Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

CHAPTER X.

Cyril Mowbray did not seem to feel quite as jubilant as he might have done, when it was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, that Claude was alive. The income that would be his when he reached the age of twenty-five was a small one, and quite insufficient to allow of his keeping three hunters and driving a coach, to say nothing of that two-hundred-ton yacht upon which he had set his heart.

He considered that he was, on the whole, very hardly dealt with by Fate, for he felt convinced that he was meant by Nature to be a country gentleman in affluent circumstances and without need to take thought for all the unlet farms that might be on his property. He considered it especially hard that he should be cheated out of his money—that was how he put it—by the reappearance of Claude. He had great confidence in his own ability to persuade his sister to part with her money. To whom should she give her money if not to her own brother, he inquired of such persons as he took into his confidence on the subject of his grievances.

His confidence in his capacity to get his sister's money into his possession was but too well-founded. During the year of idleness that followed his being sent down from the University, he had been a terrible burden to Agnes, for it was in vain that she pleaded with him to seek to qualify himself for some employment in which a University degree was not necessary; he refused to listen to her, saying that he was fit for nothing but the life of a country gentleman.

That was certainly the life which he had led for a year, at his sister's expense. He was a great burden to her, but she was extremely fond of him, and she was a woman.

Lizzie Dangan had left the neighbourhood without revealing to any one the fact that she had had a secret interview with Mr. Westwood within twenty yards of where his body had been found in the morning, and also without being reconciled to her father, the gamekeeper, though Agnes made an attempt to get the man to forgive his daughter for her lapse. The man had always been a strict father, giving his children an excellent education, and insisting on their going to church with praiseworthy regularity. It was therefore mortifying for him to find that his two sons had enlisted in a cavalry regiment and that his one daughter had neglected the excellent precepts of life which he had taught her by the aid of a birch rod.

It was probably the sense of his own failure in regard to his children that made him refuse to be reconciled to Lizzie. He had shown himself all his life to be a hard and morose man, discharging his duties with rigid exactness, and being quite intolerant of the lapses of the people about him. After the death of Mr. Westwood and the departure of his daughter, he became more morose than ever, scarcely speaking to any one on the estate, and rarely leaving the precincts of the park. Some of the servants said that, after all, he had been attached to Mr. Westwood, but others said that he was grieving because Lizzie had not been allowed to starve to death in expiation of her fault. He had more than once said that he hoped he would see her in her coffin for bringing shame upon his house, but until she was lying in her coffin he would not have her brought before him.

It was after her departure that Cyril began to feel a trifle lonely. He missed his stolen interviews with the girl, and above all he missed the sense of being engaged in an intrigue that was attended with the greatest risk, and which he flattered himself had been carried on without awaking the suspicions of any one, except his too considerate friend, Dick Westwood. Even the excitement of the trial and the consciousness of being a person of the greatest importance in connection with the case for the Crown, failed to compensate him for the absence of Lizzie, especially as, within a week after the conviction of Standish, the Crown no longer regarded him as a person of distinction. To be the chief witness for the Crown had seemed in his eyes pretty much the same thing as to be on speaking terms with Royalty; and when he found himself, after he had served the purposes of the prosecution, cast aside in favour of a farm labourer, who became the hero of the moment because he had detected a man loitering in the neighbourhood of certain hay ricks that had been burnt down, he was ready to indulge in many philosophical reflections upon the fickleness of Royalty. He felt like the discarded favourite of a Prince.

Thus it was that he became an intolerable burden to his sister, and the subject of unfavourable predictions uttered by the most far-seeing people of the neighbourhood, although his worst enemies could not say that he was not improving at billiards. It was universally admitted that he was making satisfactory progress in the study of this fascinating game; a fact which shows that if one only practises for six hours a day at anything, one will, eventually, become proficient at it.