All this was not exactly told to Lancelot, but he extracted it, or gathered it before he was able to arrive at what was really important, the name of Zoraya’s first husband, where she was married, and by whom, and where she had parted from him. She was so unwilling to give particulars that he began almost to hope to make her confess that the whole was a myth, but at last she owned that the man’s name was Giovanni Benista, and that the marriage had taken place at Messina; she knew not in what church, nor in what year, only it was before the end of the old regime, for she recollected the uniforms of the Bomba soldiers, though she could not remember the name of the priest. Benista was old, very old—the tyrant and assassin that he was, no doubt he was dead. She often thought he would have killed her—and the history of his ill-treatment had to be gone through before it appeared that she had fled from him at Trieste with her brother, in an English trading-vessel, where their dexterity and brilliancy gained them concealment and a passage. This was certainly in the summer of 1865. Of Benista she knew nothing since, but she believed him to have come from Piedmont.
Lance found Gerald walking up and down anxiously watching for him, and receiving him with a “Well!” that had in it volumes of suspense.
“Well, Gerald, I do not think there can be any blame attached to your father, whatever comes of it. He was deceived as much as any one else, and his attachment to you seems to have been his great offence.”
“Thank Heaven! Then he was deceived?”
“I am afraid there was some previous ceremony. But stay, Gerald! There is no certainty that it was valid in the first place, and in the next, nothing is known of Benista since 1865, when he was an old man, so that there is a full chance that he was dead before—”
“Before April 1868. I say, Uncle Lance, they want to make no end of a bear-fight for my coming of age. I must be out of the way first.”
“Don’t cry out too soon. Even if the worst came to the worst, as the property was left to you by will individually, I doubt whether this discovery, if real, would make any difference in law. I do not know.”
“But would I take it on those terms? It would be simply defrauding Clement, and all of you—”
“Perhaps, long before, we may be satisfied,” said Lance. “For the present, I think nothing can be done but endeavour to ascertain the facts.”
“One comfort is,” said Gerald, “I have gained a sister. I have walked with her to the corner of her place—the marble works, you know—and she really is a jolly little thing, quite innocent of all her mother’s tricks, thinking Mrs. Henderson the first of human beings, except perhaps Flight, the aesthetic parson. I should not have selected him, you know, but between them they have kept her quite a white sheet—a Miranda any Ferdinand might be glad to find, and dreading nothing so much as falling into the hands of that awful brute. Caliban himself couldn’t have been worse! I have promised her to do what I can to save her—buy her off—anything.”