Sir Francis seemed not to understand this explanation: it was hardly to be expected he should do so; but, with the indifference to minor inconsistencies natural to his condition, he passed it over; and, after a short pause, he said, reverting to his former idea, “The legacy is safe enough, my dear. Grant was Grantley—that is all the matter with him. If he’d been any one else, I’d not be lying here to-day. Your husband may keep his twenty thousand pounds, and much good may it do him! There’s not much worth having in this world, but money’s the best worth having of what there is.” He stopped for a few moments. “It just happens,” he continued, “that ’twas about this same Grantley I wanted to speak to you. ’Tis not worth while, perhaps; but when a man’s going to die, a secret is of no good to him—all the more if it’s a secret that has been bothering him all his life. I’ve been the slave of more secrets than one, and they’ve never shown me any mercy: but ’tis my turn now; for I can reveal ’em, and they can do me no harm! I can laugh at ’em, begad! and not be a penny the worse for it. But for all that, my dear, I wouldn’t have told ’em to any one but you. There’s something about you—always was—different from any other creature I ever met. Your husband’s a lucky fellow; and if he’s not the happiest fellow, and the best, that ever breathed, then stifle me if he isn’t a fool and a villain!”
“You misjudge me and him,” said Marion, speaking between her set teeth. “I am ready to hear about Mr. Grant, Sir Francis.” But at this point her self-command gave way, and she burst into a passion of tears—the first she had shed since her quarrel with Philip the morning before. The baronet, who could not suppose that anything he had said had given occasion for this outbreak, allowed himself the flattery of believing that it was compassion for his own state that moved her—a delusion that did neither of them any harm; and possibly it was not so entirely a delusion that some such sentiment may not have added itself to Marion’s deeper causes of unhappiness. At all events, by the time she had regained control of herself, the feeling between the two had become gentler and more sympathetic.
“ ’Tis somewhat late in the day to find a friend who can be sorry for me,” remarked the baronet ruefully: “and there have been times when I might have looked for it more than I do now. Grantley and I were friends; but affairs turned out so, that one or other of us had to give up everything: and he was the one to do it. It looks pretty bad, in one way; but the amount of it was that I cared more for myself than I did for him; and there’s not many men who might not confess to as much as that. Besides, I had more to lose than he had: I was the head of the house, and the name and the existence of the business would go with me. But ’twas a damned gentlemanly thing of him to do what he did, and I’m free to confess I wouldn’t have done it in his place. ’Tis bad enough to suffer for your own fault, but it must be a hard business to go down for the fault of another man—though that’s what often happens in this world, whether we want it or not. You see, my dear, there was always a bit of the gambler in me, and I used to have wonderful luck. When I was quite a young fellow, I used to sit up night after night at the clubs, and it struck me that since where one fortune was made and kept, ten to a score were lost, it would be a good plan to arrange matters so that what so many lost, one should win—and I that one. One thing led to another, and the end of it was that I set up a place called Raffett’s—though only two or three men knew that I had anything to do with it; and all I need say about it now is, that more money came to us by that quiet little place, than by the bank itself: aye, a good deal more, begad!
“A hundred times I might have sold out for enough to buy half Old Jewry with: but I liked the fun of the thing, and there seemed no chance of losing. We did lose, at last, though, and by wholesale, too. There was no accounting for it: ’twas more like a special miracle than anything I ever knew of. I knew the luck must change some time, so I kept putting in to fill up the hole, until I put in all of my own that I had in the world. Then I took from the bank: hadn’t any business to do it, of course; but it was sure to come all right in the end, if nobody found it out. That was the weak point: somebody did find it out; and Grantley was the man. He came straight to me, and asked me what I was about. I tried to stop him off; but it wouldn’t do. He forced me to own up: and then the question came, What was to happen next? I was a ruined man, and the bank was as good as gone, if the truth came out. Grantley was a careful fellow, and he had saved a vast deal of money; and I asked him to help me out of the scrape. We looked into the thing—he cared a great deal for me in those days, and as much, maybe, for the credit of the bank—and found that it would take all he’d got to make good only what was gone from the bank, not to speak of the rest of it; and to make it worse, there was no way of putting the money back without betraying that it had been taken out irregularly.
“But at last he got an idea, and I give him credit for it. ‘It must become known, Frank,’ he said to me, ‘that the bank has been robbed by somebody. You are the bank, and it stands or falls with you. It won’t make so much difference about me. You may have what I’ve got, and I’ll leave the country. Let ’em think I took it, and that you replaced it. I can make my own way, somewhere else, under another name; and the concern will be saved. Take care of my wife and child: it won’t do to take them with me, but maybe I can send for them after a bit. And do you let gambling alone for the future.’
“It was a good offer, and I took it, as most men would have done in my place. I’m not sure, now, but I might as well have let it alone. At any rate, off he went, and that was the last I heard from him for twenty years, except when I sent him word, a little while after, that his wife had died. He wrote back asking me to educate the child, and do the best I could for her: where he was, was no place for her. Meanwhile, I was contriving to keep along, but no more: we never had any luck after he left. That confounded Raffett’s kept draining me: I had ceased to be the owner of the place, as I had promised him; but the other men had a hold on me, by threatening to expose me if I didn’t let ’em have what they wanted; and they wanted more than I could find of my own to give ’em. So, what with one thing and another, when he came back under his assumed name last year, he found things pretty nearly in as bad a way as when he went off.
“I may have been mistaken,” continued the baronet, speaking in a more uncertain tone; “but I had been worried so much, and had so much underhand fighting to do, that I thought Grantley meant me no good. He had in his possession some papers—letters that had passed between us, and other things—that enabled him, if he chose, to turn me out of house and home and into jail at a day’s notice. I might have stood it for myself; but there was my boy Tom: and I felt that I could sooner kill Grantley than let Tom know I hadn’t been what they call an honest man. There was Perdita, too: he would be sure to make himself known to his own daughter if to nobody else; and he wouldn’t be likely to do that without letting her know that he was not the man who robbed the bank. And if Perdita knew it, all London would know it, for she never was a friend of mine, and would jump at a chance to ruin me.”
“You are wrong,” said Marion, who was sitting with her hands tightly clasped in her lap, and her eyes fixed with a sad sternness upon the narrator: “Madame Desmoines has had the papers within her reach for six months, and has never opened them until, perhaps, yesterday.”
“Well, right or wrong makes no difference now. I tried to make Grantley give me back the papers, by fair means: and when he refused, I was more than ever persuaded he meant mischief; so I resolved to get them in spite of him. I found he always carried them about with him: and then I thought there was no way for it but to hire a footpad to rob him. But it was too risky a job to trust to any one....”
Marion rose, and stood, with one trembling hand grasping the back of her chair. She could bear it no longer.