively moderate, and he felt a sort of pride in the fact that he had kept her secret so long and so cheaply. But now Lucy Warrender was dead, and the contract between Capt and the lady at an end. Mr. Capt, when he wrote his rather ambiguous anonymous communication to the old lord, had thought the matter well out; he had made up his mind not to reveal the nature of what he had to tell until he had the old lord's promise to let him have the sum he demanded. For Mr. Capt well knew that it is possible to provide even against extraordinary contingencies; he knew that there were such things as family treaties, and he knew that his threat, if he could only get Lord Pit Town to believe in its genuineness, would be only terrible to the old man by its rendering him practically incapable of disposing of his property, and leaving the very succession to his title in doubt. Mr. Capt was sharp enough to know that if once he had the old lord's promise, the five thousand pounds was as good as paid. But Mr. Capt had a holy horror of two things. The one, which he dreaded with a natural terror of the unknown, was the criminal law of England; the other was a desperate fear of the wrath of big Reginald Haggard. For once his master had lost his temper with the valet. It was nearly twenty years ago now since Reginald Haggard, in a moment of indignation, had literally thrashed Mr. Capt within an inch of his life, and though it was twenty years ago Mr. Capt's bones still ached with the remembrance of that tremendous beating. So that the suggested interview with Haggard entirely upset all the valet's well-arranged plans. Could he but have had a private conversation with the old lord, and the required promise, he felt that he would have proved his case up to the hilt, and thus have obtained what he looked upon as the honest reward of his long silence. But though a clever man, Mr. Capt was a coward, and he feared to face the fury of Lord Pit Town's heir.

The valet repeatedly turned the matter over in his mind, and found it a very complicated question. Of course, the one person in the world to whom the secret was most valuable was young George Haggard. The facts had but to be published to the world and George would jump at once from the precarious position of a younger son into that of the direct heir to an earldom and the property of a man of enormous wealth, while as for Lucius, he would become but the nameless byblow of old Warrender's niece. But there were several disturbing influences to Mr. Capt's calculations. To neither of the young men could he sell his secret for money down. This was a very serious consideration indeed. As for George, he might decline to do business at all, from loyalty to his mother; while as for Lucius, Mr. Capt well knew that it was impossible to trust him. The valet at length determined that he would sound young George Haggard upon the matter, and having made up his mind, proceeded to do so at the first opportunity.

Mr. Capt had not long to wait, for he encountered the young fellow in one of his solitary rambles in the park, and seeing that they were secure from interruption, plunged at once in medias res.

Young George Haggard was seated upon a stile meditatively gazing upon the landscape, when he was roused by a slight cough behind him, which proceeded from his father's discreet body servant.

"Halloa! Capt," said the youth good-naturedly; "enjoying the beauties of nature?"

"Yes, Mr. George; one can't well help it in such a lovely place as this."

"I suppose ordinary people like you and I, Capt, don't appreciate it as we ought. That, as my brother tells me, requires culture. He would doubtless see more in it than we do, being a man of culture, as he is, you know."

"Perhaps the old place, sir, may look all the pleasanter to him, for in the ordinary course of things, you see, sir, he must come into it some day or other. That must be a very pleasant thought, sir," added the valet after a pause.

"Well, I'm not so sure about that, you know; there are lots of responsibilities, you see," and the young man proceeded to fill his pipe philosophically.

"You may come into it yourself, sir, one of these days, who knows?" said the valet in a carneying tone.

Young George Haggard started, and stared at Mr. Capt, who seemed to him to have slightly forgotten himself.

"Stranger things than that have happened, sir," continued the Swiss.

"Well, you see, my man, as my father and Mr. Lucius-to say nothing of his lordship-would both have to go to the wall first, it doesn't seem a likely contingency. And do you know I don't think it's quite the thing to talk about, Capt."

But the valet was not to be put down.

"Anyhow, it's a great position for so young a gentleman as Mr. Lucius," insisted the man. "Many a man has sold his soul for less than that," he continued, as he gazed admiringly at the Castle, which occupied the centre of the peacefully romantic landscape.

Young George Haggard stared at the valet in undisguised astonishment. "Fellow's been drinking," he thought; "he seems strangely impertinent, that accounts for it."

"Ah, they manage things differently, sir, in my country. It's share and share alike there. My father, sir, had seven sons, and we each of us took an equal share of his little bit of land as a matter of right."

"Well, perhaps, Capt, that's what they'll do here when England becomes a republic. But I don't think that it'll happen in my time, and I don't think I could persuade Lucius to go halves with me."

Seeing that the young man was disinclined to continue the conversation, the valet touched his hat respectfully and took himself off.

It is a highly respectable thing to be a landowner; the freeholder has many advantages, but getting rid of the property, particularly in the present day, is as a rule both difficult and expensive. Mr. Capt was like the proprietor of an Irish estate; far from being able to dispose of it at a reasonable figure, he was unable to obtain even an offer for his secret, and it was a valuable secret; but then, though a white elephant is a valuable animal, it is not an investment that most people would care to hold, and Mr. Capt's property now seemed indeed but a white elephant. Had it not been for his holy fear of his master he might have attempted to make terms with Mrs. Haggard, but his terror of Lord Pit Town's heir was extreme and had become a second nature to him.

The love of home is specially developed among the honest and economical inhabitants of Switzerland; like the Scotchmen they quit their dear native land young, in the hope of making their fortunes; but unlike the Scots they inevitably return to the Fatherland with the results of a life of industry, and this was the dream of Mr. Capt's life. Like a wise man, finding he could not get a cash purchaser, he determined, though very much against his own inclination, to make a bargain with young Lucius Haggard at the earliest opportunity; but he knew that if he trusted to the honour of Lucy Warrender's son he would be leaning upon a broken reed, and he walked back to the discharge of his duties at the Castle in a state of considerable depression.

* * *