He made a strange reply: “You may find your opportunity, Helena, sooner than you anticipate.”
Did this mean that she was going to call again in a day or two? I am afraid I spoke flippantly. I said: “Oh, father, another lady fascinated by the popular preacher?”
The garden chairs were near us. He signed to me gravely to be seated by his side, and said to himself: “This is my fault.”
“What is your fault?” I asked.
“I have left you in ignorance, my dear, of my cousin’s sad story. It is soon told; and, if it checks your merriment, it will make amends by deserving your sympathy. I was indebted to her father, when I was a boy, for acts of kindness which I can never forget. He was twice married. The death of his first wife left him with one child—once my playfellow; now the lady whose visit has excited your curiosity. His second wife was a Belgian. She persuaded him to sell his business in London, and to invest the money in a partnership with a brother of hers, established as a sugar-refiner at Antwerp. The little daughter accompanied her father to Belgium. Are you attending to me, Helena?”
I was waiting for the interesting part of the story, and was wondering when he would get to it.
“As time went on,” he resumed, “the new partner found that the value of the business at Antwerp had been greatly overrated. After a long struggle with adverse circumstances, he decided on withdrawing from the partnership before the whole of his capital was lost in a failing commercial speculation. The end of it was that he retired, with his daughter, to a small town in East Flanders; the wreck of his property having left him with an income of no more than two hundred pounds a year.”
I showed my father that I was attending to him now, by inquiring what had become of the Belgian wife. Those nervous quiverings, which Eunice has mentioned in her diary, began to appear in his face.
“It is too shameful a story,” he said, “to be told to a young girl. The marriage was dissolved by law; and the wife was the person to blame. I am sure, Helena, you don’t wish to hear any more of this part of the story.”
I did wish. But I saw that he expected me to say No—so I said it.