CHAPTER XXXVI. VICTORY.
Stupefaction, terrible, absolute, fell for one moment upon Mr. Bradfield. He thought not of common thieves; it was borne in upon him at once, with irresistible force, that the theft was the work of Stelfox. Ringing the bell violently, and not waiting for it to be answered, he ran downstairs, telling the waiters, the boots, and everyone he met to “Stop that man!”
At first they did not take in the sense of this injunction, but when they did, they explained that the man, who had represented himself to be Mr. Bradfield’s servant, had just caught the train back to Wyngham. For it appeared that Stelfox had made no secret either of his own name, or of his master’s, or of his destination.
“My bag! My b—b—bag,” stammered Mr. Bradfield. “He’s a thief! he’s stolen it.”
At once a little group collected round the excited man, and the proprietor of the hotel coming forward, at once ordered the boots to run to the station and telegraph a description of the man, so that he might be stopped. For, indeed, more than one person remembered that he had gone upstairs without a bag, and returned carrying one.
But this order was scarcely given when Mr. Bradfield, turning suddenly more ghastly white than before, changed his mind and his tactics.
“No, no,” stammered he. “Don’t do that; wait a bit.”
At the same moment, a maid came running out of the bar with a note, which, she said, had been left for the gentleman by the man who called himself his servant.
Mr. Bradfield, opening the envelope with clammy fingers, read the following words:
“Sir,—I beg respectfully to say that I have taken your bag back to Wyngham House for you, as I am sure that you will want it when you return, as I hope you will do in the course of the day. I can undertake to say that a satisfactory settlement will be arrived at, if you should think proper to meet Mr. Richard Wryde and his lawyer, who will be there to meet you.—I am, sir, your obedient servant,
“James Stelfox.”
Mr. Bradfield’s head swam. The events, which he had been leading so beautifully up to this moment, had turned upon him, overwhelmed him, and were now carrying him away in their rush. A few moments’ reflection convinced him that he must now go with the tide.
While still looking at the note he recovered himself, and explaining hurriedly that he had made a mistake, and that it was all right, he paid his bill, walked to the station, and inquired the time of the next train to Wyngham.
Mr. Bradfield had been beaten at his own game of “bluff.” For undoubtedly, as he had said to Stelfox, the case against him, strong though it was, would have taken time and money in abundance to prove. In the meanwhile, if he had not lost nerve at the last, he could have turned the tables on Stelfox by accusing that astute person of stealing his bag.
But the contents of that bag were so incriminating, that he decided that any arrangement would now be better than coming into court.
It was rather startling, however, for the poor man to find, on alighting at Wyngham Station, the persistent and wily Stelfox waiting on the platform to meet him. Of course, the new master saluted the old master as respectfully as ever.
“I thought you would be coming by this train, sir,” said he, “so I took the liberty of telling Williams to bring the phaeton round. It’s waiting outside, sir.”
Mr. Bradfield was not grateful for this attention. He nodded, strode sullenly through the station, and drove home at a rapid pace. He wanted to get the whole business over as speedily as possible. Stelfox followed in a cab.
Wyngham House looked curiously different in his eyes from the mansion he had left, as he then supposed, for ever, on the previous night. And yet nothing about it was changed; it was the eye which looked upon it which had undergone a transformation. The footman who let him in knew something, perhaps, but he was careful to look as if he did not, this being an art in which all well-bred servants are proficient. But the man’s first words sent a shudder down John Bradfield’s back.
“Mr. Wryde is in the drawing-room, sir.”
The change of name spoke volumes to begin with. “Mr. Richard” was now “Mr. Wryde.”
John went straight to the drawing-room, and walked in with a sullen face. His day was over, but he could “die game.” He found not only his late ward, but Mrs. Abercarne, her daughter, and a gentleman of unmistakably legal aspect. There was a little flutter on his entrance, but he at once perceived matters were to be made as pleasant for him as the circumstances allowed. Thus, Richard came forward, and although he did not shake hands with him, he introduced Mr. Reynolds, “of the firm of Reynolds and Parkinson,” in a tone less cold, less hostile than that he had assumed on the preceding day.
And yet in the meantime Richard had become aware, through Marrable, who, on the announcement of Bradfield’s arrival, had tried to hide himself behind the window-curtains, of the monstrous breach of trust by which John Bradfield the pauper had become John Bradfield the millionaire, at his expense. The reason for this change in demeanour was simple enough; the human mind admires vastness, it is easily impressed, nay, abashed by undertakings carried on with magnificence, with completeness. If a man steals our watch, or a purse containing sixpence, we seize him, and hold him until a policeman comes up; if he cheats us out of a thousand pounds by inducing us to take shares in a worthless company, we proceed against him respectfully by lawsuit, which may end in our discomfiture instead of his. So that Richard, overwhelmed by the greatness of the crime, felt almost more bewildered than indignant in the presence of the criminal.
John Bradfield had the wit to recognise this, and it cleared the way to an understanding. He proceeded to assure both the lawyer and his client that he had only held Gilbert Wryde’s money in trust, and had used it in the belief that Richard was insane. Now, finding that he had been mistaken, he was delighted to hand over to the young man the fortune of which he had been trustee, and should never cease to regret the unhappy error by which Richard had been kept out of his property so long.
All this both the lawyer and his client affected to hear and believe without question, so that matters went on quite amiably and smoothly, and the transfer of the property from the usurper to the owner was quietly arranged when the ladies and Marrable, all of whom had greeted John with much constraint, had left the three gentlemen by themselves.
“May I ask, Mr. Bradfield,” asked Dick, during a pause for the lawyer to make some notes of the arrangement proposed, “whether your own private fortune is large enough to enable you to live in the style you’ve been accustomed to? Or have you only kept up this large establishment on my account?”
He had found this delicate question somewhat difficult to frame, and he had not quite succeeded in avoiding a suspicion of sarcasm. But Mr. Bradfield answered at once that his private fortune was not adequate to stand such a strain.
“You will oblige me, then,” went on Dick, with very cold courtesy, “by arranging with Mr. Reynolds the income which you would wish to have paid to you”—he paused a little before he went on with some emphasis—“in consideration, not of your past, but of your present services.”
John Bradfield winced; but he submitted like a lamb to be awarded a handsome pension in consideration of the fact that he had had to disgorge the remains of the property he had stolen.
As soon as they decently could, both Mr. Reynolds and Richard left him. When they were in the hall, lawyer and client looked at each other.
“Well,” said Mr. Reynolds, as he prepared to leave the house in company with Dick, “I’ve met some rogues in my time, but——”
“I prefer to think,” said Dick, gravely, “that he has tried so long to believe that I was insane that the forced belief has injured his own brain.”
“Very kind of you to put it like that. You forgive him then?”
The answer came, short and sharp:
“No. You can’t forgive the man who has robbed you of seventeen years of life, and youth, and hope. If I had forgiven him, I should not have insulted the cur by offering him a pension.”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t understand the world, Mr. Wryde. Nobody minds such an insult as that.”
“It’s a satisfaction to me, at all events,” answered Richard, simply.
But he would not have been so magnanimous if he had not known that Chris was waiting to meet him in the meadow by the barn.
Later in the day Mr. Bradfield came across Stelfox, who was enjoying the victory he had been the means of bringing about too greatly to leave the scene of it with undue haste. His late master, who had recovered his spirits a little, addressed him, with some abruptness, in the following manner:
“Stelfox, you’re a scoundrel.”
“Thank you, sir,” answered the man as quietly as ever. “If I hadn’t been a bit of a rogue myself,” he went on thoughtfully, “perhaps, sir, I shouldn’t have been so successful in bringing another rogue to book.”
For one moment Mr. Bradfield seemed disposed to kick him, but he refrained, and laughed instead, with some constraint, however. The remark had to be treated as a joke, though it could not be made to pass for a palatable one.
“Now, why,” pursued he, with an appearance of sincere regret, “did you not either let me know that you believed Mr. Richard to be recovering, or else let him escape much sooner than you did?”
“Well, sir,” he answered, not thinking it necessary to notice the first question, and proceeding straight to the consideration of the second, “when I first had my suspicions, the poor young gentleman had grown into such a savage that, if I had let him out, people would have believed that he was insane. I had to do my best to fit him for the world before I let him out into it. And I shouldn’t have succeeded so well as I did but for Miss Abercarne’s coming. That gave him just the stimulus he wanted, and after that it was easy to do what I liked with him. Why, sir, he’d forgotten how to speak when I first took him in hand, and I had to teach him as well as I could by the movement of the lips first, until bit by bit it came back to him.”
John Bradfield whistled softly.
“Then I d——d well wish you’d left it alone!” he murmured softly, as he walked away.
There was consternation among the Graham-Shutes when the evil rumour reached their ears that “dear cousin John” had got into trouble of some sort which involved heavy pecuniary loss, and the breaking up the establishment at Wyngham House. It came at such an awkward moment, too, just when Mrs. Graham-Shute had contemplated borrowing the use of the grounds for a garden-party which was to break the record of all her previous entertainments.
So, in despair, she had to borrow the common garden in one of the little squares in the town to give an open-air reception, which, at least, had the merit of attracting a great deal of attention. It was, indeed, the “sensation of the season” among the little boys and girls and the fisher-lads and hawkers of the population, who assembled in crowds, climbing up the railings from the outside, and occasionally shying well-directed pebbles right into the strawberries and cream which the guests were enjoying as well as they could in the circumstances. So that Mrs. Graham-Shute’s usual neglect to provide sufficient amusement for her guests was amply compensated for by the necessity of perpetual rushes on the part of the gentlemen of the party to the railings, to disperse the jibing hordes from the courts and alleys of the town.
One other incident gave an unusual zest to the proceedings; this was the appearance of Chris Abercarne, no longer in the character of the “housekeeper’s little girl,” but as the fiancée of a gentleman of property who now made his first appearance in Wyngham society as “Mr. Bradfield’s ward.”
Dick’s appearance threw Lilith into a state of the greatest excitement.
“Why, Chris,” she took the earliest opportunity of whispering to Miss Abercarne, “it’s my handsome stranger! How awfully, awfully mean of you not to tell me! I’ve been wasting my time dreaming about him for the last six months!”
But other things less pleasant to hear were said about the young fellow with the prematurely grey hair, and the deep lines of sadness in his face. People whispered of “a far-away look in his eyes,” and asked each other what the story was about the man who had been shut up in the east wing at Wyngham House. And they wondered why Mr. Bradfield had left so suddenly for the Continent, and whether it was true that Wyngham House was to be sold.
But none of these rumours troubled Chris or her future husband, whose scarcely concealed worship of each other caused many a kindly smile. Chris was quite astonished at the number of friends she had, as the quality and quantity of wedding presents that poured in proved, for everybody’s opinion of the perfect fool had gone up when everybody heard that she was going to marry a man with thirty thousand a year.
A much smarter wedding than that of Richard Wryde and Chris Abercarne took place about the same time as theirs. It was that of James Stelfox with a young woman to whom he had long been attached, and who was enabled, through the generosity of Richard, to indulge her heart’s highest ambition, and to be married in a white satin train six yards long, with a veil of corresponding proportions. She had eight bridesmaids, who all wore mauve satin frocks and primrose-coloured hats, and the portrait of the bride and an account of the ceremony appeared in The Woman’s World of Fashion.
Richard Wryde had set his late servant up as the proprietor of a brand-new hotel, for he persisted in being passionately grateful to the man who had been the means of saving his reason and his life, in spite of Stelfox’s own gentle remonstrances.
“If you’ll only believe me, sir,” he would say earnestly, “it was just a toss up whether I took your part or Mr. Bradfield’s. For you were that savage when it first occurred to me to take you in hand, that I didn’t know how it would turn out myself. It was just a lucky ‘spec’ on my part, sir.”
But Dick will not believe this, neither will Chris. They are both rather old-fashioned, unworldly creatures, tinged with a simplicity which comes to him through his long confinement, and to her through sympathy with him, and they are a little out of touch with the cynical spirit of the times.
They live quietly in the lake district, for Richard Wryde, through his long deafness, cannot hear a louder noise than that of his wife singing or playing the piano, or the splash of the water of the lake, or the cries of their children at play.
THE END.