Chapter Twenty Nine.
Gilded Sorrow.
“Good heavens! Why, it can’t be true.”
The exclamation escaped Jack Egerton’s lips as he sat in his studio enjoying his matutinal pipe, and glancing through the Daily News prior to commencing work.
The paragraph he had read contained nothing startling to the ordinary newspaper reader. It was merely an announcement that the will had been proved of the late Mr Hugh Trethowen, of Coombe Hall, Cornwall, who died suddenly at the Hôtel du Nord, Antwerp, and that the whole of the estate, valued at 112,000 pounds, had been left to his wife Valérie.
“Dead! Dead! And I knew nothing of it, poor fellow!” he cried, starting up, and, after re-reading the words, standing motionless. “Died suddenly,” he reflected bitterly. “An ominous expression where Valérie Dedieu is concerned. More than one person who has enjoyed her acquaintance has died suddenly. If I thought he had met with foul play, and could prove it, by Heaven! I’d do so—even at the risk of my own liberty. Poor Hugh,” he added in a low, broken voice. “We have been almost brothers. God! shall I ever forgive myself for not warning him of his danger? Yet I did tell him she was not fit to be his wife, but he took no heed. No; he was infatuated by her fatally seductive smiles and accursed beauty.”
Pushing the hair from his forehead he flung the paper from him with a gesture of despair.
“Dead,” he murmured. “How much I owe to him. In the days when I scarcely earned enough to keep body and soul together, we shared one another’s luck, Bohemians that we were, often living from hand to mouth, and not knowing whence the next half-crown was to come. Always my warmest friend from that time until his marriage: he was an irrepressible, genial, good fellow, whom everybody held in high esteem. Always merry, always light-hearted; in many a dark hour, when I’ve been on the verge of despair, it has been his perfect indifference to melancholy that has cheered and given me heart; nay, it was by his advice and encouragement that, instead of going out to the Transvaal as I intended, I remained here to work and win fame.”