CHAPTER XXXVI

During those few hours of strenuous, almost fierce work into which David threw himself after the funeral, he found in a collection of belated cablegrams which his secretary handed him an explanation of Letitia's half apology, an explanation, he told himself bitterly, of her altered demeanour towards him. The old proverb stood justified. Even this, the wildest of his speculations, had become miraculously successful. Pluto Oil shares, unsalable at a dollar a few weeks ago, now stood at eight. Oil had been discovered in extraordinary and unprecedented quantities. Oil was spurting another great fortune for him out of the sandy earth. He paused to make a calculation. The Marquis's forty thousand pounds' worth were worth, at a rough estimate, three hundred thousand.

"Extraordinary news, this, Jackson," he remarked to the quiet, sad-faced young man, who had been his right hand since the time of his first railway deal.

"Most extraordinary," was the quiet reply. "I congratulate you, Mr. Thain. You do seem to have the knack of turning everything you touch into gold."

"Do I?" Thain murmured listlessly.

"I took the liberty of investing in a small parcel of shares myself, just to lock away," the young man continued. "I gave seventy cents for them."

"Not enough to make you a millionaire, I hope?" Thain asked, with some bitterness.

"Enough, with my savings, to give me a very comfortable feeling of independence, sir," Jackson replied. "I have never aspired any further than that."

Thain returned to his desk. He gave letter after letter, and more than once his secretary, who had received no previous intimation of his master's intended departure, glanced at him in mild surprise.

"I presume, as you are returning to the States, sir," he suggested, "that we must try to cancel the contracts which we have already concluded for the restoration of this place?"

Thain shook his head.

"Let them go on," he said. "It makes very little difference. I have a seven years' lease. I may come back again. The letters which I gave you with a cross you had better take into your own study and type. I shall be here to sign them when you have finished."

The young man bowed and departed. David listened to the closing of the door and turned his head a little wearily towards the night. The French windows stood open. Through the still fir trees, whose perfume reached him every now and then in little wafts, he could see one or two of the earlier lights shining from the great house. Once more his thoughts travelled back to the ever-present subject. Could he have done differently? Was there any way in which he could have spared himself the ignominy, the terrible humiliation of those few minutes? There was something wrong about it all, something almost suicidal—his blind obedience to the old man's prejudiced hatred, his own frenzied tearing to pieces of what might at least have remained a wonderful dream. One half of his efforts, too, had fallen pitifully flat. The Marquis had only to keep the shares to which he was justly entitled, to free for the first time for generations his far-spreading estates, to take his place once more as the greatest nobleman and landowner in the county. If only it had been the other scheme which had miscarried!

His avenue of elms was sheltering now an orchestra of singing birds. With the slightly moving breeze which had sprung up since sunset, the perfume of his roses became alluringly manifest. Through the trees he heard the chiming of the great stable clock from Mandeleys, and the sound seemed somehow to torture him. His head drooped for a moment upon his arms.

The room seemed suddenly to become darker. He raised his head and remained staring, like a man who looks upon some impossible vision. Lady Letitia, bare-headed, a little paler than usual, a little, it seemed to him, more human, was standing there, looking in upon him. He managed to rise to his feet, but he had no words.

"I am not a ghost," she said. "Please come out into the garden. I want to talk to you."

He followed her without a word. It was significant that his first impulse had been to shrink away from her as one dreading to receive a hurt. She seemed to notice it and smiled.

"Let us try and be reasonable for a short time," she continued. "We seem to have been living in some perfectly absurd nightmare for the last few hours. I have come to you to try and regain my poise. Yes, we will sit down—here, please."

They sat in the same chairs which they had occupied on her previous visit. David had been through many crises in his life, but this one left him with no command of coherent speech—left him curiously, idiotically tongue-tied.

"I have thought over this ridiculous affair," she went on. "I must talk about it to some one, and there is only you left."

"Your guests," he faltered.

"Gone!" she told him a little melodramatically. "Didn't you know that we had been alone ever since the morning afterwards? First of all, my almost fiancé, Charlie Grantham, drove off at dawn. He left behind him a little note. He had every confidence in me, but—he went. Then my aunt. She was the most peevish person I ever knew. She seemed to imagine that I had in some way interfered with her plans for your subjugation, and although she knew quite well that no woman of the Mandeleys family could ever stoop to any unworthy or undignified action, she decided to hurry her departure. She left at midday."

"But Miss Sylvia?"

"Sylvia was most ingenuous," Letitia continued, her voice regaining a little of its natural quality. "Sylvia came to me quite timidly and asked me to walk with her in the garden. She wondered—was it really settled between me and Lord Charles? If it was, she was quite willing to go into a nunnery or something equivalent,—Chiswick, I believe it was, with a maiden aunt. But if not, she believed—he had whispered a few things to her—he was hoping to see her that week in town. It was most extraordinary—-she couldn't understand it—but it seemed that their old flirtations—you knew, of course, that they had met often before—had left a void in his heart which only she could fill. He had discovered his mistake in time. She threw herself upon my mercy. She left by the three-thirty."

"My God!" he groaned. "And this was all my doing!"

"All your doing," she assented equably. "They were all of them perfectly content to accept your story. There is not one of them who disputes it for a single moment. But you were there, with the secret door closed behind you, and, as my aunt said, there is really no accounting for what people will do, nowadays. And now," she concluded, "I gather that you are leaving, too."

"I am motoring up to town to-morrow morning," he said. "I haven't ventured to speak of atonement, but your coming here like this, Lady Letitia, is the kindest thing you have ever done—you could ever do. I have tried, in my way," he went on, after a moment's pause, "to live what I suppose one calls a self-respecting life. I have never before been in a position when I have been ashamed of anything I have done. And now, since those few minutes, I have lived in a burning furnace of it. I daren't let my mind dwell upon it. Those few minutes were the most horrible, psychological tragedy which any man could face. If your coming really means," he went on, and his voice shook, and his eyes glowed as he leaned towards her, "that I may carry away with me the feeling that you have forgiven me, I can't tell you the difference it will make."

"But why go?" she asked him softly.

His heart began to beat with sudden, feverish throbs. His eyes searched her face hungrily. She seemed in earnest. Her lips had lost even their usual, faintly contemptuous curl. If anything, she was smiling at him.

"Why go?" he repeated. "Can't you understand that the one desire I have, the one burning desire, is to put myself as far away as possible from the sight and memory of what happened that night? We have been telephoning through to London. I have taken my passage for America on Saturday. I shall go straight out to the Rockies. I just want to get where I can forget your look and the words with which your father turned me out of his house. And worse than that," he added, with a little shake in his tone, "their justice—their cruel, abominable justice."

Then what was surely a miracle happened. She leaned forward and took his hand. Her eyes were soft with sympathy.

"You poor thing!" she exclaimed. "You couldn't do anything else. I have been thinking it over very seriously. It was a horrible position for you, but you really couldn't do anything else, that I can see. You told your story simply and like a man. But wait. There is one thing I can't understand. Those shares—were they not to be part of that poor man's vengeance. You surely never intended that we should benefit by them in this extraordinary way?"

"I believed them," he told her firmly, "when I sold them to your father, to be, until long after he would have had to pay for them, at any rate, absolutely worthless. The wholly unexpected has happened, as it does often in oil. Your father's shares are worth a fortune. He can realise his idea of clearing Mandeleys. He can dispose of them to-day for three hundred thousand pounds. Lady Letitia, you have come to me like an angel. This is the sweetest thing any woman ever did. Be still kinder. Please make your father keep the shares. They are his. They were sold to ruin him. It is just the chance of something that happened many thousand miles away, which has turned them in his favour. He accepts nothing from me. It is fate only which brings him this windfall."

"I promise," she said. "To tell you the truth, I think father is as much changed, during the last few days, as I am. When I saw him, about an hour ago, and told him that I was coming to see you, I was almost frightened at first. He looks older, and I fancy that something which has happened lately—something quite outside—has been a great blow to him."

"Does he know, then, how kind you are being to me?" David asked.

She nodded.

"He rather hoped," she whispered, leaning a little closer still to him and smiling into his face, "that you would come back with me and dine."

David suddenly clutched her hands. He was a man again. He threw away his doubts. He accepted Paradise.

On their way across the park, a short time later, he suddenly pointed down towards the little cottage.

"You haven't forgotten, Letitia," he said, "that I lived there? You haven't forgotten that that old man was my uncle!—that his father and grandfather were the servants of your family?"

"My dear David," she replied, "I have forgotten nothing, only I think that I have learned a little. I am still full of family tradition, proud of my share of it, if you will, but somehow or other I don't think that it is more than a part, and a very small part, of our daily life. So let there be an end of that, please. You have done great things and I am proud of you, and I have done nothing except suffer myself to be born into a very ancient and occasionally disreputable family.... Oh, I must tell you!" she went on, with a little laugh. "What do you think father was settling down to do when I came out?"

David shook his head.

"I have no idea."

"I left him seated at his desk," she told him. "He is writing a line to Mr. Wadham, Junior, asking him to-day's price of the Pluto Oil shares."

THE END

NOVELS by E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

He is past master of the art of telling a story. He has humor, a keen sense of the dramatic, and a knack of turning out a happy ending just when the complications of the plot threaten worse disasters.—New York Times.

Mr. Oppenheim has few equals among modern novelists. He is prolific, he is untiring in the invention of mysterious plots, he is a clever weaver of the plausible with the sensational, and he has the necessary gift of facile narrative.—Boston Transcript.

LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers, BOSTON