Captain Garth, as has been said before, was not wholly ill-natured. Five years before he had had some hand in the ruining of Wallace Armstrong, then a high-spirited lad of one-and-twenty, and known to be the favourite nephew of a wealthy Scotch banker. At that time Garth was the secret proprietor of a gambling club, and it was to meet the liabilities contracted there that young Armstrong forged his uncle's name, and was subsequently banished from his native country and his uncle's favour. The gambling club in question had been raided and dispersed long ago; but Garth had evaded the law and taken up his residence abroad. He was now really sorry to note the shabbiness and recklessness of his former dupe, and was casting about in his mind as to whether he could not assist him with possible profit to himself.
"Come up to my diggings!" he said, cheerily. "My little girl will cook us a cutlet and mix a French salad as well as any waiter in Paris!"
"Your little girl? I didn't know you had any family!"
"Mrs. Garth died in England three years ago," returned the Captain. "She was a very good woman, according to her lights; but—h'm—a little narrow, you know! Country rector's sister, kept house for him in a Sussex village, fell in love with a handsome blue-eyed young racing-man she saw in church. I like church—it's an institution that ought to be kept up. And eighteen years ago, Armstrong,—though I say it that shouldn't—there wasn't a better-looking fellow at Goodwood than Randolph Garth. I have always been weak—I own it—where a pretty woman is concerned; and the late Mrs. Garth was certainly pretty, though she was eight-and-twenty when I first met her, and had never had an offer. That sly old brother of hers drove would-be suitors away—wanted to keep her little pittance—just a beggarly life-interest in three hundred a year in the family, d'ye see? But she fell in love, as pretty women will, quarrelled with her family, ran away to London, and met and married me by appointment in an old church in the City. As to the little misunderstandings which followed, no doubt each of us was a little to blame; but Mrs. Garth was a lady, and never made scenes. Our methods of life didn't suit; so ten years ago we parted quite amicably, and my wife settled down with our little girl Laline in a cottage in the Lake district, where I visited them occasionally. Three years ago Mrs. Garth died very suddenly, and her income died with her. So my little girl had to come over and rough it in Boulogne with her father."
Such was the story of his marriage, detailed airily by Captain Garth—a story true in the main, but with many touches omitted which would have lent meaning and pathos to the whole. The story of a good and tender woman's mistake, of her gradual disillusion and growing hopelessness, and of the self-sacrifice by which, at last, she forfeited annually one-third of her little income to her worthless husband, in order that she might keep and educate her child far from the gambling, drinking, and unscrupulous set to which the man she had once so loved belonged.
Possibly, had Wallace Armstrong paid much attention to Garth's story, he might have read between the lines some of these truths; but he was at present too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble himself with the autobiography of a man whom he despised and mistrusted.
The Rue Planché, where Captain Garth's lodgings were situated, was a mean street in the High Town, composed of tumble-down ill-built little houses, painted in various tints of cream-and-mustard colour, one storey high, and furnished with green shutters and little back gardens liberally adorned with clothes to dry.
One worn step only divided No. 7, Rue Planché, from the street. The front door was open as the two men approached, showing a very narrow, brick-paved passage, and the linen-hung garden beyond, in which la mère Bénoîte, the Captain's landlady, was engaged in hanging up clothes. The Captain's rooms comprised a little salon on the right, and a little salle-à-manger on the left of the entrance, and up-stairs two tiny bedrooms; but before now Mr. Garth had put up a friend on the sofa of one of the ground-floor rooms, and he was prepared to offer a similar privilege to the nephew of Alexander Wallace.
The salon was the Captain's special den. Although the window was open, the scent of spirits and stale tobacco hung on the air, a few sporting prints adorned the walls, and the Captain's desk was littered by cuttings from sporting papers. A card-table stood in the middle of the room, and an empty bottle of cognac, half a dozen glasses, and a dirty well-thumbed pack of cards clearly showed the manner in which the Captain had spent the preceding evening. Nothing in this room was removed except by Garth's special permission; but when he caught sight of the sardonic expression on his visitor's face, he shut the door somewhat hastily, and inwardly regretted that he had not ordered the place to be put straight before leaving home that morning.
"At your old tricks, I see," Armstrong observed, an unpleasant smile curving his full lips under his heavy black moustache.