WITHIN the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the other. The reaper was still laughing.
“Cynthia!” he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert Daventry had used. “There’s no Cynthia. There’s a very pretty little girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it’s the better name of the two.”
He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.
“Nonsense,” she answered boldly. “Her name is Cynthia Daventry.”
“Where was she born, then?” asked the reaper.
“In Patagonia.”
“Never in this world,” cried the man. “She was born in Concepcion, and that’s her farthest south.”
Joan shrugged her shoulders.
“We ought to know. She is my husband’s niece.”
A grin overspread the reaper’s face.
“And is that so?” he asked, in a mock surprise. “I wasn’t aware of it.”
“Well, you are now,” said Joan.
“Yes, and the news alters our relations altogether, doesn’t it?” he said pleasantly.
He tossed his battered hat upon the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down in it at his ease, his legs stretched out, his hands deep in his pockets. He nodded familiarly to Joan.
“How do you do, sis?” He turned his face toward Mr. Daventry, “You have got a nice little place, brother Robert. Shows what honest work can do if persevered with day after day for a great number of consecutive years. Quite a nice little place. You haven’t, by any chance, got a nice little cigar, too, have you, Robert, for your long-lost brother?”
Robert Daventry’s face grew red, and the veins swelled upon his forehead. He was a man quickly moved to passion, and quick, too, the passion exhausted, to swing back into doubts and hesitations. He blew either hot or cold, and, sooner or later, he was sure to blow cold. Now, however, his temper was up, and he brought his great fist down with violence upon the table.
“What do you mean by your insolence?” he shouted “Stand up!”
Joan laid a hand upon the old man’s arm to restrain him. The reaper, for his part, never budged from his attitude.
“You have got a nerve,” he said. “You tell me a pack of lies—that’s all right, you’ve got money. But when I take you at your word, it’s ‘insolence’ and ‘stand up.’ How’s that, if you please?” He sat and laughed for a little in contemptuous jerks. “Your niece, indeed! The girl’s my daughter.”
Neither Joan nor Robert believed him for a moment. They thought of Cynthia, and compared that image at their hearts with the actual man who sprawled on the chair in front of them. Robert counted him up, his heavy features, his grime-engrained, spoilt hands, the whole degraded, unkempt look of him. Cynthia’s father! The claim was preposterous.
“Her father!” cried Robert Daventry, leaning across the table. “Look at yourself in the glass!”
The sneer stung the reaper to a fury. He sprang to his feet, and from habit his hand slipped to the knife at the back of his waistband. But he mastered himself in a second or two. He was there for other ends than violence, and he withdrew his hand.
“I sha’n’t forget that,” he said, in a perfectly quiet voice, which contrasted in the strangest way with the convulsion of his face. “You got home there. Right home;” and he sat down again.
Joan interposed before her husband could say another word, and used soft words. The man was not Cynthia’s father to be sure, but he knew something of the girl’s history. That was certain—and he knew more than either Joan or Robert knew themselves. If she was to fight her battle with success, she must know what he knew.
“You could not expect us to accept your mere statement,” she said.
“No, that’s reasonable,” said the reaper, and he began his story. But the insult rankled in his breast and as he spoke he kept turning a murderous eye on the man who had inflicted it.
He told the story of the earthquake at Valparaiso, and the flight of James Challoner across the Andes. It was a story told with a wealth of detail, and difficult altogether to discredit. Neither Joan nor Robert did altogether discredit it. It might be true or it might not. This man might have obtained it from James Challoner, or might somehow have come across it by himself. But they were still convinced he could not be James Challoner himself.
“We shall want more proof than that,” said Joan calmly, and Robert nodded his head. Neither of them had felt more confidence than at this moment since the crumpled slip of paper had been brought into the dining-room.
But outside the door Cynthia huddled in the great chair with her ear to the door, listened with a growing terror. She had never doubted until this hour that she was the daughter of Robert Daventry’s brother. She had been secure in that belief. Now the security was going. She clutched the arms of her chair, feeling the whole world slipping from beneath her feet—even as it had slipped at Valparaiso. For certain memories, quite clear in her mind, were being explained to her. An open hill-side at night, a strange red light upon the world, the crash of houses, little flames creeping, and ships quietly at anchor on the smoothest of seas—that was one picture in her memories which had often puzzled her, which would puzzle her no longer if she believed the story which was being told on the other side of the door. She remembered, too, a long journey amongst mountains, and a bridge over a deep and narrow torrent, and many people with kind faces who spoke to her.
“Of course, it isn’t certain,” she pleaded to herself desperately; and the husky voice behind the door began again:
“I travelled down to Buenos Ayres by train. I had little money, and no prospects, and a child on my hands. I couldn’t make a home for her. So I went straight to the foundling hospital. It stands back in a garden, and is kept by some wealthy sisters. There’s a turnstile in the brick wall of the garden, a little iron turnstile—but you know it well, both of you;” and he broke off with a laugh.
Inside the study Joan and Robert Daventry, still remained unconvinced. Outside Cynthia was persuaded.
“It’s true then,” she whispered to herself. “It’s quite true;” and she wrung her hands in the darkness, and her voice broke in a sob. She had no longer any shadow of doubt. The turnstile in the brick wall was for her the overwhelming proof.
Examined in a court of law by the rules of evidence, it might seem flimsy enough. To Cynthia, it was complete corroboration of the testimony of her memories. The turnstile in the brick wall—the one ugly thing in her imagined wonderland of heroes—the turnstile which had always been there before the land was—how had it come there, she asked herself? And she was in no doubt as to the answer. The turnstile was a memory too. It was the turnstile of a foundling hospital, where her father had left her and gone his way. No wonder, she reflected bitterly, it was the one ugly thing in her world of fancies.
She leaned back, shivering, with her hands covering her face. She was humiliated, but she was still more terrified. Shame cut deep, but fear touched the very nerves of her heart. The man who had this morning rushed at her was her father, and she remembered the malice of his smile, and the evil, covetous look of him as he appraised her. She grew hot, now, as she thought upon it.
“What harm does he mean?” she asked; and suddenly she sat forward on the edge of her chair, quivering from head to foot like a spring some touch had released. For her father’s voice rose again:
“I tied a bootlace round the child’s arm. I can’t say that I ever thought to come back for her. But there’s a convention in these things, isn’t there?” he added with a grin. “I have been a conservative all my life, and now I have found the advantage of it.”
“How?” asked Joan. “Even if your story were true, your daughter wouldn’t be wearing a bootlace or even the mark of it round her arm now.”
“No, from the look of her she’d be more likely to be wearing a diamond bangle, bless her! But all the same the bootlace helps.”
“How?”
Again the implacable question was uttered by Joan. She must know all that this man had upon his side by way of argument. That was her first necessity.
“How does the bootlace help?”
“It helps because the child wearing that bootlace was received by the same old ladies who allowed you a few months afterward to adopt her—that’s how. Don’t you leave those old ladies out of your reckoning, Mrs. Daventry, or you will run up against a snag. I went back to the foundling a year ago and claimed my daughter.”
“You did?” cried Joan. She was startled. For a moment, too, she was disconcerted. She knew nothing of any such visit. But the statement was so easily capable of proof that the reaper would hardly have made it, had it not been true. And she was quick to see how strong a presumption such a visit would create, that he was the girl’s father. Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.
“If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a field brings you face to face?”
“There’s no chance about it, believe me,” James Challoner returned. For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. “The old ladies lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me,” and he spread out his hands in indignation. “Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious people too!”
“If they did lie,” Robert Daventry burst in, “they did the best thing they ever did in all their good lives.”
James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept his eyes fixed upon Joan’s face.
“Yes, they lied to me,” he said. “I gave them the day and the month and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!” and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan, “You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be.”
Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of her face.
“It’s a matter of indifference to me,” she replied, “since Cynthia is not your child.”
She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true. She would not have it that this man was Cynthia’s father.
“Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!” said Challoner ironically. “I will tell you something that won’t be. Those old ladies lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls, they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they were committing. A child could have seen they were lying—as I did who am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It wasn’t very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one they didn’t want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who could give the girl a position.”
At the word “rich” Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were they disconcerted by Challoner’s knowledge and assurance that now they hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.
“So I began to make inquiries,” continued Challoner. “I found out who were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end.” And again he began to laugh. “Those poor innocent old women had actually given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child’s death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I reached you. But I have reached you,” he exclaimed, lolling back in his chair, “and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;” and Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which would discredit every word of his story.
“Recognized her!” she repeated scornfully. “And the last time, when, on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!”
Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.
“If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn’t be so high,” he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.
“Speak respectfully to my wife,” he cried.
“What, are you butting in again?” asked Challoner, with a look of surprise. “You didn’t do any good, you know, the last time you interfered.”
Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of that conviction.
“How did you recognize her?” she asked, smiling in her turn. “How did you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Challoner confidently. “And, by the way, she’s not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She’s seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July.”
“Keep to the point,” said Joan.
“Certainly, I will,” replied Challoner, “though it’s by no means necessary to substantiate my authority—yes,” and his voice suddenly rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, “yes, my authority. I don’t say that she’s like what she was when she was three. I don’t even say she’s like her mother. She isn’t. She’s a Challoner—and in the Challoner’s home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire, there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at home afterward—until I came out here. It was the portrait of my great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped right out of that picture frame. That’s how I recognized her.”
He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan’s confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but just as Challoner’s description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the particular detail of the girl’s resemblance, now that she was seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners’ dining-room he could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and, so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true. She looked him over again with new eyes.
“But you can’t prove that,” she said. “Even if it were true, you couldn’t prove it.”
“Should I need to?” asked Challoner. “After I had put those old ladies from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs. Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could turn ’em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But they wouldn’t try—and you know it as well as I do.”
Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys’ position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.
“There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile,” Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.
“But you wouldn’t be mad enough to go to law with us,” he cried, and Challoner laughed.
“Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I wouldn’t bring my action here, of course, in this district. You’ve got your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don’t you forget it.”
Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James Challoner and Cynthia’s father. His story was too circumstantial to be disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it. There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to Challoner: “How much do you want?”
Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer it was to admit the claim.
“What are you saying, Robert?” she cried.
Robert turned to her quietly.
“It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it? How much?”
A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner’s face. Outside the door Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony of suspense. Why didn’t he answer? Why was he so long?
The answer came at length:
“I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right to her; I’ll take her away with me to-night.”
Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field. He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:
“You want to take her away? Cynthia?” And as though the meaning of Challoner’s demand for the first time broke in on him, “Never!” he cried violently.
“I want to take her away to-night;” and now the malice in Challoner’s voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what Cynthia herself had said: “He seemed to hate me.”
“You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!” she exclaimed; and Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.
“Is it strange?” he cried. “All these years here she has been sitting soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? ‘Look at yourself in a glass’—That’s what you said,” and he turned to Robert Daventry. “I told you I’d remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I’ve lost my looks.”
All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own assiduous cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.
“I have had enough of it,” cried James Challoner. “It’s now her turn.”
“But we offer you freedom from that life,” said Joan, and her voice began to plead.
“I want my daughter,” Challoner retorted implacably.
“But you can’t make a home for her,” said Robert Daventry.
Challoner chuckled and his voice lost its violence.
“You must take me for a softy,” he said with a drawl of amusement. “I mean her to make a home for me, where I can do a bit of sitting soft and recover my good looks.”
“But she can’t make a home for you,” said Joan.
“Oh, yes she can.”
“How?”
Cynthia outside the door waited in a despairing bewilderment. The changed tones of those whom she had looked upon as her parents assured her that the reaper had authority and rights, could claim her, could take her away. But how, she asked herself, was she to make a home for him? She had learned no profession, practised no art. The tears rose to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; and the answer came.
“She’s a rare one for looks,” said Challoner. His eyes narrowed to slits and his face became mean and despicable to look upon. “You’ll not find her equal strolling under the lamps of Buenos Ayres.”
Joan flinched and uttered a cry. The movement was that of one who has been slapped in the face. Cynthia felt her heart stand still within her breast. She had lived in Buenos Ayres, where knowledge comes quickly to women. She was neither ignorant nor a fool. She understood, and once more her eyes went to the door. It was all quiet in the hall. A few quick steps and she would be out of the house. She rose from her chair. For the dark night, which a minute before had so appalled her, now appealed to her as a friend and refuge. But as she turned, she heard Robert Daventry say in a choking voice:
“Go! or I’ll have you thrown out;” and the bell rang violently.
“Oh, is that the game?” replied Challoner.
Daventry strode round the room.
“Not a word! Go! I loathe you.”
And the door was wrenched violently open. Cynthia had just time to drop into her chair. She heard her father’s voice close to her, and no longer through the panels of a door. She cowered down, covering her face with her hands, and drawing in her feet.
“All right, I’ll go,” said Challoner. “I can afford to go. For I have the law on my side.”
“The law! Try it!”
“I will.”
Challoner was standing in the doorway now. He was looking back into the study. But he had only to turn his head to see that blur of misty white in the chair, only to bend down and draw the trembling hands from the girl’s face to find his daughter in his grasp. Cynthia lay holding her breath, ready at a touch of him to swoon.
“She’s my daughter. All your money won’t get over that. Just wait and see. I’ll come back with the law at my side, and take her away—yes—if I have to tie her hand and foot to take her.”
He flung out across the smoking-room, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Joan and Robert Daventry followed quickly behind him, afraid lest he should force his way into the dining-room where they had left Cynthia. Not one of them saw the girl huddled in the great chair in the dark room. Richard Walton came into the hall.
“I’ll see you off the premises,” he said to Challoner, and a moment afterward the front door slammed.
With the slamming of that door Cynthia seemed to swim back into life; and all at once there came upon her a great longing for comfort and kind words. She was hurt and humiliated as she had never thought to be. It seemed to her that she was tainted, and she was terribly afraid. She took a swift step toward the door, and there Joan’s voice speaking in a whisper arrested her.
Joan was standing with her husband by the dining-room, and seeking to compose her agitation before she entered it. Her voice was still shaking from her encounter.
“Not a word to Cynthia,” she said. “We sha’n’t let her go, Robert,” and her voice was very wistful, and appealed for confirmation of her words. “So there’s no need to trouble her—as this story would trouble her.”
“No, we’ll not say a word to her,” replied Robert. He made an effort to be hearty, but it quite failed to hide his distress. “We shall find a way out somehow when we think it all over. No, we’ll not breathe a word, my dear. Cynthia’s birthday mustn’t be spoilt,” and, thoroughly miserable, the old couple went into the dining-room and closed the door behind them.
Cynthia made up her mind. Since they wished her not to know, since it would add so much to their distress if they learned that she did know, she would keep her knowledge to herself. It seemed to her then a small return to make to them for their devotion, but it was to cost her much more than she imagined. She would wait, schooling herself to patience, hiding her fears. But she could not face her friends to-night and keep her secret. For that she had not the strength. She ran swiftly and silently up to her room and flung herself upon her bed and buried her face in the pillows. There she lay trembling until the thought came to her that Joan would not retire without coming to ask why she had gone upstairs so early. She undressed and was hardly in bed before Joan knocked on the door.
“I had a headache,” said Cynthia. “It is the heat, no doubt. I shall be myself in the morning.”
“You are sure? You wouldn’t like the doctor?” Joan asked anxiously.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Cynthia.
Joan put her hand to the switch of the light, and Cynthia started up in bed with a wild gesture.
“Don’t turn the light out, please, mother,” she cried; and the next moment feared that Joan would have heard the terror underneath her words. But Joan herself was occupied. She kissed Cynthia and left her alone with the light burning in her room.
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