“You are right in your surmise, Mr—ar—Fordham. As an intimate friend of young Orlebar, a man, I believe, considerably older than himself, it occurred to me that you would be—ar—likely to have some influence over him—and—ar—might exert that influence towards inducing him to do what is right.”
“You may command any influence I may possess in that direction, Mr Glover,” said Fordham, suavely, though inwardly chuckling over the cool impudence of the proposal and the opacity of the mind which could propound it.
“I was sure of it—sure of it,” reiterated the other, much mollified at the prospect of so welcome an alliance. “As I said before, he is not behaving straightforwardly, and you will—ar—agree with me. Well, now, some months ago it was that he came first to my place. I’ve got a little crib down at Henley, you know, Mr Fordham—shall be happy to see you there if you are returning to England—very happy. Well, we had plenty of fun going on—parties and picnics and rowing and all that. I’m a man that likes to see young folks enjoying themselves. I don’t stint them—not I. Let them enjoy themselves when they are young, say I. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Undoubtedly,” murmured Fordham.
“Well, among other young fellows who came sparking around was this young Orlebar,” went on old Glover, forgetting his stilted pomposity in the thread of his narrative. “I was always glad to see him—ask him if I wasn’t. Soon it seemed to me that he was taking a fancy to my Edie. She’s my eldest, you know, as good a girl as ever was. She’s a pretty girl, too, and looks at home anywhere—in the Park, or wherever she may be. Now doesn’t she?”
“I quite agree with you on the subject of Miss Glover’s attractions,” said Fordham, gravely. “She would, as you say, look thoroughly at home in the Park—with a perambulator and a soldier,” he added to himself.
“All day and every day he made some excuse or other to run down. He’d take her out on the river by the hour, sit about the garden with her, be sending her flowers and things and all that. If that don’t mean intentions, I’d like to know what does. Well, I didn’t feel called upon to step in. I don’t believe in interfering with young folks’ inclinations. I liked the young fellow—we all did—and it seemed he was old enough to know his own mind. This went on for some time—some months. Then suddenly we heard he’d gone abroad, and from that day on heard no more about him by word or line. My poor Edie felt it dreadfully. She didn’t say anything at first, nor for a long time, and at last I got it all out of her. Now, that isn’t the way a girl should be treated, is it, Mr Fordham? If you had daughters of your own you would not like to see them treated like that, would you?”
“Certainly not. But pray go on—I am interested.”
He was—but in reading between the lines of this very ingenuous and pathetic tale of base and black hearted treachery. To the narrator his sympathetic tone and attitude conveyed the liveliest satisfaction, but that hoary plutocrat little guessed at what a dismally primitive hour it was requisite to rise in order to get the blind side of saturnine Richard Fordham.
“I’d taken the girls to the seaside for their summer outing,” continued the narrator—“a thing they generally go wild with delight over. But poor Edie this time said she hated the sea. She wanted to go abroad. Would I take her abroad? At first I wouldn’t, till she grew quite thin and pale. Then I knew why she wanted to go, and she told me. If she could find him out herself—make up a pleasant little surprise, she said—it would all come right. It would all be as before, and they would be as jolly as grigs. I hadn’t the heart to refuse her, and so we came. We found out where young Orlebar was, and dropped down on him with the pleasant little surprise we’d planned. But—it didn’t seem a pleasant surprise at all.”