“Oh, then, my heart did not deceive me,” cried she, taking his hand with both her own, “when I felt towards you like an old friend. After we parted last night, I asked myself, again and again, how was it that I already felt an interest in you? What subtle instinct was it that whispered this is the son of poor George's dearest friend,—this is the son of that dear Ormsby Conyers of whom every letter is full? Oh, the happiness of seeing you under this roof! And what a surprise for my poor brother, who clings only the closer, with every year, to all that reminds him of his boy!”
“And you knew my father, then?” asked Conyers, proudly.
“Never met him; but I believe I knew him better than many who were his daily intimates: for years my nephew's letters were journals of their joint lives—they seemed never separate. But you shall read them yourself. They go back to the time when they both landed at Calcutta, young and ardent spirits, eager for adventure, and urged by a bold ambition to win distinction. From that day they were inseparable. They hunted, travelled, lived together; and so attached had they become to each other, that George writes in one letter: 'They have offered me an appointment on the staff, but as this would separate me from Ormsby, it is not to be thought of.' It was to me George always wrote, for my brother never liked letter-writing, and thus I was my nephew's confidante, and intrusted with all his secrets. Nor was there one in which your father's name did not figure. It was, how Ormsby got him out of this scrape, or took his duty for him, or made this explanation, or raised that sum of money, that filled all these. At last—I never knew why or how—George ceased to write to me, and addressed all his letters to his father, marked 'Strictly private' too, so that I never saw what they contained. My brother, I believe, suffered deeply from the concealment, and there must have been what to him seemed a sufficient reason for it, or he would never have excluded me from that share in his confidence I had always possessed. At all events, it led to a sort of estrangement between us,—the only one of our lives. He would tell me at intervals that George was on leave; George was at the Hills; he was expecting his troop; he had been sent here or there; but nothing more, till one morning, as if unable to bear the burden longer, he said, 'George has made up his mind to leave his regiment and take service with one of the native princes. It is an arrangement sanctioned by the Government, but it is one I grieve over and regret greatly.' I asked eagerly to hear further about this step, but he said he knew nothing beyond the bare fact. I then said, 'What does his friend Conyers think of it?' and my brother dryly replied, 'I am not aware that he has been consulted.' Our own misfortunes were fast closing around us, so that really we had little time to think of anything but the difficulties that each day brought forth. George's letters grew rarer and rarer; rumors of him reached us; stories of his gorgeous mode of living, his princely state and splendid retinue, of the high favor he enjoyed with the Rajah, and the influence he wielded over neighboring chiefs; and then we heard, still only by rumor, that he had married a native princess, who had some time before been converted to Christianity. The first intimation of the fact from himself came, when, announcing that he had sent his daughter, a child of about five years old, to Europe to be educated—” She paused here, and seemed to have fallen into a revery over the past; when Conyers suddenly asked,—
“And what of my father all this time? Was the old intercourse kept up between them?”
“I cannot tell you. I do not remember that his name occurred till the memorable case came on before the House of Commons—the inquiry, as it was called, into Colonel Barrington's conduct in the case of Edwardes, a British-born subject of his Majesty, serving in the army of the Rajah of Luckerabad. You have, perhaps, heard of it?”
“Was that the celebrated charge of torturing a British subject?”
“The same; the vilest conspiracy that ever was hatched, and the cruellest persecution that ever broke a noble heart. And yet there were men of honor, men of purest fame and most unblemished character, who harkened in to that infamous cry, and actually sent out emissaries to India to collect evidence against my poor nephew. For a while the whole country rang with the case. The low papers, which assailed the Government, made it matter of attack on the nature of the British rule in India, and the ministry only sought to make George the victim to screen themselves from public indignation. It was Admiral Byng's case once more. But I have no temper to speak of it, even after this lapse of years; my blood boils now at the bare memory of that foul and perjured association. If you would follow the story, I will send you the little published narrative to your room, but, I beseech you, do not again revert to it. How I have betrayed myself to speak of it I know not. For many a long year I have prayed to be able to forgive one man, who has been the bitterest enemy of our name and race. I have asked for strength to bear the burden of our calamity, but more earnestly a hundred-fold I have entreated that forgiveness might enter my heart, and that if vengeance for this cruel wrong was at hand, I could be able to say, 'No, the time for such feeling is gone by.' Let me not, then, be tempted by any revival of this theme to recall all the sorrow and all the indignation it once caused me. This infamous book contains the whole story as the world then believed it. You will read it with interest, for it concerned one whom your father dearly loved. But, again. I say, when we meet again let us not return to it. These letters, too, will amuse you; they are the diaries of your father's early life in India as much as George's, but of them we can talk freely.”
It was so evident that she was speaking with a forced calm, and that all her self-restraint might at any moment prove unequal to the effort she was making, that Conyers, affecting to have a few words to say to Stapylton's messenger, stole away, and hastened to his room to look over the letters and the volume she had given him.
He had scarcely addressed himself to his task when a knock came to the door, and at the same instant it was opened in a slow, half-hesitating way, and Tom Dill stood before him. Though evidently dressed for the occasion, and intending to present himself in a most favorable guise, Tom looked far more vulgar and unprepossessing than in the worn costume of his every-day life, his bright-buttoned blue coat and yellow waistcoat being only aggravations of the low-bred air that unhappily beset him. Worse even than this, however, was the fact that, being somewhat nervous about the interview before him, Tom had taken what his father would have called a diffusible stimulant, in the shape of “a dandy of punch,” and bore the evidences of it in a heightened color and a very lustrous but wandering eye.