There & Back

“I see you know what you’re about!” grinned sir Wilton—saying to himself, however, “The rascal will be too many for me!—But,” he continued, “I see too you don’t know how to sign your own name! I had better alter it to bearer, with my initials! Damn it! your paltry cheque has given me more trouble than if it had been for ten thousand! Sit down there, will you, and write your name on that sheet of paper.”

Richard knew the story of Talleyrand—how, giving his autograph to a lady, he wrote it at the top left-hand corner of the sheet, so that she could write above or before it, neither an order for money nor a promise of marriage: yielding to an absurd impulse, he did the same. The baronet burst into loud laughter, which, however, ceased abruptly: he had not gained his end!

“What comical duck-fists you’ve got!” he cried, risking the throw. “I once knew a man whose fingers and toes too were tied together that way! He swam like a duck!”

“My feet are more that way than my hands,” replied Richard. “Only some of my fingers have got the web between them. My mother made me promise to put up with the monstrosity till I came of age. She seemed to think some luck lay in it.”

“Your mother!” murmured the baronet, and kept eyeing him. “By Jove,” he said aloud, “your mother—! Who is your mother?”

“As I told you, sir, my mother’s name is Jane Tuke!”

“Born Armour?”

“Yes, sir.”

“By heaven!” said the baronet to himself, “I see it all now! That terrible nurse was one of the family—and carried him away because she didn’t like the look of my lady! Don’t I wish I had had half her insight! Perhaps she was cousin to Robina—perhaps her own sister! Simon, the villain, will know all about it!” He sat silent for a moment.

“Hm!—Now tell me, you young rascal,” he said, “why didn’t you put in a claim for yourself instead of those confounded Mansons?”

“Why should I, sir? I didn’t want anything. I have all I desire—except a little more strength to work, and that is coming.”

The baronet kept gazing at him with the strangest look on his wicked, handsome old face.

“There is something you should have asked me for!” he said at length, in a gentler tone.

“What is that, sir?”

“Your rights. You have a claim upon me before anyone else in the whole world!—I like you, too,” he went on in yet gentler tone, with a touch of mockery in it. Apparently he still hesitated to commit himself. “I must do something for you!”

His son could contain himself no longer.

“I would ask nothing, I would take nothing,” he said, as calmly as he could, though his voice trembled, and his heart throbbed with the beginnings of love, “from a man who had wronged my mother!”

“Damn the rascal! I never wronged his mother!—Who said I wronged your mother, you scoundrel? I’ll take my oath she never did! Answer me directly who told you so!”

His voice had risen to a roar of anger.

His son could do the dead no wrong by speaking the truth.

“Mrs. Manson told me,” he began, but was not allowed to finish the sentence.

“Damned liar she always was!” cried the baronet—with such a fierceness in his growl as made Richard call to mind a certain bear in the Zoological gardens. “Then it was she that had you stolen! The beast ought to have died on the gallows, not in her bed! Ah, she was the one to plot, the snake! In this whole curse of a world, she was the meanest devil I ever came across, and I’ve known more than a few!”

“I know nothing about her, sir, except as the mother of Arthur, my schoolfellow. She seemed to hate me! She said I belonged to you, and had no right to be better off than her children!”

“How did she know you?”

“I can’t tell, sir.”

“You are like your mother, but the snake never can have set eyes on her!—Give me that cheque. Her fry shan’t have a farthing! Let them rot alive with their dead dam!”

He held out his hand: the second cheque lay on the table, and Richard had the former still in his possession. He did not move, nor did sir Wilton urge his demand.

“Did I not tell you?” he resumed. “Did I not say she was a liar? I never did your mother a wrong—nor you neither, though I did swear at you a bit, you were so damned ugly. I don’t blame you. You couldn’t help it! Lord, what a display the woman made of your fingers and toes, as if the webs were something to be proud of, and atoned for the face!—Can you swim?”

“Fairly well, sir,” answered Richard carelessly.

“Your mother swam like a—Naiad, was it—or Nereid?—I forget—damn it!”

“I don’t know the difference in their swimming.”

“Nor any other difference, I dare say!”

“I know the one was a nymph of the sea, the other of a river.”

“Oh! you know Greek, then?”

“I wish I did, sir: I was not long enough at school. I had to learn a trade and be independent.”

“By Jove, I wish I knew a trade and was independent! But you shall learn Greek, my boy! There will be some good in teaching you! I never learned anything?—But how the deuce do you know about Naiads and Nereids and all that bosh, if you don’t know Greek?”

“I know my Keats, sir. I had to plough with his heifer though—use my Lempriere, I mean!”

“Good heavens!” said the baronet, who knew as little of Keats as any Lap.—“I wish I had been content to take you with all your ugliness, and bring you up myself, instead of marrying Lot’s widow!”

Richard fancied he preferred the bringing up he had had, but he said nothing. Indeed he could make nothing of the whole business. How was it that, if sir Wilton had done his mother no wrong, his mother was the wife of John Tuke? He was bewildered.

“You wouldn’t like to learn Greek, then?” said his father.

“Yes, sir; indeed I should!”

“Why don’t you say so then? I never saw such a block! I say you shall learn Greek!—Why do you stand there looking like a dead oyster?”

“I beg your pardon, sir! May I have the other cheque?”

“What other cheque?”

“The cheque there for my brother and sister, sir,” answered Richard, pointing to it where the baronet had laid it, on the other side of him.

“Brother and sister!”

“The Mansons, sir,” persisted Richard.

“Oh, give them the cheque and be damned to them! But remember they’re no brother and sister of yours, and must never be alluded to as such, or as persons you have any knowledge of. When you’ve given them that,”—he pointed to the cheque which still lay beside him—“you drop their acquaintance.”

“That I cannot do, sir.”

“There’s a good beginning now! But I might have expected it!—You tell me to my face you won’t do what I order you?”