"Melrose's wife and daughter! Great Scot! So they're not dead?" Tatham stood amazed.
"He seems to have done his best to kill them. They're starved—and destitute. But here they are."
"And why in the name of fortune do they come to us?"
"We are cousins, my dear—and I saw her twenty years ago. It isn't a bad move. Indeed the foolish woman might have come before."
"But what on earth can we do for them?"
The young man sat down bewildered, while his mother told the story, piecing it together from the rambling though copious narrative, which she had gathered that morning from Netta in her bed, where she had been forced to remain, at least for breakfast.
After her flight, Melrose's fugitive wife had settled down with her child in Florence, under the wing of her own family. But they were a shiftless, importunate crew, and, in the course of years, every one of them came more or less visibly to grief. Her sisters married men of the same dubious world as themselves, and were always in difficulties. Netta's eldest brother got into trouble with the bank where he was employed, and another brother, as a deserter from the army, had to make his escape to South America. The father, Robert Smeath, had found it more and more difficult to earn anything on which to keep his belongings, and as a picture dealer seemed to have fallen into bad odour with the Italian authorities, for reasons of which Netta could give no account.
"And how much do you think Mr. Melrose allowed his wife and child?" asked Victoria, her eyes sparkling. "Eighty pounds a year!—on which in the end the whole family seem to have lived. Finally, the mother died, and Mr. Smeath got into some scrape or other—I naturally avoided the particulars—which involved pledging half Mrs. Melrose's allowance for five years. And on the rest—forty pounds—she and her daughter, and her old father have been trying to live for the last two. You never heard such a story! They found a small half-ruined villa in the mountains north of Pisa, and there they somehow existed. They couldn't afford nursing or doctoring for the old father; they were half starved; the mother and daughter have both actually worked in the vineyards; and, of course, they had no servant. You should see the poor woman's hands! Then she began to write to her husband. No reply—for eighteen months, no reply—till just lately, an intimation from the Florentine bank, that if any more similar letters were addressed to Mr. Melrose the allowance would be stopped."
"Old fiend!" cried Tatham, "now we'll get at him!"
Victoria went on to describe how, at last, an English family who had taken one of the old villas on the Luccan Alps for the summer had come across the forlorn trio. They were scandalized by the story, and they had impressed on Mrs. Melrose that she and her daughter had a legal right to suitable maintenance from her husband. Urged by them—and starvation—Netta had at last plucked up courage. The old father was left in the charge of a contadino family, a small loan was raised for them to which the English visitors contributed, and the mother and daughter started for home.