“As I told you before,” Captain Desfrayne replied, with more asperity than seemed at all necessary under the circumstances, “I did not know even of her existence before receiving that letter, and I now know not one solitary fact more than you do. I know nothing of the girl, or of her money. I do not wish to know; I take no interest, and I don’t want to take any interest now, or in the future.”
“But it is foolish to refuse to perform a duty when you are so entirely ignorant of the reasons why this money has been thrown into your keeping,” urged Mrs. Desfrayne gently.
“If I refuse, I suppose the Court of Chancery will find somebody more capable, and certainly may easily find some one more willing than myself,” Captain Desfrayne said, almost irritably.
“If it had been a boy, instead of a girl, would you have been so reluctant?” asked Mrs. Desfrayne, smiling mischievously.
“That has nothing to do with it. I have to deal with the matter as it now exists, not as it might have been.”
Mrs. Desfrayne glanced at her son from beneath the long, silken lashes that half-concealed her great blue eyes. It seemed so strange to hear that musical voice, which for nine-and-twenty or thirty years had been as soft and sweet to her ears, as if incapable of one jangled note, fall into that odd, irritable discordance.
Paul was out of sorts and out of humor, she could see. Was he telling her all the truth?
Never, in all those years of his life, most of which had passed under her own vision, had he uttered, looked, or even seemed to harbor one thought that he was not ready and willing for his mother to take cognizance of. Why, then, this possible reticence, blowing across their lifelong confidence like the bitter northeast wind ruffling over clear water, turning its surface into a fragile veil of ice?
The young man was out of humor, for his meeting with the fellow whom he had just encountered almost on the threshold of the house had brought up many recollections he would fain have banished—memories of a time he would gladly have erased from the pages of his life—a time whereof his mother knew nothing.
Mrs. Desfrayne, however, shot very wide of the mark when she ascribed his alteration of look and manner to some foreknowledge of the girl in question. He spoke nothing but the truth in saying that he had never as much as heard of her before receiving the letter that lay between his mother’s fingers.