We need not follow Luigi in his narrative, nor record his uncle’s comments thereon. There were several points about it which puzzled the Captain, even as they had puzzled his nephew, and for which he could find no adequate explanation. But that in no wise affected the one overwhelming fact, that his edifice of fraud, notwithstanding all the pains he had been at in the building of it, had crumbled to pieces, struck down by some unseen hand, and he was far from certain yet that it might not involve him personally in the catastrophe.
For the first and all-important question which he asked himself was, as to the steps Sir Gilbert Clare might decide upon taking now that the nefarious plot of which he had been made the victim was laid bare from beginning to end. Would he, while the first flame of his resentment still burned fiercely, cause a warrant to be issued for the arrest of one Augustus Verinder? It was a possibility which might well cause even a man who prided himself on his nerve to shake in his shoes, and if the Captain did not exactly do that, he was certainly rendered excessively uncomfortable thereby. His somewhat cynical philosophy notwithstanding, the prospect of two or three years’ incarceration in a gaol, with all its concomitant pains and penalties, was no more alluring to him than it is to the majority of people.
But presently a thought came to him from which he did not fail to derive a certain measure of comfort. It would be next to impossible for Sir Gilbert to institute proceedings against him without including his daughter-in-law in the indictment as an accomplice, and one almost equally guilty with himself. Now it seemed to him that the Baronet would think twice before taking so extreme a step, seeing that whatever Giovanna might have been guilty of nothing could alter the fact that she was a member of the Clare family; and that Sir Gilbert would deliberately drag one of his own name through the mire of a prosecution for fraud, seemed, considering the kind of man he was, to be scarcely conceivable.
The Captain had just arrived at this comfortable conclusion when the current of his thoughts was broken by an exclamation from Luigi, who, with his hands deep in his pockets, had been staring disconsolately out of the window for some minutes past.
“If that’s not Aunt Giovanna’s trunk on the top of a fly which is crawling down the street, I’ll eat my hat! Of course it’s hers! I can make out her initials on it.”
“Then run downstairs; stop the cab and bring your aunt up here,” cried the Captain as he started to his feet.
It was indeed Giovanna, back from Italy. She had picked up her maid on her way through London, and on arriving at Mapleford station had hired a cab to convey her to Maylings. But she never got as far as Maylings. The fatal tidings were told her in that room of the Crown and Cushion hotel.
She bore the blow very well; but she would feel the effects of it later on far more than at the time. For the present she was simply stunned. She had had much more at stake than either Verinder or her nephew. They had merely lost what had never been theirs to lose. She had forfeited that which, had she not allowed herself to be led away by Verinder’s sophistries, would have remained hers through life as an inalienable right—her position as daughter-in-law to the Master of Withington Chase.
But whatever she felt all she said to the Captain was: “I have to thank you for this, Uncle Verinder. If you had let me go to Sir Gilbert, as I wished to do, and tell him the truth—that my child died in infancy—he would not have repulsed me. No, he would have acknowledged me and have made much of me, and at his death I should not have been forgotten. But I listened to you and have lost everything. Oh! I think we are all very rightly punished.”