“This is no trivial matter, Jack. Perhaps when you have heard what Mr. Sefton has to tell you may hardly care about the opera—or about seeing Miss Marchant, before you have had time for serious thought.”
“There is nothing that Mr. Sefton—or the four Evangelists—could tell me that would alter my feelings about Miss Marchant by one jot or one tittle,” cried Vansittart, furiously, his angry feeling about this man leaping out of him like a sudden flame.
“Wait,” said the mother, gravely—“wait till you have heard.”
“Begin, Mr. Sefton. My mother’s preamble is eminently calculated to give importance to your communication.”
“I am hardly surprised that you should take the matter somewhat angrily, Vansittart,” said Sefton, in his smooth, persuasive voice. “I dare say I shall appear an officious beast in this business—and, had it not been for Mrs. Vansittart’s express desire, I should not be here to tell you the facts which have come to my knowledge within the last two days. I considered it my duty to tell your mother, because in our previous conversations she has been good enough to allude to old ties of friendship between your father and my father—and this made a claim upon me.”
“Proem the second,” cried Vansittart, impatiently. “When are we coming to facts?”
“The facts are so uncommonly disagreeable that I may be pardoned for approaching them diffidently. You know, I believe, that Miss Marchant has a brother——”
“Who disappeared some years ago, and about whose fate you have busied yourself,” interrupted Vansittart, with ever-growing impatience.
“All my efforts to trace Harold Marchant’s movements after his departure from Mashonaland resulted in failure, until the day before yesterday, when one of the two men whom I employed to make inquiries turned up at my house in Tite Street as suddenly as if he had dropped from the moon. This man is a courier and jack-of-all-trades, as clever and handy a dog as ever lived, a man who has travelled in all the quarters of the globe, a Venetian. When I began the search for Miss Marchant’s brother, I put the business in the first place into the hands of a highly respectable private detective; but as a second string to my bow it occurred to me to send a full statement of the circumstances, and a careful description of the missing man, to my old acquaintance, Ferrari, the courier, who travelled with my poor father on the sea-board of Italy for several months, and who helped to nurse him on his sick-bed.”
Vansittart bridled his tongue, but could not keep himself from drumming with his fingers on the dainty silver table and setting all the toy harpsichords, and sofas, and bird-cages, and watering-pots, and tiny tables rattling.