“I daresay, but I shall be obliged to you, sir, if you will cut line, and tell me what your purpose is in coming to visit me! I’ve already told you that I don’t know where Desford is, and I can only advise you to await his return to London! He has a house in Arlington Street, and his servants are—are in hourly expectation of his return to it!”
“That he resides in Arlington Street I know,” said Mr Steane. “Upon my arrival from Bath, I instantly made it my business to discover his direction—an easy task, his lordship being such a distinguished member of Society.”
“Of course it was an easy task!” said Simon scornfully. “All you had to do was to consult a Street Directory!”
Mr Steane dismissed this with a lofty wave of his hand. “Be that as it may,” he said, obscurely but with great dignity, “I did discover it, and instantly repaired to the inhospitable portals of his residence. These were opened to me by an individual whom I assumed to be his lordship’s butler. He, like you, Mr Carrington, disclaimed all knowledge of his master’s whereabouts. He was—not to put too fine a point upon it—strangely reticent. Very strangely reticent! I am neither a noddicock nor a souse-crown, young man—in fact, I am one who is up to every move on the board, ill though it becomes me to puff myself off! And I perceived, in the twinkling of a bedpost, that he was under orders to fob me off!”
“Well, if that’s what you perceived it’s time you bought a pair of spectacles!” replied Simon rudely. “How could Desford have given him any such orders when he thought you were dead? And, damn it, why the devil should he have done so? I daresay there’s no one he would liefer meet than yourself! Yes, and if you care to leave me your direction I promise you I’ll give it to my brother the instant I know where he is to be found! All I know at this present is that he went off to Harrowgate, early last week!”
Mr Steane appeared to subject this information to profound consideration. After an appreciable pause, he shook his head, and said with an indulgent smile: “It pains me to cast a doubt upon your veracity—and I would not wish you to think that I am insensible to the virtue of Loyalty! I assure you, young man, that I honour your noble determination to protect your brother, however much I may deplore his unworthiness. I will go further! If the interests of my beloved child were not so tragically involved, I should applaud it. But what, I ask myself, should take Lord Desford to Harrowgate? No doubt a salubrious resort, and one, as I recall, much patronized by persons afflicted with gout, scurvy, and paralytic debilities. But if you wish to persuade me that Desford, who cannot, by my reckoning, be above thirty years of age, suffers from any of these distressing diseases, you are—in vulgar parlance—doing it rather too brown.”
“No, he don’t suffer from those diseases! He don’t suffer from any diseases, and he didn’t go to Harrowgate for his health. Unless I’m much mistaken, he went there on what ought to be your business, Mr Steane! When I last saw him he was on the point of setting out to search for your father!”
“Tut, tut, my boy!” said Mr Steane reprovingly. “Too rare and thick altogether! I have never had any business in Harrowgate. Or, in point of fact, in any of the watering-places of its kind: they offer no scope at all to a man of my genius. As for my father, I have cut my connection with him. He has been as one dead to me for many years.”
“Desford is searching for him to claim his protection for his granddaughter—your daughter, sir, whom you left destitute!” said Simon furiously. “Or is she too as one dead to you?”
“That I should have lived to hear such words addressed to me!” ejaculated Mr Steane, pressing a hand to his heart, and casting up his eyes. “My only child—my beloved child—the only relative I have in the world I And do not, I beg of you, speak to me of my erstwhile brother! I have not sunk so low as to claim relationship to that snivel-nose!” he added, descending abruptly from his histrionic heights. However, he rapidly recovered himself, and said: “I demand of you, young man, is not my presence in London proof of my devotion to the sole pledge left to me by my adored partner in the marital state?” Overcome by these reflections, he buried his face in his handkerchief, and became to all appearances bowed with grief.
“No, it ain’t!” said Simon bluntly. “Anyone would think you’d plunged into a burning house, or some such thing!”
Affronted, Mr Steane raised his head, and said, with a good deal of feeling: “If you imagine that plunging into a burning house is a riskier thing to do than to come boldly into this city, you are much mistaken! Why did I shake its dust from my feet do you suppose? Why did I choose to go into exile, leaving my beloved child—temporarily, of course—in the care of a female who had cozened me into believing her to be worthy of my trust?”
“I hardly like to say, sir!” promptly replied Simon. “But since you ask me I should think it was because the tipstaffs were after you!”
“Worse!” said Mr Steane tragically. “I do not propose to recount the circumstances which led to my ruin. Suffice it to say that from the hour of my birth misfortune has dogged my every step. My youth was blighted by a gripe-fisted parent, and a scaly scrub of a brother, who had not the common decency to cock up .his toes when his life was despaired of! Not only did he rise up from what I confidently expected to be his death-bed, but less than a year later he fathered a son! That, young man, was the final straw!”
“Did—did you raise the recruits on a post obit bond?” asked Simon, awed.
“Naturally! Do not be misled into thinking that because I am not, I thank God, a muckworm, I am a lob-cock! It was not in my father’s power to cut me out of the Succession. If Jonas died, leaving a pack of daughters, I must, in due course, have inherited title, fortune, and all. Pardon me! The thought unmans me!” He disappeared once more into his handkerchief, emerging, after a few moments to say: “I shall not say that I was shattered. It was a blow that would indeed have crushed me had I been a pudding-heart, but I am not a pudding-heart: I have ever borne my reverses with becoming fortitude, and have seldom failed to make a recover. In this crisis, did I flinch? did I despair? No, Mr Carrington! I girded up my loins, as did—well, I forget who it was, but it’s no matter!—and I did make a recover! You see in me, today, one who by his own exertions has raised himself from low tide to high water.”
“Then why the deuce don’t you settle your debts?” asked Simon sceptically.
Shocked by this suggestion, Mr Steane exclaimed: “Waste the ready on my creditors? I am not such a spill-good as that, I hope! Nor let me tell you, as unmindful of my duty to my child! I had no other purpose in returning to the land of my birth than to succour her. Conceive what were my feelings when I arrived in Bath, yearning to clasp her in my arms, only to discover that the Creature to whom I had entrusted her had cast her off! Delivered her, in fact, into the hands of one of my bitterest enemies! And why? Because, if you please, in the midst of my struggles to bring myself about I had been obliged to defer the payment of her bills! Could she not have reposed as much confidence in my integrity as I had reposed in hers? Did she doubt that as soon as it became possible for me to do so I should have discharged my debt to her in full? Her only reply to these home-questions was a flood of tears.” He paused, directing a challenging stare at Simon; but as Desford had divulged only the bare outlines of the circumstances which had led him to befriend Cherry, Simon had no comment to offer. So Mr Steane continued his narrative. “I repaired instantly to Amelia Bugle’s country residence. It cost me a severe struggle to do so, but I mastered my repugnance: my parental feelings overcame all other considerations. And what was my reward? To be informed, Mr Carrington, that my innocent child had been ravished from the safety of her maternal relative’s home by none other than my Lord Desford!”