When he found that Gurth had gone away and left the coast clear, he felt sure that something he had said had seriously alarmed him.
As Gertie grew more and more into the young lady, Marston recognised more than ever the likeness to the man who had come to a violent end in Josh Heckett’s gambling den.
Intuitively he felt that Gertie was a thorn in Gurth’s side. For her to be living in his (Marston’s) house, his ward, as it were, would be a strange revolution of the wheel of fate. He felt, moreover, that it would be galling to Gurth. He did not forget that Gurth had once expressed a desire to do something for Gertie himself.
He determined as soon as he was married and had settled down that he would try and find out a little more than he knew at present of the child’s antecedents and of the circumstances of Ralph’s death.
Birnie undoubtedly knew a good deal more than he pretended to and Birnie was not so thick with Gurth for nothing.
Marston remembered that Gurth had confessed it was he who had paid the five hundred pounds Birnie had given him on his return from America.
‘Birnie knows something,’ he said to himself, and I’m not at all sure that Gertie s name wouldn’t figure in his secret if it were revealed. I’m not only doing the right thing in taking care of the child, but ‘believe I’m doing a very judicious thing. She may be a capital buffer one of these days if Mr. Gurth Egerton should come running on to my line in defiance of the danger signals.’
So it was finally settled that Gertie, and Lion should be figures in Ruth’ s new home.
Apart from all other selfish consideration, Marston comforted himself with the idea that if he had driven the child’s natural guardian out of the country, he was with poetic justice providing for her himself.
The more he thought of Gertie, the more it seemed to him that she was to be a central figure in his future.