“Well?” demanded Vanna with wide-open eyes. “I failed to understand your meaning then and I am not a bit the wiser now.”
“Listen then. Although, owing to circumstances to which I need not further refer, we are not in a position to go before Sir Gilbert and produce the real heir, is that any reason why we should not find a substitute who would answer both his purpose and ours just as well as the genuine article?” His cunning eyes were watching her eagerly.
Vanna’s face expressed a growing wonder, but it was a wonder largely compounded of bewilderment.
“Ecoutez,” resumed her uncle. “Let us assume for the moment that you agree with me what a very desirable thing it would be to provide Sir Gilbert with an heir, even though it would, of necessity, have to be a fictitious one. Being, then, so far in accord, naturally the first question would be, ‘But where are we to find the heir in question—or rather, someone by whom he could be personated?’ To which I should reply that I am prepared at any moment to lay my finger on the one person out of all the hundreds and thousands of people in this big city best suited to our purpose. That person is none other than your own nephew (whom I believe you have never yet set eyes on), the son of your only brother, Luigi Rispani.”
Sheer amazement kept Giovanna silent.
“I have already seen Luigi and sounded him in the matter,” resumed the Captain. “He fully agrees with me that the idea is a most admirable one, and one which, if carried out in all its details with that care and foresight which I should not fail to bestow on it, could not prove otherwise than brilliantly successful. In short, Luigi places himself unreservedly in my hands. So now, my dear Vanna, it only remains for you to follow your nephew’s excellent example.”
It is not needful that we should recount in detail what further passed between uncle and niece either at this or subsequent interviews. Enough to say that when once she had been talked over into giving her consent, and had thoroughly mastered the details of the scheme as proposed to be carried out by her uncle, she entered fully into the affair, and seemed to have thrown whatever moral scruples might at one time have feebly held her back completely to the winds. But before all this came about Luigi Rispani and his aunt had been brought together. Although English blood on the female side ran in the veins of both, they might have been pure Italians for anything in their looks which proclaimed the contrary. In point of fact, there was a very marked family likeness between the two, so much so, indeed, that the Captain could not help saying to himself with a chuckle, “Nobody seeing them together, would take them for other than mother and son.”
At length all the details of the scheme were so far elaborated and agreed upon by our three conspirators that Verinder felt the time had come for him to make his first important move, which was, to seek an interview with Sir Gilbert Clare, or, as he preferred to express it, to “beard the lion in his den.”
CHAPTER XVI.
HOW SIR GILBERT RECEIVED THE NEWS
It is to be hoped that the reader has not quite forgotten the existence of Everard Lisle.