Part 17

“I have never made it my business, Trent,” he said, with good-humored brusqueness, “to interfere in my employees' private affairs, unless they affect their relations to the bank, and I haven't had the least occasion to do so with you. Neither has Mr. Dingwall, although it is on HIS behalf that I am now speaking.” As Randolph listened with a contracted brow, he went on with a grim smile: “But he is an Englishman, you know, and has certain ideas of the importance of 'position,' particularly among his own people. He wishes me, therefore, to warn you of what HE calls the 'disparity' of your position and that of a young English lady--Miss Eversleigh--with whom you have some acquaintance, and in whom,” he added with a still grimmer satisfaction, “he fears you are too deeply interested.”

Randolph blazed. “If Mr. Dingwall had asked ME, sir,” he said hotly, “I would have told him that I have never yet had to be reminded that Miss Eversleigh is a rich heiress and I only a poor clerk, but as to his using her name in such a connection, or dictating to me the manner of”--

“Hold hard,” said Revelstoke, lifting his hand deprecatingly, yet with his unchanged smile. “I don't agree with Mr. Dingwall, and I have every reason to know the value of YOUR services, yet I admit something is due to HIS prejudices. And in this matter, Trent, the Bank of Eureka, while I am its president, doesn't take a back seat. I have concluded to make you manager of the branch bank at Marysville, an independent position with its salary and commissions. And if that doesn't suit Dingwall, why,” he added, rising from his desk with a short laugh, “he has a bigger idea of the value of property than the bank has.”

“One moment, sir, I implore you,” burst out Randolph breathlessly, “if your kind offer is based upon the mistaken belief that I have the least claim upon Miss Eversleigh's consideration more than that of simple friendship--if anybody has dared to give you the idea that I have aspired by word or deed to more, or that the young lady has ever countenanced or even suspected such aspirations, it is utterly false, and grateful as I am for your kindness, I could not accept it.”

“Look here, Trent,” returned Revelstoke curtly, yet laying his hand on the young man's shoulder not unkindly. “All that is YOUR private affair, which, as I told you, I don't interfere with. The other is a question between Mr. Dingwall and myself of your comparative value. It won't hurt you with ANYBODY to know how high we've assessed it. Don't spoil a good thing!”

Grateful even in his uncertainty, Randolph could only thank him and withdraw. Yet this fateful forcing of his hand in a delicate question gave him a new courage. It was with a certain confidence now in his capacity as HER friend and qualified to advise HER that he called at Mr. Dingwall's the evening she arrived. It struck him that in the Dingwalls' reception of him there was mingled with their formality a certain respect.

Thanks to this, perhaps, he found her alone. She seemed to him more beautiful than his recollection had painted her, in the development that maturity, freedom from restraint, and time had given her. For a moment his new, fresh courage was staggered. But she had retained her youthful simplicity, and came toward him with the same naive and innocent yearning in her clear eyes that he remembered at their last meeting. Their first words were, naturally, of their great secret, and Randolph told her the whole story of his unexpected and startling meeting with the captain, and the captain's strange narrative, of his undertaking the journey with him to recover his claim, establish his identity, and, as Randolph had hoped, restore to her that member of the family whom she had most cared for. He recounted the captain's hesitation on arriving; his own journey to the rectory; the news she had given him; the reason of his singular behavior; his return to London; and the second disappearance of the captain. He read to her the letter he had received from him, and told her of his hopeless chase to the docks only to find him gone. She listened to him breathlessly, with varying color, with an occasional outburst of pity, or a strange shining of the eyes, that sometimes became clouded and misty, and at the conclusion with a calm and grave paleness.

“But,” she said, “you should have told me all.”

“It was not my secret,” he pleaded.

“You should have trusted me.”

“But the captain had trusted ME.”

She looked at him with grave wonder, and then said with her old directness: “But if I had been told such a secret affecting you, I should have told you.” She stopped suddenly, seeing his eyes fixed on her, and dropped her own lids with a slight color. “I mean,” she said hesitatingly, “of course you have acted nobly, generously, kindly, wisely--but I hate secrets! Oh, why cannot one be always frank?”

A wild idea seized Randolph. “But I have another secret--you have not guessed--and I have not dared to tell you. Do you wish me to be frank now?”

“Why not?” she said simply, but she did not look up.

Then he told her! But, strangest of all, in spite of his fears and convictions, it flowed easily and naturally as a part of his other secret, with an eloquence he had not dreamed of before. But when he told her of his late position and his prospects, she raised her eyes to his for the first time, yet without withdrawing her hand from his, and said reproachfully,--

“Yet but for THAT you would never have told me.”

“How could I?” he returned eagerly. “For but for THAT how could I help you to carry out YOUR trust? How could I devote myself to your plans, and enable you to carry them out without touching a dollar of that inheritance which you believe to be wrongfully yours?”

Then, with his old boyish enthusiasm, he sketched a glowing picture of their future: how they would keep the Dornton property intact until the captain was found and communicated with; and how they would cautiously collect all the information accessible to find him until such time as Randolph's fortunes would enable them both to go on a voyage of discovery after him. And in the midst of this prophetic forecast, which brought them so closely together that she was enabled to examine his watch chain, she said,--

“I see you have kept Cousin Jack's ring. Did he ever see it?”

“He told me he had given it to you as his little sweetheart, and that he”--

There was a singular pause here.

“He never did THAT--at least, not in that way!” said Sybil Eversleigh.

And, strangely enough, the optimistic Randolph's prophecies came true. He was married a month later to Sibyl Eversleigh, Mr. Dingwall giving away the bride. He and his wife were able to keep their trust in regard to the property, for, without investing a dollar of it in the bank, the mere reputation of his wife's wealth brought him a flood of other investors and a confidence which at once secured his success. In two years he was able to take his wife on a six months' holiday to Europe via Australia, but of the details of that holiday no one knew. It is, however, on record that ten or twelve years ago Dornton Hall, which had been leased or unoccupied for a long time, was refitted for the heiress, her husband, and their children during a brief occupancy, and that in that period extensive repairs were made to the interior of the old Norman church, and much attention given to the redecoration and restoration of its ancient tombs.

MR. MACGLOWRIE'S WIDOW

Very little was known of her late husband, yet that little was of a sufficiently awe-inspiring character to satisfy the curiosity of Laurel Spring. A man of unswerving animosity and candid belligerency, untempered by any human weakness, he had been actively engaged as survivor in two or three blood feuds in Kentucky, and some desultory dueling, only to succumb, through the irony of fate, to an attack of fever and ague in San Francisco. Gifted with a fine sense of humor, he is said, in his last moments, to have called the simple-minded clergyman to his bedside to assist him in putting on his boots. The kindly divine, although pointing out to him that he was too weak to rise, much less walk, could not resist the request of a dying man. When it was fulfilled, Mr. MacGlowrie crawled back into bed with the remark that his race had always “died with their boots on,” and so passed smilingly and tranquilly away.

It is probable that this story was invented to soften the ignominy of MacGlowrie's peaceful end. The widow herself was also reported to be endowed with relations of equally homicidal eccentricities. Her two brothers, Stephen and Hector Boompointer, had Western reputations that were quite as lurid and remote. Her own experiences of a frontier life had been rude and startling, and her scalp--a singularly beautiful one of blond hair--had been in peril from Indians on several occasions. A pair of scissors, with which she had once pinned the intruding hand of a marauder to her cabin doorpost, was to be seen in her sitting room at Laurel Spring. A fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry, a complexion sallowed by innutritious food, slight and tall figure, she gave little suggestion of this Amazonian feat. But that it exercised a wholesome restraint over the many who would like to have induced her to reenter the married state, there is little reason to doubt. Laurel Spring was a peaceful agricultural settlement. Few of its citizens dared to aspire to the dangerous eminence of succeeding the defunct MacGlowrie; few could hope that the sister of living Boompointers would accept an obvious mesalliance with them. However sincere their affection, life was still sweet to the rude inhabitants of Laurel Spring, and the preservation of the usual quantity of limbs necessary to them in their avocations. With their devotion thus chastened by caution, it would seem as if the charming mistress of Laurel Spring House was secure from disturbing attentions.

It was a pleasant summer afternoon, and the sun was beginning to strike under the laurels around the hotel into the little office where the widow sat with the housekeeper--a stout spinster of a coarser Western type. Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the stack of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook and eyeless freedom of attire which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the blue veins of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious.

“I reckon we kin put the new preacher in Kernel Starbottle's room,” said Miss Morvin, the housekeeper. “The kernel's going to-night.”