‘Nearer, perhaps, than you would care to hear; so near that I have some right to know how you, Jack Chicot, came to be her husband—how it was that you married her a year ago, at which period the lovely and accomplished Madame Chicot, whom I had the honour to know, was still living? Either that charming woman was not your wife, or your marriage with Laura Malcolm is invalid.’
‘Laura is my wife, and her marriage as valid as law can make it,’ answered John Treverton. ‘That is enough for you to know. And now be good enough to explain your degree of kindred with Mrs. Treverton. You say your real name is Malcolm. What was your relationship with Laura’s father?’
‘Laura urged me to trust you with my secret,’ muttered Desrolles, throwing himself into his former seat by the fire, and speaking like a man who is calculating the chances of a certain line of policy. ‘Why should I not be frank with you, Jack—Treverton? How much handier the old name comes! Had you been the punctilious piece of respectability I expected to meet in the heir of my old friend Jasper Treverton, I might have shrank from telling you a secret that hardly redounds to my credit, from the churchgoer and ratepayer’s point of view. But to you—Jack—the artist and Bohemian, the man who has tumbled on every platform and acted in every show at the world’s fair—to you I may confide my secret without a blush. Come, fill me another glass, like a good fellow; my hand shakes as if I had the scrivener’s palsy. You know the history of Jasper Treverton’s adopted daughter?’
‘I have heard it, naturally.’
‘You have heard how Treverton, who had quarrelled with his friend Stephen Malcolm about a foolish love affair, was summoned many years after to that friend’s sick bed—found him dying, as every one supposed—then and there adopted Malcolm’s only child, and carried her off with him, leaving a fifty-pound note to comfort his old friend’s last moments and pay the undertaker?’
‘Yes, I have heard all this.’
‘But not what follows. When a doctor gives a patient up for dead, he is sometimes on the high road to recovery. Stephen Malcolm contrived to cheat the doctor. Perhaps it was the comfort provided by that fifty-pound note, perhaps it was the knowledge that his only child’s future was provided for,—anyhow, it seemed as if a burden had been lifted from the sick man’s shoulders, for from the time Jasper Treverton left him he mended, got a new lease of life, and went out into the world again—a lonely wayfarer, happy in the knowledge that his daughter’s fate was no longer allied with his, that whatever evil might befall him her lines were set in pleasant places.’
‘Do you mean to tell me that Stephen Malcolm recovered—lived for years—and allowed his daughter to suppose herself an orphan, and his friend to believe him dead?’
‘To tell the truth would have been to hazard his daughter’s good fortune. As an orphan, and the adopted child of a rich bachelor, her lot was secure. What would it have been if she had been flung back upon her actual father, to share his precarious existence? I considered this, and took the unselfish view of the question. I might have claimed my daughter back; I might have sponged on Jasper. I did neither—I went my solitary way, along the stony highway of life, uncheered, unloved.’
‘You!’ cried John Treverton. ‘You!’