Pratt smiled—a queer, knowing smile—and reached out his hand to some papers which lay on his desk.
"You're wrong there, Mr. Eldrick," he said. "But of course, you don't
know. I didn't know myself, nor did Mrs. Mallathorpe, until lately. But
I have a claim—and a good one—to get a business lift from Mrs.
Mallathorpe. I'm a relation."
"What—of the Mallathorpe family?" exclaimed Eldrick, whose legal mind was at once bitten by notion of kinship and succession, and who knew that Harper Mallathorpe was supposed to have no male relatives at all, of any degree. "You don't mean it?"
"No!—but of hers, Mrs. Mallathorpe," answered Pratt. "My mother was her cousin. I found that out by mere chance, and when I'd found it, I worked out the facts from our parish church register. They're all here—fairly copied—Mrs. Mallathorpe has seen them. So I have some claim—even if it's only that of a poor relation."
Eldrick took the sheets of foolscap which Pratt handed to him, and looked them over with interest and curiosity. He was something of an expert in such matters, and had helped to edit a print more than once of the local parish registers. He soon saw from a hasty examination of the various entries of marriages and births that Pratt was quite right in what he said.
"I call it a poor—and a mean—game," remarked Pratt, while his old master was thus occupied, "a very mean game indeed, of well-to-do folk like Mr. Collingwood and Mr. Robson to want to injure me in a matter which is no business of theirs. I shall do my duty by Mrs. Mallathorpe—you yourself know I'm fully competent to do it—and I shall fully earn the percentage that she'll pay me. What right have these people—what right has her daughter—to come between me and my living?"
"Oh, well, well!" said Eldrick, as he handed back the papers and rose. "It's one of those matters that hasn't been understood. You made a mistake, you know, Pratt, when you went to see Mrs. Mallathorpe yesterday in her daughter's absence. You shouldn't have done that."
Pratt pulled open a drawer and, after turning over some loose papers, picked out a letter.
"Do you know Mrs. Mallathorpe's handwriting?" he asked. "Very well—there it is! Isn't that a request from her that I should call on her yesterday afternoon? Very well then!"
Eldrick looked at the letter with some surprise. He had a good memory, and he remembered that Collingwood had told him that Nesta had said that Pratt had gone to Normandale Grange, seen Esther Mawson, and told her that it was absolutely necessary for him to see Mrs. Mallathorpe. And though Eldrick was naturally unsuspicious, an idea flashed across his mind—had Pratt got Mrs. Mallathorpe to write that letter while he was there—yesterday—and brought it away with him?