Chapter Twenty One.
Sharks by Land and Water.
Mr Brandram’s abrupt summons to Mr Armstrong was not due to the reappearance on the scene of the mysterious Robert Ratman. It was, in fact, at the instance of Miss Rosalind Oliphant that the doctor sent his message.
That young lady had returned a week ago to find everything at Maxfield awry. Her father was gloomy, mysterious, and haggard. The rumour of Mr Ratman’s extraordinary claims had become the common property of the village. Roger and his tutor were away, no one exactly knew where or on what errand.
On the day following her return she walked across from the Vicarage to visit her father.
He sat in the library, abstracted, pale, and limp. The jaunty, Anglo-Indian veneer had for the time being dropped off, unmasking the worried exterior of a chicken-hearted man.
At the sight of his daughter he pulled himself together, and crushed in his hand the letter which he had been reading.
“Why, my child,” said he, with unusual cordiality, “this is a pleasant apparition. Cruel girl, to desert us for so long. We have hardly existed without you, Roger and his tutor are away in France holiday-making, while I remain here on duty with no one to cheer me up.”
“Dear father,” said Rosalind, kissing him, “how worried you look! What is the matter? Won’t you tell me?”
The father’s eyes dwelt for a moment on her fair earnest face—so like her mother’s, so unlike a daughter of his—then they fell miserably.
“Worried?” said he. “Do I show it as plainly as all that? I flattered myself I kept it to myself.”
“Any one can see you are unhappy, father. Why?”
“I am in difficulties, my child, which you could not understand.”
“I could. Do tell me.”
“The fact is,” said the captain, taking up his pen and dotting the blotting-pad as he spoke, “that when on former occasions I have tried to claim your sympathy I—well, I was not quite successful. I do not want the pain of a similar failure again.”
“I would do anything, anything to help you, if I could!”
He took her hand and held it in his.
“I am in great straits,” said he. “An old Indian debt has followed me here. I cannot meet it, and ruin stares me in the face. You know I am a poor man; that I am living on other people—you have reminded me of that often enough; that of all the money which passes my hands, scarcely enough to live on belongs by right to me. You know all that?”
“Yes; I know that we are poor. How much do you owe?” she asked.
“I cannot say. Not long ago it was some hundreds, but by this time it is nearer thousands. Nothing grows so rapidly as a debt, my child—even,” added he, with an unctuous drop of his voice, “a debt of honour.”
“And will not your creditor wait?”
“My creditor has waited, but refuses to do so any longer. In a month from now, my child, your father and those he loves best will be paupers.”
“Is there no way of meeting it? None whatever?”
“I cannot pay; I shrink from borrowing. The trust funds in my charge are sacred—”
“Of course!” said she, astonished that he should name them in such a connection. “Is there nothing else?”
“My creditor is Robert Ratman—or as he calls himself, and possibly is, Roger Ingleton. As you know, he claims to be the elder brother of our Roger, and I—”
“Yes, yes,” said she; “Roger told me about that. He is your creditor?”
“He is. I got into his clutches in India, little guessing who he was, and he is crushing me now. There is but one way, and one only, of escaping him—and that way is, I fear, impossible, Rosalind.”
“What is it?” said she, with pale face, knowing what was to come.
“He loves you. As my son-in-law he would be no longer my creditor.”
She drew away her hand with a shudder.
“Father,” said she, in a dry hard voice which startled him, “do you really mean this?”
“Is it a time for jesting?” said he. “I ask nothing of you. I merely state facts. You dislike him—there is an end of it. Only remember we are not now dealing with Robert Ratman, but with an injured man who has not had a fair chance. The good in him,” continued the father, deluded by the passive look on his daughter’s face, and becoming suddenly warm in his championship of the absent creditor, “has been smothered; but for aught we know it may still be there. A wife—”
She stopped him with a peremptory motion of her hand.
“Please do not say anything more. Your debt—when does it fall due?”
“In a week or ten days, my child. Consider—”
She interrupted again.
“No more, please,” she said, almost imploringly. “I will think what can be done to help you in a week. Good-bye, dear father.”
She stooped, with face as white as marble, and touched his forehead with her cold lips.
“Loyal girl,” said the father, when the door had closed behind her; “she will stand by me yet. After all, Ratman has his good points—clever, cheerful, good man of business—”
Here abruptly the soliloquy ended, and Captain Oliphant buried his face in his hands, a miserable man.
To Rosalind, as she walked rapidly across the park, there came but one thought. Her father—how could she help him? how could she save him, not so much from his debts as from the depths into which they were plunging him?
“My poor father,” said she. “Only a man in desperate plight could think of such a remedy. He never meant it. He does not really suppose—no, no; he said he did not ask anything. He told me because I asked. Poor darling father!”
And with something very like a sob she hurried on to Yeld.
She went straight to Dr Brandram’s.
“Well, my dear young lady, it does one good to see you back,” said he; “but bless me, how pale you look.”
“Do I? I’m quite well, thank you. Dr Brandram,” said she, “do you know anything about this Mr Ratman?”
The Doctor stared at this abrupt inquiry.
“Nothing more than you and every one else does—that he is a rank impostor!”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, where is he? I want to see him very much.”
“You want to see him? He has vanished, and left no track. Is it nothing I can help you in?”
“No,” said she, looking very miserable. “I hoped you could have told me where to find him. Good-bye, and thank you.”
She departed, leaving the doctor sorely disturbed and bewildered. He stood watching her slight figure till it disappeared in the Vicarage garden, and then shrugging his shoulders, said, “Something wrong, somewhere. Evidently not a case for me to be trusted with. It’s about time Armstrong came home.”
Whereupon he walked over to the post office and dispatched the telegram which, as the reader knows, procured Tom Oliphant the unspeakable pleasure of a game of football on the following afternoon.
“Well,” said the tutor to his friend in the doctor’s parlour that evening, “what’s all this about?”
“That’s what I’m not likely to know myself,” said the doctor; and he narrated the circumstances of Miss Oliphant’s mysterious call.
“Humph!” said the tutor. “She wants to see him in his capacity of Robert Ratman, evidently, and not of Roger Ingleton, major.”
“So it seemed to me.”
“And you say she had just come from visiting her father at Maxfield?”
“Yes.”
“On the principle that two and two make four, I suppose we may conclude that my co-trustee is on toast at present,” said the tutor.
“And further, that that co-trustee being somebody’s father, you are the man to get him off it.”
The tutor’s face clouded, and his glass dropped with a twang from his eye.
“Don’t make that mistake again, Brandram—unless,” and here his lips relaxed into a quiet smile, “you mean by somebody, Miss Jill.”
Dr Brandram read a good deal in this short sentence, and, like a good friend, let the subject drop.
“As Tom has gone to the Rectory to dinner,” said the tutor, “I take it the neighbourhood for twenty miles round will know of my return by this time. Meanwhile I must go back and possibly find out some thing from Oliphant himself.”
Captain Oliphant, however, was in no mood for confidences. The sudden return of his co-trustee was extremely unwelcome at this juncture—indeed so manifestly unwelcome that Mr Armstrong was convinced he had come back not a day too soon.
The captain professed great annoyance and indignation at what he termed the desertion of his ward, and demanded to know when the tutor proposed to return to his duties.
“In fact, sir,” said he, “I desire to know what brings you here in this uncalled-for manner.”
“Business, my dear sir,” replied the tutor. “It need not incommode you.”
“Your proper place is with your pupil. Where have you left him?”
“In London, prosecuting a search which neither you nor I consider to be very hopeful. I should not be surprised to see him back any day.”
“And may I ask the nature of the very pressing business which forms the pretext of this abrupt return? Am I to understand you and my ward have quarrelled?”
“No, sir; we are excellent friends. It’s getting late; I’ll say good night.”
“By the way,” said he at the door, “while I am here, there are a few small matters connected with the accounts which seemed to my unpractised eye, when I went through Pottinger’s books, to require some little elucidation. If you have an hour or so to spare to-morrow, I should like to go through them with you. Good night.”
He did not stay to notice the sudden pallor of his colleague’s face, nor did he overhear the gasp which greeted the closing of the door.
The captain did not go to bed that night. For an hour he sat motionless in his chair, staring blankly into the fire; then, with a sudden access of industry, he went to the safe, and producing account-books, bank books, cheques, and other documents, spent some troubled hours over their contents. That done, for another hour he paced the floor, dismally smoking a cigar. Finally, when the early March dawn filtered through the blinds, he quitted the house, and surprised Mr Pottinger by an unexpected visit at breakfast-time. Thence he proceeded to the bank; and after transacting his business there, returned easier in mind, but exhausted in body, to the seclusion of his room at Maxfield.
The tutor meanwhile was abroad on horseback with Tom and Jill. The three took a scamper over the downs, and returned by way of the shore. Biding with Tom and Jill, as may be imagined, was a series of competitive exercises, rather than a straightforward promenade. Tom was an excellent rough horseman; and Jill, when Mr Armstrong was at hand, was not the young lady to stick at anything. They had tried handicaps, water-jumps, hurdles, and were about to start for a ding-dong gallop along the mile of hard strand which divided them from Maxfield, when the tutor’s eye detected, perched a little way up the cliff, the figure of a young lady sketching.
“I’ll start you two,” said he, “I scratch for this race. Ride fair, Tom; and Jill, give the mare her head when you get past the boulders. I shall go back by the downs. Are you ready now? Pull in a bit, Tom. Now—off you go!”
Not waiting to watch the issue of this momentous contest, he turned to where Rosalind sat, and reining up at the foot of her perch, dismounted.
She came down to meet him, palette in hand.
“Mr Armstrong, I am so glad to see you. I want to speak to you dreadfully. Are you in a great hurry?”
“Not at all. Brandram told me you were in trouble, and I was wondering when and where I should have the opportunity of asking how I can help you.”
He tied his horse to a stake, and helped her back to her seat on the cliff.
There was an awkward pause, which he occupied by examining her picture with a critical air.
“Do you like it?” said she.
“I don’t know. I’m no great judge. Do you?”
“I did, before you came. I’m not so sure now. Do sit down and let me say what I want to say.”
The tutor, with a flutter at his breast, sat meekly, keeping his eyes still on the picture.
“Mr Armstrong, it’s about Mr Ratman.”
“So Brandram said. What of him?”
Rosalind told her father’s story, except that she omitted any reference to the desperate proposition for satisfying his claims.
“I am sure it is a fraud, or blackmail, or something of the sort. For all that, he threatens to ruin father.”
“What does the debt amount to?”
“Father spoke of thousands.”
“Does the creditor offer no terms?”
Rosalind flushed, and looked round.
“None; that is, none that can be thought of for a moment.”
“I understand,” said the tutor, to whom the reservation was explicit enough.
“The difficulty is, that he has disappeared. If we could find him I would—”
“You would allow me to go to him,” said the tutor. “No doubt the opportunity will soon come. He wants money; he is bound to turn up.”
“But why should you be mixed up in father’s troubles?” asked Rosalind after a pause.
“Your father’s troubles are yours; your troubles are—shall we say?—Roger’s; Roger’s troubles are mine.”
There was another long silence, during which Rosalind took up her brushes and began work again on the picture, Mr Armstrong critically looking on.
“Have you no troubles of your own, then, that you have so much room in you for those of other people?” she said at last.
“I have had my share, perhaps. Your picture, with its wide expanse of calm sea, was just reminding me of one of them.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was years ago, when, before I was a singer in London— You knew I followed that honourable vocation once, don’t you?”
“I have heard father speak of it. Why not?”
“No reason at all. But before that I worked at the equally honourable profession of a common sailor on a ship between New York and Ceylon. At that time I was about as wild and reckless as they make them, and deluded myself into the foolish belief that I enjoyed it. How I had come to that pass I needn’t tell you. It wasn’t all of a sudden, or without the assistance of other people. I had a comrade on board—a man who had once been a gentleman, but had come down in the world; who was nearly as bad as I, but not quite; for he sometimes talked of his home and his mother, and wished himself dead, which I never had the grace to do.”
“Are you making this all up for my benefit,” asked Rosalind, “or is it true?”
“The story would not be worth telling if it were not true,” said Mr Armstrong, screwing his glass into his eye and taking a fresh survey of the picture. “One very hot summer we were becalmed off Colombo, and lay for days with nothing to do but whistle for a wind and quarrel among ourselves. My mate and I kept the peace for a couple of days, but then we fell out like the rest. I forget what it was about—a trifle, probably a word. We didn’t fight on deck—it was too hot—but jumped overboard and fought in the water. I remember, as I plunged, I caught sight, a hundred yards away, of an ugly grey fin lying motionless on the water, and knew it belonged to a shark. But I didn’t care. Well, we two fought in the water—partly in spite, partly to pass the time. Suddenly I could see my opponent’s swarthy face become livid. ‘Good God!’ he gasped; ‘a shark!’ and quick as thought he caught me by the shoulders and pushed me between him and the brute. I heard it swish up, and saw it half turn with gaping jaws. In that moment I lived over my life again, with all its folly and crime, and for the first time for years I prayed. How it happened I cannot tell; the shark must either have made a bad shot at me or else I must have ducked instinctively, for I remember feeling the scrape of his fin across my cheek and being pushed aside by his great tail. Next moment my mate’s hands let go their grip of me and there was a yell such as I pray I may never hear again. When at last they hauled me on board I was not the same man who three minutes before had dived into the water. That was the scene your picture reminded me of, Miss Oliphant. You have told me one of your troubles, and I have told you one of mine, which makes us quits. But my horse is getting fidgety down there; I must look after him. Good-bye.”
Mr Armstrong was a little surprised, when he came to go through the accounts with his co-trustee that afternoon, to find that he must have been mistaken in his previous supposition that they were not all correct and straightforward. Everything appeared quite plain and properly accounted for, and he agreed with the figures, rather abashed to feel that, after all, he was not as acute a man of business as he had flattered himself. Mr Pottinger and the captain rallied him about his deserted mares’-nest, and bored him with invitations to go through all the items again, to give him a chance of proving them wrong. He declined with thanks, and signed the balance with the best grace he could summon.
“Odd,” said he to himself, as he strode home after the interview; “either you must be very clever or I must be very stupid. I should greatly like to know which it is.”