A Traitor in London

by Fergus Hume

She might well ask. Scarse was always pale, but now he was deathly white. He reared himself out of his chair with a look of terror in his eyes. It was in broken sentences he spoke. "Did . . . Harold Burton . . . see me . . . with a crape scarf . . . to-day?"

"Yes, yes; but was it you, father? Why did you wear----"

"Hush! Say no more, Brenda. Go away."

A faint color was coming back to his face, and he began to look more like himself, less like a corpse. Brenda was about to demur at leaving him, but he stopped her with a peremptory gesture. "Go away, Brenda, I say."

"But won't you explain----"

"There is nothing to explain; go away."

She was obliged to obey, and reluctantly she left the room. She could not understand her father's emotion, nor could she understand the presence in Chippingholt of this man with the crape scarf, who so nearly resembled him as to be mistaken for him by Harold. So far as she knew her father had no relatives. But he had always been very reticent about his family affairs. She knew nothing of his connections or his past life. Her mother she could scarce remember. She had died when Brenda was a tiny child, and ever since that time she had been brought up by strangers far away from home. Up to the age of twenty she had been at a boarding-school, and there she had seen next to nothing of her father. A casual visit on his part, and a few casual questions as to her welfare--her mental welfare chiefly--that represented Brenda's experience of the domestic affections and a father's love. When she had come of age Scarse had sent for her, and had established her in the cottage at Chippingholt, giving her occasionally a week in London during the season. He retained his bachelor chambers in Start Street, Piccadilly, but never took her there, and ever kept her at arm's length when she hungered for sympathy and love. No wonder, then, that in the all-important matter of her marriage she felt no inclination to obey the man who had been to her but a father in name: and no wonder she had fallen in love with Harold Burton, and was bent now on linking her life with his. He was the one human being who had held out to her affection and sympathy, and from him she determined no earthly power should part her. Her father treated her as a pawn on the chessboard of life, to be moved about as best suited his own purpose. She regarded herself as a human being, with the right to consider her own happiness, and to work out her own destiny.

"Never will I marry Van Zwieten," she reiterated to herself as she dressed for dinner. "The man is a tyrant and a brute. Father has done nothing for me that I should sacrifice myself so for him. Together Harold and I will shape a new life for ourselves. If father's neglect has done nothing else for me, it has at least made me self-reliant."

As she expected, her father did not appear at dinner, alleging his megrims as the reason for his non-appearance. But Brenda had a very shrewd idea that the appearance of this unknown man, who so resembled him, had more to do with it. She felt sure there was some sort of mystery. Her father's life was altogether so secretive. But she did not let it disturb her, and dismissed it from her mind, until a chance remark from Van Zwieten again roused her curiosity.

The Dutchman was tall of stature--well over six feet, and stout in proportion. A well set-up figure assuredly, and what would be termed a fine animal. His hair and beard were of an ochre color, and his sleepy blue eyes, although seeming to observe nothing, on the contrary took in everything. His complexion was delicate as a woman's, and he was slow and soft of speech and movement. A casual observer might have set him down as lethargic and small-brained. But Brenda knew that he possessed a fund of energy and cunning and dogged determination which could be exerted to the detriment of those whom his sleepy looks deceived. Those blue eyes could sparkle with fire, that soft, low voice could ring out like a trumpet, and that huge frame could be active and supple as any serpent. Waldo van Zwieten he was called, and he had lived in London now for the past five years.