"Well, yes," he admitted; "several things, and just at the wrong time, too. There seems a kind of fate in it,—as if when one thing began the rest must follow."
The colonel began to bite one end of his long mustache reflectively as he looked at the young man's knitted brow.
"There is one thing you must understand at the outset," he said, at length. "When I can be made useful—supposing such a thing were possible—I am here."
Richard glanced up at him quickly. He looked a little haggard for the moment.
"What a steady, reliable fellow you are!" he said. "Yes, I should be sure of you if—if the worst came to the worst."
The colonel bit the ends of his mustache all the way home, and more than one passer-by on the avenue was aroused to wonder what the subject of his reflections might be, he strode along with so absorbed an air, and frowned so fiercely.
"I should like to know what the worst is," he was saying to himself. "I should like to know what that means."
It was perhaps his desire to know what it meant which led him to cultivate Richard more faithfully still, to join him on the street, to make agreeable bachelor dinners for him, to carry him off to the theatres, and, in a quiet way, to learn something of what he was doing each day. It was, in fact, a delicate diplomatic position the colonel occupied in these days, and it cannot be said that he greatly enjoyed it or liked himself in it. He was too honest by nature to find pleasure in diplomacy, and what he did for another he would never have done for himself. For the sake of the woman who rewarded his generosity and care with frivolous coldness and slight, he had undertaken a task whose weight lay heavily upon him. Since his first suspicions of her danger had been aroused he had been upon the alert continually, and had seen many things to which the more indifferent or less practical were blind. As Richard had casually remarked, he was possessed of a strong business sense and faculty of which he was not usually suspected, and he had seen signs in the air which he felt boded no good for Richard Amory or those who relied on his discretion in business affairs. That the professor had innocently relied upon it when he gave his daughter into his hands he had finally learned; that Bertha never gave other than a transient thought—more than half a jest—to money matters he knew. Her good fortune it had been to be trammelled neither by the weight of money nor the want of it,—a truly enviable condition, which had, not unnaturally, engendered in her a confidence at once unquestioning and somewhat perilous. Tredennis had recalled more than once of late a little scene he had taken part in on one occasion of her signing a legal document Richard had brought to her.
"Shall I sign it here?" she had said, with exaggerated seriousness, "or shall I sign it there? What would happen to me if I wrote on the wrong line? Could not Laurence sign it for me in his government hand, and give it an air of distinction? Suppose my hand trembled and I made a blot? I am not obliged to read it, am I?"
"I think I should insist that she read it," the colonel had said to Richard, with some abruptness.