That evening, somewhat wondering that he had heard no news of Tommy or of Vandermeer, he unlocked the iron safe in his museum and took out his will. He lit a candle and set it by the hearth. Now was the time to destroy the benevolent document. He put it near the flame; then drew it back. A new thought occurred to him. To practise on his nephew the same trick as his uncle had played upon him was mere unintelligent plagiarism. He felt a sudden disdain for the merely mimetic in wickedness.
“I will be original,” said he. “Yes, original.” He repeated the word as a formula both of consolation and incentive, and blowing out the candle, put the will back into the safe.
CHAPTER VIII
Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.
The pious ejaculation was in the nature of a reply to Miss Etta Concannon, the fragile slip of a girl whose portrait she had painted and in whose cornflower-blue eyes she had caught the haunting fear. There was no fear, however, in the eyes to-day. They were bright, direct, and abnormally serious. She had just announced her intention of becoming a hospital nurse. Whereupon Clementina had cried: “Lord have mercy upon us!”
Now it must be stated that Etta Concannon had bestowed on an embarrassed Clementina her young and ardent affection; secretly, during the sittings for the portrait which her father had commissioned Clementina to paint as a wedding present, and openly; when the sittings were ended and she called upon Clementina as a friend. In the first flush of this avowed adoration she would send shy little notes, asking whether she might come to the studio to tea. As she lived quite close by, the missives were despatched by hand. Clementina, disturbed in the midst of her painting, would tear a ragged corner from the first bit of paper her eyes fell upon—note-paper, brown-paper, cartridge-paper—once it was sand-paper—scribble “Yes” on it with a bit of charcoal and send it out to the waiting messenger. At last she was driven to desperation.
“My good child,” she said, “can’t you drop in to tea without putting me to this elaborate correspondence?”
Etta Concannon thought she could, and thence-forward came to tea unheralded, and, eventually such were her powers of seduction that she enticed Clementina to her own little den in her father’s house in Cheyne Walk—a fairy den all water-colour and gossamer very much like herself, in which Clementina gave the impression of an ogress who had blundered in by mistake. It was on the first visit that Clementina repudiated the name of Miss Wing. She hated and loathed it. On Etta’s lips it suggested a prim, starched governess—the conventional French caricature of the English Old Maid with long teeth and sharp elbows. She might be an old maid, but she wasn’t a prim governess. Everybody called her Clementina. Upon which, to her professed discomfort, Etta threw her arms round her neck and kissed her and called her a darling. Why Clementina wasted her time over this chit of a girl she was at a loss to conjecture. She was about as much use in the world as a rainbow. Yet for some fool reason (her own expression) Clementina encouraged her, and felt less grim in her company. The odd part of their intercourse was that the one thing under heaven they did not talk about was the bullet-headed, bull-necked young man to whom Etta was engaged—not until one day when, in response to the following epistle, Clementina brusquely dismissed her sitter, skewered on a battered hat, and rushed round to Cheyne Walk.
“My dearest, dearest Clementina,—Do come to me. I am in abject misery. The very worst has happened. I would come to you, but I’m not fit to be seen.
Your own unhappy