“Her story,” Wetherell resumed—possibly he had been arranging his thoughts—“is this. Lady Vermuyden was living a life of the wildest gaiety. She had no affection for the child; if the woman is to be believed, she hated it. To part with it was nothing to her one way or the other, and on receipt of Sir Robert’s order to return, her ladyship conceived the idea of punishing him by abducting the child and telling him it was dead. She set out from Florence with it; on the way she left it at Orvieto in charge of the Italian nurse, and arriving in Rome she put about the story of its death. Shortly afterwards she had it carried to England and bred up in an establishment near London—always with the aid and connivance of her maid.”
“The maid’s name?” Vaughan asked.
“Herapath—Martha Herapath. But to proceed. By and by Lady Vermuyden returned to England, and settled at Brighton, and the maid left her and married, but continued to draw a pension from her. Lady Vermuyden persisted here—in the company of Lady Conyng—but I need name no names—in the same course of giddiness, if no worse, which she had pursued abroad; and gave little if any heed to the child. But this woman Herapath never forgot that the pension she enjoyed was dependent on her power to prove the truth: and when a short time back the girl, now well-grown, was withdrawn from her knowledge, she grew restive. She sought Lady Vermuyden, always a creature of impulse, and when her ladyship, foolish in this as in all things, refused to meet her views she—she came to us,” he continued, lifting his head abruptly and looking at Vaughan, “and told us the story.”
“It will have to be proved,” Vaughan said stubbornly.
“No doubt, strictly proved,” Wetherell replied. “In the meantime if you would like to peruse the facts in greater detail, they are here, as taken down from the woman’s mouth.” He drew from his capacious breast-pocket a manuscript consisting of several sheets which he unfolded and flattened on his knee. He handed it to Vaughan.
The young man took it, without looking at Sir Robert: and with his thoughts in a whirl—and underlying them a sick feeling of impending misfortune—he proceeded to read it, line after line, without taking in a single word. For all the time his brain was at work measuring the change. His modest competence would be left to him. He would have enough to live as he was now living, and to pursue his career; or, in the alternative, he might settle down as a small squire in his paternal home in South Wales. But the great inheritance which had loomed large in the background of his life and had been more to him than he had admitted, the future dignity which he had undervalued while he thought it his own, the position more enviable than many a peer’s, and higher by its traditions than any to which he could attain by his own exertions, though he reached the Woolsack—these were gone if Wetherell’s tale was true. Gone in a moment, at a word! And though he might have lost more, though many a man had lost his all by such a stroke and smiled, he was no hero, and he could not on the instant smile. He could not in a moment oust all bitterness. He knew that he was taking the news unworthily; that he was playing a poor part. But he could not force himself to play a better—on the instant. When he had read with unseeing eyes to the bottom of the first page and had turned it mechanically, he let the papers fall upon his knee.
“You do not wish me,” he said slowly, “to express an opinion now, I suppose?”
“No,” Wetherell answered. “Certainly not. But I have not quite done. I have not quite done,” he repeated ponderously. “I should tell you that for opening the matter to you now—we have two reasons, Mr. Vaughan. Two reasons. First, we think it due to you—as one of the family. And secondly, Vermuyden desires that from the beginning, his intentions shall be clear and—be understood.”
“I thoroughly understand them,” Vaughan answered drily. No one was more conscious than he that he was behaving ill.
“That is just what you do not!” Wetherell retorted stolidly. “You spill words, young man, and by and by you will wish to pick them up again. You cannot anticipate, at any rate, you have no right to anticipate, Sir Robert’s intentions, of which he has asked me to be the mouthpiece. The estate, of course, and the settled funds must go to his daughter. But there is, it appears, a large sum arising from the economical management of the property, which is at his disposal. He feels,” Wetherell continued sombrely, an elbow on each knee and his eyes on the floor, “that some injustice has been done to you, and he desires to compensate you for that injustice. He proposes, therefore, to secure to you the succession to two-thirds of this sum; which amounts—which amounts, in the whole I believe”—here he looked at White—“to little short of eighty thousand pounds.”