OR more than twenty years, dating back from the time our story commenced, Richards had been a partner in the firm of Griffiths, Keane, and Co.; yet although he was almost every day in the company of Mr. Keane, he could neither love nor respect him. Perhaps had he been less with him he might have respected him more. But he knew him too well; knew him to be Keane by name and keen by nature—avaricious, grasping, and miserly in the extreme, and for the sake of adding to his stores of gold, very far indeed from scrupulous. His niggardly habits had undoubtedly hurried his wife to her grave, when Gerty was little more than a baby, and she was left to the tender mercies of a nurse and governess. In the transaction of his business Richards was constantly at his partner’s home, and usually stayed to dine; but for the sake of the child Gerty, he made many and many a visit to the house after her mother’s death, when he had no real business to transact. “Poor little mite!” he thought; “she is so lonely, and she sees no one; has no one to love save her father, to whom she is merely ‘the child.’”
It used to vex poor great-hearted Richards to the core to hear Keane snap out, “Take away that child; it’s troublesome.”
“Nay, nay,” Richards would say, lifting the mite from the hearth-rug to his knee, “let me have the darling a minute.”
“Richards, you’re a fool!” Keane would growl.
And with one arm round her protector’s neck, her cheeks wet with tears, the mite would gaze round-eyed and in saddened silence at her unnatural father. It is no wonder that she grew up to love Richards. What stories he used to tell her! what fun he used to make for her! how he entered heart and soul into all her games and romps, as if he himself were but a boy in reality, as he was in his heart of hearts!
But the psychical mystery is how she could have come to love her father so. Yes, as the reader already knows, she did love him, and love him to that extent that she was willing to sacrifice her own happiness to his ambition, and marry a man whom she loathed if she did actually not detest.
A bachelor, with no expenses worth naming, Richards had saved quite a small fortune in his time; and when he came to find out that Keane was going positively to sell his daughter to the worn-out roué Sir Digby, that for his own advancement he might see her ere long a lord’s wife, Richards thumped his fist down on his desk—he was alone at the time—till even the big ink-bottle leaped an inch up from the table.
“I’ll save that darling child,” he had said, “if I spend every penny I have earned, and lose my life into the bargain.”
He smiled to himself a moment after.