"You've found out whose child lam, Simnel?" asked Kate.
"Every thing! I've only got to see your father, and wring from him the confession,--and I have the means of doing that, as safe as houses--and you shall be put in your proper position at once, Kitty, and a capital position it is, too. Your father is a man of great wealth, very highly thought of, moving in the best circles, and eminently respectable."
"And his name?"
"Ah, that I mustn't tell you till next time we meet. It's due to him to let him know how much we have learned, and to give him the option of behaving properly. If he refuse, I can put such a screw on him as will compel him at once to do as we wish. And then, Kitty," continued Simnel, dropping his voice, and looking at her fondly from under his bushy eyebrows "when all my work for you is satisfactorily finished, I shall come to you and ask for my reward."
"You shall have it, Robert," she said simply, placing her hand in his. It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name, and as he heard it a thrill of delight ran through him.
Mr. Simnel had ridden away homeward, and Kate had thrown herself on a sofa in the dining-room, and was vacantly watching the purple gloom creeping up and ingulphing the landscape. Vacantly, I say; for though her eyes were fixed on it, she heeded it not. Simnel's description of his visit had awakened in her a thousand memories of old days. The smell of the stables, the tan, and the sawdust of the ring; the lamps, and the orange-peel in the marquee; the way in which the tent-poles would strain and crack in a high wind, and the audience would look up, as though expecting the crazy edifice to descend on their heads; the swinging naphtha-burners flaring in the draught; the dull flopping sound of the first drops of a thunder-shower on the tent roof, causing an immediate consternation and whispering among the non-umbrellaed spectators,--all these rose before her mind. She recollected all the different stages of her own novitiate; heard old Fox's thin piping voice cursing her freely for "missing her tip" in clearing the garters, or sticking in the silver-papered hoop; and his wife's hoarse growling at her extravagance in tarlatan skirts and rose-pinked stockings. Then, pursuing this train of thought, she remembered what Simnel had said about her parentage; and stung with a sudden idea she sat upright on the sofa, unconsciously tapping her teeth with her nails. Could it not all be made straight? That was what she thought. Her father was a man of position, a man highly thought of and esteemed--so Simnel had said; he could be forced to recognise her as his daughter,--Simnel swore he should do this. What, then, stood in the way of her being reconciled to, of her being married to Charles Beresford? She had plenty of money as it was, and if her father were rich as stated, could have the command of more. It was her position, the horse-breaking business, that had floored Charley; she saw that at once; but now here she was a recognised swell, bar the illegitimacy; and Charley wouldn't mind that with money, and above all with love--oh, such love!--for him. He would give up every one else for her; he would give up that fair-haired woman--Ah, good God! the letter! that fatal letter, which she wrote in her mad passion of yesterday! that wild wicked letter was fatal! it would be shown to him; her handwriting would be recognised, and there would be an end to all her hopes.
When the servant came in with the dinner-tray she found her mistress in a swoon.
[CHAPTER XXXIII.]
THE HOUSE OF MOURNING.
Dead! had been dead for half an hour!--so said the first man with an approach to medical knowledge who was called in, and who indeed was a worthy chemist who lived in the neighbourhood, and who, on the strength of a square shop fitted with an oil-cloth floor, with a little fountain in the centre (in the basin of which half-a-dozen bottles of aerated water were always cooling), of a counter bearing glazed cases of scents and cosmetics, of a nest of drawers labelled with illegible half-words, and of three large shining coloured bottles in the window, was regarded by the servants in the vicinity as a weird practitioner indeed. A servant had been despatched in a cab for Dr. Prater; but in the interval pending that luminary's arrival, Mr. Canthar, of the Medical Hall, was master of the position, and all those who were left with the body hung upon his words. It--it had already come to be called "it"--still lay in the library, where it had been found. Mrs. Schröder, who had hurried in close behind Barbara, had, at the very first glimpse of the state of affairs, gone off into a violent fit of hysterics, and had been removed to her room, whither Barbara had followed her, and where the latter was now in close attendance upon her stricken friend. When Mr. Canthar arrived (he had stripped off his black-calico apron and thrown it into the cork-drawer on being summoned, and completed his toilette en route by running his fingers through such hair as remained on the sides of his head), he found Mr. Schröder's body stretched out on the sofa in the library, and attended solely by the kitchen-maid and by a page-boy, who, partly from love to the kitchen-maid, partly from gratitude to his employers, bore her company. The other servants had declined having any thing to do with such horrors, as not coming within their engagements. The great butler had retired to the housekeeper's room, taking with him a bottle of brown sherry, and there these supreme functionaries sat, discussing future prospects; the French cook had gone out to announce to a friend of his, who was steward at a crack club, that he was now open to an engagement; the two footmen, great hulking masses of ignorance and vanity, with faces whiter than the powder on their heads, sat in the pantry, shaking over one glass of hot gin-and-water, and solemnly glozing over the probability of a suggestion made by one of them that "he" (they had never named him) had died of "spuntanus kymbustium." When Mr. Canthar's sharp ring came at the bell, they both trembled violently, and went up together to open the door. The announcement that their master was dead,--an announcement made by Mr. Canthar after a very cursory examination,--utterly failed in reassuring them; on the contrary, it produced the liveliest symptoms of fright, and they incontinently hurried down stairs to the pantry again. Mr. Canthar required but a very short examination to arrive at his verdict. He placed his finger on the pulse, his ear to the waistcoat; then he took a candle from the attendant kitchen-maid, and looked for an instant into the half-closed glazed eyes. Gently depositing the hand, he said, "Dead! quite dead! been dead for half-an-hour, I suppose. I'm not called upon to state to you my opinion of the cause of death; indeed, it would be quite useless; and as no member of the family has done me the honour to be present,--well, no matter, never mind." Then, in a whisper, "I'd put a cloth round the jaws, don't you know? just bind it together, because--ugly appearance, you understand, Martha--good-night;" and Mr. Canthar tripped out of the house, and devoted the remainder of the evening to working out a composition for the nutriment of the hair, which, under the name of Canthar's Crinibus, has an enormous circulation over the infant heads of Albertopolis.