“There’s some plot,” he said, “and I have no idea what it is. I want a witness with regard to anything further that you wish to say to me. What’s his name? Your father’s solicitor, I mean. Oh, yes, Markham. Don’t speak another word to me.”
He turned his back on her and waited till a servant came in.
“Her ladyship wishes to see Mr. Markham,” he said. “Ask Mr. Markham to come here at once.”
“Colin....” she began.
It was just such a face that he turned on her now as he had given to her one evening at Capri.
“Not a word,” he said. “Hold your tongue, Violet. You’ll speak presently.”
Mr. Markham appeared, precise and florid. Colin shook hands with him.
“My wife has a statement to make to you,” he said. “I don’t know what it is: she has not yet made it. But it concerns me and the succession to my father’s title and estates. It had therefore better be made to you in my presence. Please tell Mr. Markham what you were about to tell me, Violet.”
In dead silence, briefly and clearly, Violet repeated what Colin had told her on the night that they were engaged. All the time he looked at her, Mr. Markham would have said, with tenderness and anxiety, and when she had finished he spoke:
“I hope you will go into this matter without any delay, Mr. Markham,” he said. “My wife, as I have already told her, is perfectly right in saying that my uncle—you will need his address—gave me two letters from my mother to him. She is right also about the subject of those letters. But she is under a complete delusion about the dates of them. I destroyed them not so long ago, I am afraid, so the only person who can possibly settle this is my uncle, to whom I hope you will apply without delay. No doubt he will have some recollection of them; indeed, he cherished them for years, and if the dates were as my wife says that I told her they were, he must have known that my brother and I were illegitimate. So much for the letters.”