Sir Paul was, in fact, no uncommon man. Leaving a wild youth behind him, he had for ten years which followed his landing in the United States pursued the hard and humble and most exacting calling of miner in the West. Life he had always held cheap, not only as it touched others, but as it touched himself. He had learnt a hard lesson in the school of life, and taking it hardly had become a hard man. So inured, indeed, had he become both to suffering and to danger that, when at length a greedy lawyer had tracked him down, he had at first resented bitterly and blasphemously the fate which made him the richest man on earth.
For his uncle, from whom he inherited the baronetcy, had been a rich man when he died; and for five years his well-invested fortune had lain in the hands of able men, slowly accumulating still greater wealth, which a crowd of secondary relatives had striven to prove did not belong to the vanished and scapegrace nephew.
At first the fact that he was the undisputed owner of quite as many millions as would have justified an American plutocrat in being jealous had annoyed the new baronet more than he could tell.
Week after week the lawyer, mindful of his fees, had pleaded with the new baronet to return to England and enter into possession of his own. Week after week Westerham had hesitated to return, for, in spite of the hardships which he had undergone, there lived with him still sufficient of the old life to tell him that the possession of millions would entail the labour of a social treadmill which he not only dreaded but despised.
There had, however, come to him quite by chance a motive for returning. On thinking it over he had come to the conclusion that it is not, after all, so bad a thing to be able to indulge a whim. And the secret of the whim he meant to follow lay, he knew, within the kit-bag which he had found Captain Melun ransacking.
Utterly cut off from the world as he had been, the names which mean so much in Society in London, Paris, Vienna, and even in New York, had been lost to him. The faces of the great men of those great cities were to him as a closed book. The faces of their womenkind were as dreams which he had long since forgotten. But there was a dream in the kit-bag.
Even Westerham's roystering had not been ill-spent. His knowledge of the world, which, after all, means a certain cognisance of the evil that men do, had taught him that Captain Melun was not a man to perpetrate a common theft.
Long years spent in a land peopled practically by Ishmaelites had taught him deep distrust of the stranger—particularly distrust of the stranger who would be friendly.
So, many hours had not passed on board the Gigantic before the shrewd inquiries that followed on his suspicions had laid bare before him, as far as could be unfolded, the history of Captain Melun.