It was a letter from my brother in Cape Town; poor old ne’er-do-weel Jack, who scarcely ever writes anything more than a picture postcard with a view of the Cape of Good Hope, or something of that kind, unless he’s in trouble and wants something.
With a sigh I took out the crackling, scrawled sheet; and my eyes fell on the last sentences first.
“You’ll have to get the money for me, old girl. You know you can if you try. Ask Vandeleur to lend it to us; he’d do anything for you. Haven’t got his address, or I would have written to him myself. I am absolutely on the rocks, so don’t wait. You’ll have to wire a hundred pounds to the Bank here——”
A hundred pounds? Mightn’t he just as well have said “a million”? What was all this about? I took the letter into my own little room and sat down on the camp-bed to read it through....
In five minutes I have grasped all that I can take in at present of the situation; an old one.
Jack is in trouble, worse trouble than ever before. Debts; an I O U that was to fall due in six weeks. Threatened exposure of—something that he doesn’t explain. “A business affair?”
Yes; Mr. Dundonald is quite right. I have “no head for business routine.” My head’s going round with the bewilderment of it. It can’t mean that Jack, my own brother, Father’s only son—one of the Trants—has been “not quite straight” with the accounts that are in his care? He must be mad! It must be the hot sun in that awful country. Not Jack——!
But to suggest that I should turn to Sydney Vandeleur for the money, even supposing that I knew where the Vandeleurs were to be found just now—oh! As if I wouldn’t rather die! Yet there’s nothing else that I can do——
Stop. There is one thing.