"Ramsay," he asserted vigorously, "it was just that false accusation which sent me to the devil. I was on the brink before, but that fairly toppled me over. And, as God is my witness, whatever sins I have committed since that time must be laid to the charge of that real thief, whoever he may have been."
"How did you manage to get out of it?" I asked.
"Simply because my uncle, Sir Benjamin Plowden—a pious, New Jerusalem patriarch of East India Avenue—not caring to have the family name figuring in the police reports, took the matter in hand, and used his influence to square it."
"Sir Benjamin Plowden!" I gasped. "You don't mean to tell me Sir Benjamin is your uncle?"
"He was my father's brother. My real name is Plowden. But, good gracious, man, you don't surely know him?"
"Know him! Why, I should rather think I do! Wasn't I in his office for years? And wasn't I engaged to his daughter Maud until I was blackguard enough to think her false to me?"
Veneda was silent. After a while he said, as I thought, rather sadly—
"What a rat-trap of a world it is, after all! Ramsay, this is too much of a coincidence; there's fatality in it. Fate must have willed that we should meet!... And so you were engaged to little Maud! By Jove! how well I remember her—a tiny slip of a thing in a white frock, tied up with blue ribbons. She came into her father's study one day when I was waiting for him, pretended she came for a book, but I believe myself it was just to steal a look at wicked Cousin Marmaduke, whom the women-folk had piously permitted to figure in her mind as a sort of cross between Giant Blunderbore and the devil. Perhaps Cousin Satan was not quite so ugly as she had expected him to be, for when Sir Benjamin entered later, he found us seated side by side on the hearthrug, making paper boats. I can see his face now! And so—she's a grown woman!—and I—well, I'm just a derelict on the ocean of life, useless to myself, and harmful to my fellow-men. But there, I can't complain; I've made my bed, and I suppose I must lie on it. Ramsay, shall I tell you what I was going to do if I had reached home?"
"What?"
"I should have been a rich man, remember. And I had figured it that I would purchase an estate in a county where nobody would know my past, marry some nice quiet English girl, and settle down to bring up my children, if I had any, to be as honest as their father was crooked, to do good to my neighbours, and when I went down to my grave, to have lived so that somebody should be able to say, 'There's an English gentleman gone to his rest!' An English gentleman, mark you, and there's no prouder title under the sun than that. As it is, I shall peg out here, cut off from all who knew me, and—as somebody has it—going into my grave 'unwept, unhonoured, and unsung!' A grand end, isn't it?"