"Your real father," said Durban, and departed without another word. It would seem as though he were unwilling to be questioned. Beatrice began to think that there was some mystery connected with her parents, which Durban knew, but which Durban would not reveal.
[CHAPTER III]
MR. ALPENNY'S PROPOSAL
Shortly after Durban resumed work, Beatrice received a surprise which rather pleased her. This was none other than an invitation to enter the counting-house. She had always desired to do so, being filled with that curiosity which led her grandmother Eve to eat apples, but hitherto Alpenny had declined to admit her. Now the door of the dungeon was open, and Alpenny, standing before it, beckoned that she should come in. In the bright sunshine he looked more decrepit and wicked than usual. He could not have been less than eighty years of age, and his spare figure was bowed with Time. That same Time had also robbed him of every hair on his head, and had even taken away eyebrows and eyelashes. As the old man was clean shaven, his gleaming head and hairless yellow wrinkled face looked rather repulsive. Nor did his dress tend to improve his appearance, for it was a shepherd's-plaid suit cut in the style of the early fifties, when he had been young, and presumably something of a dandy. In spite of the antiquity of the clothes, there was a suggestion of juvenility about them which matched badly with his Methuselah looks. Like an aged ghost he beckoned in the sunshine, and the white-painted erection behind him assumed, in the eyes of Beatrice, the look of a tomb.
Wondering that she should be invited into Mammon's Shrine, the girl walked across the lawn. In her white dress, with her beautiful face shaded by a coarse straw hat, she appeared the embodiment of youth and grace, contrasting markedly with the senile old villain, who croaked out his orders.
"Come in," said Alpenny testily, and with the screech of a peacock, as he pointed to the open door. "I wish to speak to you seriously."
Beatrice, ever sparing of words with crabbed age, nodded and entered the counting-house, glancing comprehensively around to take in her surroundings--as a woman always does--with a single look. The space naturally was limited. All the windows had been boarded up save one, which opened immediately over a rather large desk of mahogany which was piled with papers. The walls were hung with faded red rep. In one corner stood a large green-painted safe; in another stood a pile of tin boxes which reached quite to the roof. A paraffin lamp dangled by brass chains from a somewhat smoky ceiling; and at the far end of the carriage, in front of a dilapidated bookcase, was an oil stove, crudely set on a sheet of galvanised tin. A ragged carpet, disorderly in colour and much faded, covered the floor; and there were only two chairs, one before the desk, and another beside it, probably for the use of clients. The one window was barred, but not covered with any curtain; the others were sheathed in iron and barred strongly outside. From without, as has been said, the carriage looked like a dungeon: within, its appearance suggested the home of a recluse, who cared very little for the pomps and vanities of civilisation. This barren room represented very fairly the bare mind of the miser, who cared more for money itself, than for what money could do.
Motioning Beatrice to the client's chair, Alpenny seated himself before his desk, and from habit presumably, began to fiddle with some legal looking documents. Apparently he had got over the shock caused by Vivian's strange speech, and looked much the same as he always did--cold, unsympathetic, and cunning as an old monkey. In the dungeon Beatrice bloomed like a rose, while Alpenny resembled a cold, clammy toad, uncanny and repulsive. He began to speak almost immediately, and his first words amazed the girl. They were the last she expected to hear from the lips of one who had always treated her with indifference, and almost with hostility.
"Have you ever thought of marriage?" asked the usurer, examining his visitor's face with two small sharp eyes, chilly and grey.
"Marriage!" she gasped, doubting if she had heard aright.