‘Yes, yes; I know you warned me, and others warned me, and the thing has turned out as bad as you croakers could wish. That is due to my mismanagement—to a blunder I have made somewhere, not to any weakness in the principle of my scheme. Taking the position as it is, I want to find out where I have blundered.—I do not mean to give in, and will go on as hard as ever, if we can only tide over the present mess.’
‘That’s right enough,’ ejaculated Wrentham with an outburst of good-natured admiration; ‘but in the meanwhile, the first thing to do is to get over the mess.’
‘Ay, how to do that,’ muttered Philip still marching up and down.
‘The shortest way is to make sure that Mr Shield’s mind is not prejudiced against you and your work at the same time.’
‘Oh, stuff. Who wants to prejudice him against me?’
‘I say, find out what Beecham is after. Maybe he is your friend: in that case, so much the better; and if he is not, then you will be able to deal with him more promptly, if you have discovered his trick in time. Ask Miss Heathcote about him. She ought to tell you all she knows.’
Philip halted, head bowed, eyes fixed on the floor, and the words buzzing through his brain—‘She ought to tell me all she knows.’ Certainly she ought, and would. Then, for the first time, there seemed to reach his ears as from a distance the voices he had heard behind him at the ‘dancing beeches,’ and he recalled Madge’s agitated face as she told him that she had been intrusted by this man with a secret which she must not at present share with him. He had disapproved of her conduct at the time; he disapproved of it still more strongly now, although he regarded it as nothing more than a mistake into which she had been betrayed by her sympathetic heart.
‘Very well,’ he said sharply, ‘I shall ask Miss Heathcote what she knows about him. What then?’
‘Why, then we shall know where we are,’ Wrentham answered gaily. ‘To be sure, if you receive a message from Mr Shield to-morrow morning that it is all right, there will be no necessity to trouble Miss Heathcote.’
It was one of the anomalies of his association with Wrentham—or one of the effects of the weakness which the strain upon his nerves had produced—that Philip was influenced by him on those very points on which he would have least expected himself to be subject to influence by any one. It is true that whilst he had been all along aware of his manager’s want of sympathy with his work, he had discovered no reason to suspect his honesty—and this might account for the anomaly.