CHAPTER XIV
INHERITANCE
Alone in his own room, high up in the northern tower of Melbourne Hall, the Earl locked the door and turned up the lights with the air of a man who has a considerable task before him and must make the most of the hours of grace remaining.
He was very pale and greatly changed since he had returned from London three hours ago. Some would have perceived in his manner, not the evidences of fear but of displeasure, and such displeasure as events bordering upon tragedy alone could provoke. Uttering but one harsh instruction to the servant who answered his bell, he sat at his writing table and for a full hour turned over the pages of a diary which had not seen the light for twenty years or more.
Georges Odin! How the very name could seize upon his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Sitting there with the time-stained papers before him, the Earl was no longer in Derbyshire but out upon the Carpathians, a youth of the West craving for the excitements of the East; a hunter upon a brave horse, the friend of brigands and of outlaws—drinking deep of the intoxicating draughts of freedom and debauch. Well and truly had this young Count, whom Fate had sent to his door, reminded him of these scenes he had made it his life's purpose to forget.
"Zallony, my lord," he had said, "Zallony still lives and you were one of Zallony's band. They tell of your crimes to this day. The mad Englishman who carried the village girls to the hills—the mad Englishman who drank when no other could lift the cup—the mad Englishman who rode out of Bukharest in a bandit's cloak and lived the Bohemian days of which the very gypsies were ashamed. Shall I tell you his name? It would be that of my father's murderer."
And the answer had been a cringing evasion.
"I met Georges Odin in fair fight. He was the better man. I could show the scars his sword left to this day. Of what do you accuse me? They sent him to prison—well, I did not make their laws. He died there, a convict laborer in the salt mines. Was it my doing? Ask those at the Ministry. We moved heaven and earth to save him. The Government's reason was a political one. They sent your father to the mines because the Russian Government—then all powerful at Bukharest—believed him to be its most dangerous enemy. His affair with me was the excuse. What had I to do with it?"
But the Count persisted.
"Your influence would have saved him. You preferred to keep silent, my lord. And I will tell you more. It was at your instigation that the Roumanian Government arrested my father in the first place. You wished for revenge—I think it was more than that. You were afraid that the woman you married would find you out if Georges Odin regained his liberty. You were not sure that Dora d'Istran did not love him. And so—you left Roumania and took her with you—luckily for you both—to die before she had read her own heart truly. That's what I have come this long way to tell you. To Robert Forrester—I said. How should I know that in England they would make a lord of such a man! I did not know it; but that to me is the same. You shall answer my question or pay the price. My lord, I have brains of my own and I can use them. You shall pay me what you owe—you will be wise to do so."