C. J. Wills

“ Lucius, the elder, was, as we know, Lucy Warrender's child. His whole soul was wrapped up in the fact that a few short years would see him the possessor of the courtesy title and heir to his supposed father's ample means and old Lord Pit Town's incalculable wealth. The young fellow had even developed a taste for art, simply because he felt it was his bounden duty to be able to appreciate the innumerable treasures which must inevitably soon be his very own. ”

“ Mr. Capt was like the proprietor of an Irish estate; far from being able to dispose of it at a reasonable figure, he was unable to obtain even an offer for his secret, and it was a valuable secret; but then, though a white elephant is a valuable animal, it is not an investment that most people would care to hold, and Mr. Capt's property now seemed indeed but a white elephant. Had it not been for his holy fear of his master he might have attempted to make terms with Mrs. Haggard, but his terror of Lord Pit Town's heir was extreme and had become a second nature to him. ”

“ God's justice, do you mean, or man's? Is it not enough that my husband should have betrayed and befooled me for twenty years, and should have robbed my boy of his very [Pg 109] heritage, and more than that, of half the treasure of a mother's love? For I tell you, strange and unnatural as it may seem, that I love Lucius; ay, I love him, though he is poor Lucy's child and my husband's bastard. And who could help loving the poor helpless, friendless, neglected child? Yes, I acted the love at first, Lord Spunyarn, and it grew upon me till it became a part of myself. ”

“ I don't understand you, George. You neglect your opportunities. Why don't you make up to the old man, or cultivate a taste for art, as I do; I mean to make art pay, my boy."
"Well, you see, Lucius, it might be awkward if his lordship found me out. I'm afraid I find more pleasure in walking up and down this big avenue and staring up at the rooks, than in spending my time in the Pit Town galleries." ”

“ And what art can be higher than the culinary art, which must have been necessarily one of the earliest, if not the very earliest of all? Some people are born without an ear for music; I am one of those unfortunates myself, but to make up for it I have been blessed by heaven with an appreciative palate. Would you have me neglect my advantage, would you wish me to bury my one talent in a napkin? Certainly not, Mrs. Dodd. Art I appreciate, especially high art, and I'll trouble you for a little more of the salmi, Dr. Wolff."
"And how are things going on in the parish, Mr. Dodd?" said Georgie. ”

“ Just think for an instant of the immense temptation to him to do so. There may be, there will be, a gigantic law-suit that may never end, while the whole of the vast property may be frittered away, for in a matter such as this, remember, all costs come out of the estate. Lord Spunyarn, what you tell me is not a misfortune, it is an appalling calamity, and Lucius Haggard alone has the key of the situation. It's not a time for half measures, Lord Spunyarn; we must attempt to obtain from him the contents of the box, even if we have to employ violence. ”

“ But Lucius Haggard's was not a well-regulated mind. He was of his father's religion, but he carried the religion further. Reginald Haggard was a self-worshipper, a man determined to get the greatest amount of pleasure and amusement out of this world, regardless of consequences to others, a man for whom trumps were continually turning up, a man who felt he was a brazen pot among the earthen ones floating down the stream, and to whom the annihilation of the weaker vessels was a matter of utter indifference. ”

“ Then there was the sweating system; women working fifteen or sixteen hours a day for [Pg 79] a pittance of ninepence: women doing men's work and getting next to nothing for it; and the attempted redress of a thousand and one nameless grievances and horrors."
"Oh, Lord Spunyarn," cried Mrs. Dodd, "would that I could walk hand in hand with you through those dreadful places, sharing in such work."
"I have no doubt Dodd could exchange and become one of the wise men of the East, if he tried," said Haggard maliciously.
"Ah, dear Mr. Haggard, my husband was never formed for missionary work. ”

“ I wish the secret had remained in the dead man's [Pg 107] keeping; it is a dreadful responsibility. Can it be still kept?"
"It is my duty towards my dead husband, Lord Spunyarn," she said decisively.
"But you have another duty, dear lady; a duty to your son and a duty to the old man here, who looks on Lucius as his heir."
"My son must suffer with me, Lord Spunyarn, for his father's fault."
Spunyarn shook his head. "Not so, dear lady; there is but one way, one possible way, to preserve the reputation of those who are gone and to do justice, for justice must be done. ”

“ John.
"I am so glad to have met you once more, Lord Spunyarn," said the vicar's wife; "isolated as I am at King's Warren, it is so seldom my privilege to meet any man having a purpose in life, and the men with a purpose, you know, are after all the only men worth knowing." Here she gave a benignant and comprehensive glance round the table, and every one felt that he at least was not worth Mrs. Dodd's notice, which was exactly the sensation the vicar's wife intended to produce. ”

“ To be suddenly told that one is a bastard is bad enough even for an ordinary mortal, but to a youth who has considered himself porphyro-genitus to be informed that he is but of common clay after all, and, worse than that, base-born, is terrible indeed. Since he had heard the story, young Lucius had been unable to obtain even a sip of the doctor's recuperative elixir. He believed the tale—he couldn't doubt it—for he knew that the woman who had been a mother to him could not lie. So Lucius Haggard believed the story, and his only consolation was that the proofs were missing. ”

“ Capt saw the box upon the table in Mrs. Haggard's boudoir, with its key standing invitingly in the lock, he should seize the opportunity to take a peep at its contents. When Capt saw what those contents were, being an unscrupulous man, he hesitated not an instant in becoming their possessor. With men such as Capt, chantage, as the French call it, is a favourite mode of obtaining wealth. We know how Capt had blackmailed Lucy Warrender for years, and how he was a past-master in the art. ”

“ But the good name of a woman was at stake, the proofs were in our possession, [Pg 167] there was no doubt as to the illegitimacy of Lucius Haggard, and I trusted in his honour and to the affection he bore to the woman who had been a mother to him, to enable us to tide over the matter without disclosing it to a living soul, at least during Lord Pit Town's lifetime."
"And you were disappointed, Lord Spunyarn; you forgot the magnitude of the stake, when you deliberately placed the honour of a noble family, the succession to a title and immense estates, in the hands of an interloper." ”

“ A woman's ideas of honour, Lord Spun [Pg 175] yarn, are peculiar. With them, as a rule, particularly with the best of them, sentiment often takes the place of what men call honour. You yourself have told me that this unhappy lady considered herself bound by an oath to Lucius's mother, accepting for the moment the theory that she herself is not his mother. If she would keep the secret for twenty years, Lord Spunyarn, if there was a secret, she may carry it with her to her grave, repenting the sudden confidence that you state she made to you. ”

“ Why, the very title would cease to exist, and the estates would possibly revert to the Crown. Are you and I, Lord Spunyarn, justified in setting the match to a train which might extinguish an ancient peerage? If I speak to you as a man of the world, and give you my honest opinion, I do not hesitate to say that the best thing that can happen is, that these papers, whatever they contain, may never come to light. ”

“ It is a curious fact that your croupier, that well-paid but honest official, for some mysterious reason or other always mentally identifies himself with the bank; it gives him absolute pleasure to rake in the winnings, and he feels some strange vicarious twinge of agony when he commences the process of paying out. But whenever Miss Warrender won, this particular croupier pushed her gains towards her with a little smile, and strange to say didn't seem to feel it in the least. ”

“ In art one cannot be too exacting. We made up our minds years ago that there should be nothing doubtful here, and here is the only remaining space filled at last, and filled, as it should be, by a masterpiece. Yes," said the old nobleman, as he rubbed his hands, "thank heaven there is nothing doubtful here. Nothing remains for me now, Wolff, but to leave the treasures that it has been the labour of my life to accumulate ”

“ Pit Town must know; for others, taking the lowest standpoint, may possess the secret, and the honour of the family must not be compromised. Lucius must efface himself, that is the only course."
"Efface himself, Lord Spunyarn? I know the boy, the orphan boy; he was my husband's child; and with all his faults I love [Pg 108] him; he will never consent to that; he would die first," said Reginald Haggard's widow.
"And die he must, I mean socially. There is no other way."
"He will never consent, Lord Spunyarn," repeated the widow. "He is wrapped up in the fact that he is Lord Pit Town's heir. ”

“ If there really was a secret, Lord Pit Town, we can rely upon the discretion of a woman who has kept it for twenty years. But after all it seems to me that it is only the distant branches of the family who suffer in losing a remote contingent succession; [Pg 188] even if the extremely unlikely history which Lord Spunyarn gave me is a fact, and true in all its details, Lucius Haggard is still Reginald Haggard's son. It seems to me that it is not for us to stir up the question of his legitimacy. ”

“ Under no pretext whatever would any servant at Walls End Castle have dared to awaken either the doctor or the old lord; they were never called in the morning, and in the midst of the most interesting conversations they were both of them in the habit, without the slightest apology, of suddenly closing their eyes and taking a deep draught of what they called nature's recuperative elixir. Everybody in Walls End Castle knew perfectly well what the servants meant, when they said that either the old lord or his faithful henchman was engaged ”

“ George Haggard knew well enough that he would be a comparatively poor man—a pauper, as his brother pleasantly put it, but only a pauper from the point of view of Lucius Haggard, the probable future possessor of immense wealth, for The Warren acres would assuredly be his, and had George Haggard so willed it, nothing would have been easier for him than to sit and twiddle his thumbs and wait for old Squire Warrender's death ”

“ Of course I had to bribe the pair of them. Lucy Warrender poisoned herself, Georgie. She did it artfully enough, with chloral. Why, they showed me the bottle; she had swallowed enough to kill half-a-dozen women. What a fool she [Pg 57] was, when one comes to think of it! Why, she could have married well any number of times, if she'd liked; she could have had Spunyarn years and years ago, if she had chosen to lift her finger. What a fool she was!"
Yes, that was her epitaph: "What a fool she was!" You couldn't have put it more tersely and more truly, Reginald Haggard. ”

“ Lucius could have had no hand in the abstraction. It seemed to Spunyarn's mind imperative upon him to communicate the whole matter to the old earl, and so shift the entire responsibility upon the shoulders of the head of the family. Possibly the old lord, as the possessor of unbounded wealth, might be able to make arrangements satisfactory to himself and to the naturally conflicting interests of the two young men. In any case an open scandal must be avoided, and the Pit Town title and estates, whatever might become of the old lord's money, must not be diverted from the legitimate heir. ”

“ Supposing that Lord Pit Town should elect to either ignore the matter altogether, or simply instruct me to seek for further evidence; in a very short time indeed, for his lordship is a very old man, Lucius Haggard will come into the title and estates as a matter of course; it will then be for George to attempt to prove his right. We must be careful, Lord Spunyarn, in attempting to set ourselves up as an amateur court of law, that we do not ruin the fortunes of a great house by leaving it absolutely without an heir ”