It was a merry night at Number Nine. Jim's wife became the mistress at once. She knew where everything was to be found, as well as if she had been there for a year, and played the hostess to Mr. and Mrs. Balfour as agreeably as if her life had been devoted to the duties of her establishment.
Mr. Balfour could not make a long stay in the woods, but had determined to leave his wife there with the boys. His business was pressing at home, and he had heard something while at Sevenoaks that made him uneasy on Mr. Benedict's account. The latter had kept himself very quiet while at the wedding, but his intimacy with one of Mr. Balfour's boys had been observed, and there were those who detected the likeness of this boy, though much changed by growth and better conditions, to the little Harry Benedict of other days. Mr. Balfour had overheard the speculations of the villagers on the strange Mr. Williams who had for so long a time been housed with Jim Fenton, and the utterance of suspicions that he was no other than their old friend, Paul Benedict. He knew that this suspicion would be reported by Mr. Belcher's agent at once, and that Mr. Belcher would take desperate steps to secure himself in his possessions. What form these measures would take—whether of fraud or personal violence—he could not tell.
He advised Mr. Benedict to give him a power of attorney to prosecute Mr. Belcher for the sum due him on the use of his inventions, and to procure an injunction on his further use of them, unless he should enter into an agreement to pay such a royalty as should be deemed equitable by all the parties concerned. Mr. Benedict accepted the advice, and the papers were executed at once.
Armed with this document, Mr. Balfour bade good-bye to Number Nine and its pleasant company, and hastened back to the city, where he took the first opportunity to report to his friends the readiness of Jim to receive them for the summer.
It would be pleasant to follow them into their forest pastimes, but more stirring and important matters will hold us to the city.
CHAPTER XXIII.
IN WHICH MR. BELCHER EXPRESSES HIS DETERMINATION TO BECOME A "FOUNDER," BUT DROPS HIS NOUN IN FEAR OF A LITTLE VERB OF THE SAME NAME.
Mrs. Dillingham had a difficult rôle to play. She could not break with Mr. Belcher without exposing her motives and bringing herself under unpleasant suspicion and surveillance. She felt that the safety of her protégé and his father would be best consulted by keeping peace with their enemy; yet every approach of the great scoundrel disgusted and humiliated her. That side of her nature which had attracted and encouraged him was sleeping, and, under the new motives which were at work within her, she hoped that it would never wake. She looked down the devious track of her past, counted over its unworthy and most unwomanly satisfactions, and wondered. She looked back to a great wrong which she had once inflicted on an innocent man, with a self-condemnation so deep that all the womanhood within her rose into the purpose of reparation.
The boy whom she had called to her side, and fastened by an impassioned tenderness more powerful even than her wonderful art, had become to her a fountain of pure motives. She had a right to love this child. She owed a duty to him beyond any woman living. Grasping her right, and acknowledging her duty—a right and duty accorded to her by his nominal protector—she would not have forfeited them for the world. They soon became all that gave significance to her existence, and to them she determined that her life should be devoted. To stand well with this boy, to be loved, admired and respected by him, to be to him all that a mother could be, to be guided by his pure and tender conscience toward her own reformation, to waken into something like life and nourish into something like strength the starved motherhood within her—these became her dominant motives.