With the electric sympathy of strong mutual affection, Paul Desfrayne quickly perceived the ill effect his coldness had upon his mother; and with an effort he cleared his countenance, and assumed a shadow of his formerly smiling aspect. He looked down, and appeared to consider. Then, raising his eyes to those of his mother, he said, with an air of resignation:
“I suppose it would be best to see the lawyers, and hear what they have to say. It is a most intolerable bore. I don’t know what I have done to merit being visited for my sins in this fashion.”
“You don’t remember what you happened to do for this eccentrically disposed old man?”
Paul Desfrayne shrugged his shoulders.
“A remarkably simple matter, when all is said and done. I was traveling once with him, as well as I can remember, and he began talking to me about some wonderful invention he had just brought to perfection. He was in what I supposed to be rather cramped circumstances, though not an absolutely poor man, for he was traveling first-class. I should not have thought about him at all, only, with the enthusiasm of an inventor, he persisted in bothering me about this thing.
“I thought at the time it was deserving of notice; and when he alighted, I happened to almost tumble into the arms of the very man who had it in his power to get the affair into use and practise. More to get rid of him than for any more worthy motive, I introduced the two to each other. It was something this old Vere Gardiner had invented, for some kind of machinery, which, if adopted by the government, would save—I really forget how much. I recollect asking this friend, some time after, if he had done anything about it, and he told me it would probably make the fortune of half a dozen people. He seemed delighted with the old man and his invention.
“This must be the service he made so much of. It was a service costing me just five or six sentences. I did not even stop to see what Percival, this friend, thought of old Gardiner, or what he thought of Percival; but left them talking together in the waiting-room, for I was in a desperate hurry to reach you, mother. I never anticipated hearing of the affair again.”
There was a brief silence.
“This man, it is to be presumed, was of humble birth,” said Mrs. Desfrayne. “It will be too dreadful if, with the irony of blind fate, this girl proves unpresentable. In that case—at nineteen—it will be too late to mend her manners, or her education. Perhaps she has some frightfully appalling cognomen, which will render it a martyrdom to present her in society. If she is anything of a hobgoblin, you may with justice talk of a white elephant.”
“I suppose there is no clause in the criminal code whereby I may be compelled to accept the trust if I do not elect voluntarily to undertake it?” Captain Desfrayne asked, with a slight smile at his mother’s fastidious alarm. “And if she is nineteen now, I suppose my responsibility would cease in two years?”