‘I shall live the life of a gentleman. Not in England. My daughter wants to get me out of the country. She said as much just now; or, at any rate, what she did say implied as much. A continental life would suit my humour, and perhaps mend my health. Annuitants are long-lived.’
‘Not when they drink a bottle of brandy a day.’
‘In a milder climate I may diminish the quantity. Give me a hundred in ready money to begin with, and I’ll go back to London by the first train to-morrow morning, and start for Paris at night. I ask for no father’s place at your Christmas table. I don’t want you to kill the fatted calf for me.’
‘I understand,’ said Treverton, with an involuntary sneer, ‘you only want money. You shall have it.’
He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, and unlocked a despatch box, in which he was in the habit of keeping money received from his steward before he sent it off to the bank. There was a little over a hundred pounds in the box, in notes and gold. John Treverton counted a hundred; the crisp notes, the bright gold, lay in a tempting heap on the table before him, but he kept his hand upon the money for a minute or two, while he sat looking at it with a meditative countenance.
‘By the way, Mr. —— Mansfield,’ he began after that thoughtful silence, ‘when, after a lapse of so many years, you presented yourself to your daughter, what credentials did you bring with you?’
‘Credentials?’
‘Yes. In other words, how did you prove your identity? You had parted with her when she was a child of six years old. Did her memory recall your features when she met you as a girl of seventeen, or did she take your word for the fact that you were the father she had believed to be in his grave?’
‘She remembered me when I recalled myself to her. At first her memory was naturally vague. She had a dim recollection of my face, but no certainty as to when and where she had last seen it, until I recalled to her the circumstances of her childhood, the last days we spent together before my serious illness, her mother, the baby brother that died when she was three years old. John Treverton, you libel nature if you suppose that a daughter’s instinct can fail her when a father appeals to it. Had material proofs been wanted to convince my child that her father stood before her, I had those proofs, and I showed them to her—old letters, the certificate of her birth, her mother’s picture. The portrait I gave to Laura. I have the documents about me to-night. I have never parted with them.’
He produced a bloated pocket-book, the leather worn greasy with long usage, the silk lining frayed and ragged, and from this receptacle brought forth half-a-dozen papers, yellow with age.