"That is the fellow," Sir Charles said with obvious surprise, "though how you could know all these things puzzles me. Name of Bentwood. Sartoris was in the room, too. He told me that I had been found wandering about, and he told me that I was in danger of immediate arrest. When I suggested sending for Richford, he said that Richford had come to grief, and that the police were after him. Altogether, my dear child, my situation was not one to be envied."
"I quite understand that," Beatrice said, not without sarcasm.
"My dear, it was dreadful. Richford had come to
grief. So far as I knew to the contrary, my only child was mated to a felon. Think of my mental agony!"
"I don't think we need dwell on that," Beatrice said with some traces of scorn in her voice. "You always knew that Stephen Richford was a scoundrel. He was not the less of a scoundrel because he could give me a position as the wife of a rich man, and because he could free you from a great and terrible danger. My mental agony counted for something too."
"I should think it did," Sir Charles said pompously. "I find that you were married, that all the papers were talking of my strange disappearance. Strangely enough, I never could get a sight of a daily newspaper. I don't know why. At any rate, you were married. Richford had come to grief, and thus was in hourly expectation of arrest. It was at this point that my friend Carl Sartoris came in. He kept me safe, he insisted upon giving me £500 for those concessions, which really was a delicate way of finding me the money to leave the country. Everything was arranged for my departure when the police came to the house of my friend Sartoris and took him off also. Directly I found that out, that something was wrong there, I crept away from the house, and here I am."
Sir Charles held out his hands helplessly. He always expected other people to do things for him. Beatrice began to see her side of the case. Richford was dead, and the large sum of money that he had promised Sir Charles was no longer available. And Beatrice recalled the night of the dinner party, when her father had taken her to the window, and had shown her the two men watching silently below. The danger
was just as great as ever; it was just as imperative that Sir Charles should leave the country.
Out of the whirling emotion in Beatrice's head order began to be restored. Everybody, so far as the girl knew, believed her father to be dead. The body had been spirited away for some reason known to Sartoris and his colleagues; nobody ever expected to see Sir Charles again. If he could slip out of the country now, and go abroad, the danger would be averted. Beatrice began to see her way to manage the thing.
"I will do what I can," she said. "You have that £500 intact? Very good. But there are some things that I am bound to tell you. People who are in a position to know, say that your mining concessions are very valuable indeed."