A few weeks afterwards poor lonely Gerty returned, and Mary. Richards constituted himself Miss Keane’s guardian. Indeed it had been Keane’s last wishes that he should do so. And, strange to say, the ruling passion had manifested itself strongly in death; for by the help of a priest he had written a letter to Richards, praying him, for the sake of their long acquaintanceship and friendship, to see that Gerty married Sir Digby. He died, he said, peacefully, knowing she would yet be Lady Auld.
“A dying man’s last request,” said Richards to himself, “ought to be attended to; but—”
Then he solemnly placed the letter in the fire, and it was cremated.
Sir Digby made himself as comfortable as possible in the Fleet. Richards did not think it safe he should come out. Gerty was a strange girl. Her heart bled for the poor man, as she called him. For sake of her father’s memory, there was no denying that she might even yet sacrifice herself.
D’Orsay paid many visits to Sir Digby in prison. He really acted like a true friend, and did all he could for him. He had even gone to see his old brother, and come back, figuratively speaking, with a finger in his mouth.
“No good in that quarter,” he told Sir Digby bluntly. “Says you’re a spendthrift and a ne’er-do-weel, and that he means to live for twenty years yet; and ’pon honour, Digby, he looks as if he could. I did hear too that he was looking out for a wife.”
“I shall go and see my hero in his dark dungeon, in his prison cell, in his chains and misery.”
These are words spoken by Miss Gordon heroically to herself in the mirror one morning. She had strange ideas of the Fleet.
She was astonished to find her hero in a flowered dressing-gown, smoking a Havana, which he threw into the fire when he saw her, and living in a handsomely-furnished room.