At first Miss Paget had been inclined to feel aggrieved by the presence of the young man whom she had seen writing letters in the gloomy dusk of the November afternoon; but in due time she came to accept him as a companion, and to feel that her joyless life would have been drearier without him. He was the secretary of the Friendly and Philanthropic Loan Society, and of any other society organised by the Captain. He was Captain Paget's amanuensis and representative—Captain Paget's tool, but not Captain Paget's dupe; for Valentine Hawkehurst was not of that stuff of which dupes are made.
The man who lives by his wits has need of a faithful friend and follower. The chief of the vultures must not be approached too easily. There must be a preparatory ordeal, an outer chamber to be passed, before the victim is introduced to the sanctuary which is irradiated by the silver veil of the prophet. Captain Paget found an able coadjutor in Valentine Hawkehurst, who answered one of those tempting advertisements in which A. B.C. or X. Y. Z. was wont to offer a salary of three hundred a year to any gentlemanly person capable of performing the duties of secretary to a newly-established company. It was only after responding to this promising offer that the applicant was informed that he must possess one indispensable qualification in the shape of a capital of five hundred pounds. Mr Hawkehurst laughed aloud when the Captain imparted this condition with that suave and yet dignified manner which was peculiar to him.
"I ought to have known it was a dodge of that kind," said the young man coolly. "Those very good things—duties light and easy, hours from twelve till four, speedy advancement certain for a conscientious and gentlemanly person, and so on—are always of the genus do. Your advertisement is very cleverly worded, my dear sir; only it's like the rest of them, rather too clever. It is so difficult for a clever man not to be too clever. The prevailing weakness of the human intellect seems to me to be exaggeration. However, as I haven't a five-pound note in the world, or the chance of getting one, I'll wish you good morning, Captain Paget."
There are people whose blood would have been turned to ice by the stony glare of indignation with which Horatio Paget regarded the man who had dared to question his probity. But Mr. Hawkehurst had done with strong impressions long before he met the Captain; and he listened to that gentleman's freezing reproof with an admiring smile. Out of this very unpromising beginning there arose a kind of friendship between the two men. Horatio Paget had for some time been in need of a clever tool; and in the young man whose cool insolence rose superior to his own dignity he perceived the very individual whom he had long been seeking. The young man who was unabashed by the indignation of a scion of Nugents and Cromies and Pagets must be utterly impervious to the sense of awe; and it was just such an impervious young man that the Captain wanted as his coadjutor. Thus arose the alliance, which grew stronger every day, until Valentine took up his abode under the roof of his employer and patron, and made himself more thoroughly at home there than the unwelcome daughter of the house.
The history of Valentine Hawkehurst's past existence was tolerably well known to the Captain; but the only history of the young man's early life ever heard by Diana was rather vague and fragmentary. She discovered, little by little, that he was the son of a spendthrift littérateur, who had passed the greater part of his career within the rules of the King's Bench; that he had run away from home at the age of fifteen, and had tried his fortune in all those professions which require no educational ordeal, and which seem to offer themselves invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the lower class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career he had been a provincial actor, a manège rider in a circus, a billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted these liberal professions that he encountered Captain Paget.
Such was the man whom Horatio Paget admitted to companionship with his only daughter. It can scarcely be pleaded in excuse for the Captain that he might have admitted a worse man than Valentine Hawkehurst to his family circle, for the Captain had never taken the trouble to sound the depths of his coadjutor's nature. There is nothing so short-sighted as selfishness; and beyond the narrow circle immediately surrounding himself, there was no man more blind than Horatio Paget.
* * * * *
It was dusk when Diana grew tired of the lonely pathways among the hills, where the harmonies of a band stationed in the valley were wafted in gusts of music by the fitful summer breeze. The loneliness of the place soothed the girl's feverish spirits; and, seated in a little classic temple upon the summit of a hill, she looked pensively downward through the purple mists at the newly-lighted lamps twinkling faintly in the valley.
"One does not feel the sting of one's shabbiness here," thought Miss
Paget: "the trees are all dressed alike. Nature makes no distinction.
It is only Fortune who treats her children unfairly."
The Captain's daughter walked slowly back to the little town in the deepening dusk. The lodging occupied by Horatio Paget and his household consisted of four roomy chambers on the second story of a big rambling house. The rooms were meanly furnished, and decorated with the tawdry ornamentation dear to the continental mind; but there were long wide windows and an iron balcony, on which Diana Paget was often pleased to sit.