“Keep still, man, keep still!” cried Miss Carlaw furiously, “and get on with your story.”
“The man, who, like the rest of his kind, makes the most of his opportunities, informed me that he had advanced a large sum of money to young Mr. Willis. On my inquiring, naturally enough, what security he had asked, he told me that Mr. Willis had informed him that he was heir to the whole of Miss Charlotte Carlaw’s large fortune, and that he supposed that fact was security enough. The man evidently thought so, for he had advanced your misguided nephew the sum of a thousand pounds at a ruinous rate of interest.”
Miss Carlaw stood perfectly still for a long time; all expression seemed to have died out of her face. When at last she spoke her voice appeared to have changed, to have aged in some strange fashion. “Brother Bob,” she said, “we are of the same blood, you and I, and whatever our later quarrels may have been we’ve played together as boy and girl. I pray you, Bob, in mercy to me, tell me that this is some hideous jest. I’ll forgive you; I swear I’ll even laugh at you, if only you’ll tell me that you’ve come here, knowing my love for this boy, to play a cruel joke on me, and then to go away and laugh at it. Brother Bob, tell me you’re making fun of me.” The appeal was piteous enough to have melted any heart, but brother Bob merely shook his head and sighed again more heavily than before.
“Alas! my dear Charlotte, it is no jest. To say that I was thunderstruck would be to put the matter mildly; and I can well imagine what your feelings must be. What he does with this money is more than I can say; I can give a shrewd guess, but I may be doing him an injustice, so I won’t say what that guess is. But it is certainly true that he has raised this money in the fashion I have explained to you. If you still believe that I am guilty of such atrocious bad feeling as to jest with you on a subject of such a nature, I beg that you will yourself ask him.”
“Yes, I shall certainly ask him,” replied Miss Carlaw.
“That is wise, that is just,” replied her brother. “Perhaps I might suggest that it would be better not to mention my name in the matter. After all, I am not concerned in it in any way, and being a man of peace I do not desire to have this young man’s enmity. He will probably believe that you have heard it through some business channel of which he knows nothing.”
“Oh, you needn’t fear that I shall mention your name. If he admits it, the fact that I know it is sufficient. Have you anything more to say?”
“Nothing, beyond the hope that you will not deal hardly with him. He is young, thoughtless, headstrong; he has been brought up extravagantly, and——”
“With plenty to be extravagant upon,” said Miss Carlaw, with something of a return of her old manner. “Well, brother Bob, I suppose you’ll go home to-night in triumph; you’ll go home and laugh because an old fool has been blind in a double sense; because she’s been fooled as thousands of women have been fooled before, eh? Oh, you need have no mercy; go and tell all your friends, every one who knows you, tell all the world that I have warmed something in my bosom until at last it has stung me. Tell ’em all.”
“Indeed, my dear sister,” said Mr. Carlaw, “you do me a grave injustice. You spoke just now, not without emotion, of our childish years; my heart goes out to you to-night more than it has ever done. I may say that, having seen much of men and women in this queer world of ours, I feared something of this from the beginning; I felt that the boy had not that strength of character, if I may so term it, necessary to take his place with any dignity in an exalted sphere. Humbly he might have done well; the best of us are likely to have our heads turned.”