Captain Calamity Part 40

His tone puzzled her, and she went on, curious, perhaps, to probe his real feelings.

"You are glad?"

"Glad? I should never have returned but for one thing--the memories of the place are too unpleasant."

A faint and delicate tinge of colour came into the woman's face, for she did not doubt that he was thinking of her and the shattered romance of the past. It moved her to think that, after all these years, this memory was still fresh with him.

"Why darken your home-coming by thoughts of the unalterable past?" she answered softly. "It is all forgotten and forgiven now."

"It is not forgotten, neither is it forgiven--I am not that sort."

A deeper colour flooded her face. He considered himself wronged, then, that she had believed in his guilt and married his brother. At that moment she wished pa.s.sionately to justify herself in his eyes, for this stranger who had been her lover was beginning to exercise an ascendancy over her weaker nature that he had never possessed in the old days.

She was about to stammer out words of excuse and apology, when McPhulach turned round and leaned over the wind-screen.

"Hae ye such a thing as a match aboot ye, skeeper?" he inquired.

Calamity tossed him a box of matches, whereupon McPhulach produced a well-worn briar from his pocket and transferred it to his mouth.

"You must try and forget all that old story of the cheque," said Lady Betty recovering herself. "It is so long ago that everyone is prepared to be as nice to you as if it had never happened."

"H'm," grunted Calamity.

"You'll see," she went on hopefully. "I've got some people staying at the Towers, and Judge Pennyfeather--Lady Di----you remember her as a pert young flapper, I expect--the Bishop and some other people are dining with us to-night."

"Then the story of the forgery was not kept in the family," remarked Calamity icily. "All these people know it?"

"Well--yes," a little hesitatingly. "It was impossible to keep it secret; you know George had a valet----"

"A fitting epitaph," said Calamity grimly.

"What----" began Lady Betty, but was interrupted once more by McPhulach, who for some moments had been pulling at an empty pipe.

"I'm oot o' baccy," he said, again peering over the wind-screen. "Ye'll no be haein' a pooch on ye'r pairson, skeeper?"

Without a word Calamity pa.s.sed him a tobacco pouch, while Lady Betty bit her lips with annoyance at this interruption of their _tete-a-tete_.

"I'm tell't that yon's ye'r ain hoose," said McPhulach, as he filled his pipe. "It's a gey braw place, an' I wouldna mind haein' it mesel'."

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a picturesque old mansion standing in its own luxuriously wooded grounds at the summit of a slope just ahead.

Calamity made no answer, but gazed thoughtfully at this home of his childhood, the home he had never expected to see again. And thinking of his early days there, and of the soft and sheltered lives of those who live in such mansions, it seemed very desirable to the world-worn, battered man. All sorts of trivial incidents of the past, forgotten until now, flashed across his mind as the car turned into a road that ran through a wood on the estate. In that wood, as a boy, he had seen an adder swallow a young bird and remembered killing the reptile with a heavy ash stick. In that piece of marshy ground, almost hidden by trees, there used to be a pond fringed with yellow iris; he wondered if that pond were still there, and the iris.... He made a resolution to go and see later on, but, even as he did so, knew that he would find it the same. Everything remained the same; Betty was the same; it was only he who had altered.

Then his mood changed, and, while he felt a grim satisfaction at thus returning as master to the home from which he had been thrust forth as a criminal, he was not at all sure whether, apart from this sense of triumph, he was glad to be back or otherwise--probably he was neither.

He wondered, too, whether the old life, with all its luxury and ease, would appeal to him; whether he would feel at home again amidst these remembered surroundings, or at variance with them.

And then, of course, there were the people whom he would have to meet; people more foreign to him now than the polyglot rabble which had formed his last crew. He had seen Lady Betty shrink from him at first sight, and imagined that her present amiability was forced; that her words and those soft, languis.h.i.+ng glances she cast upon him were void of sincerity. Others would shrink from him too, he supposed, and then hide their feelings under a mask of well-bred composure as she was doing.

Could he meet these people on their own ground, speak their language, lead their life? he asked himself.

Seeing Calamity deep in thought, McPhulach, who had leaned over the wind-screen to return the tobacco-pouch, slid gently back into his seat and absent-mindedly dropped the pouch into his own pocket.

The car was now proceeding up a broad avenue which led to the main entrance of the Towers, and a vision came to Calamity of himself as a small boy on horseback, cantering down this same avenue with his father.

The thought of the latter brought back to his memory the brother who had blackened him in his father's eyes and made him what he had been; what, in heart, he still was--an outcast and an exile.

Never had he hated his brother as he hated him at this moment.

Lady Betty, meanwhile, was taking advantage of his thoughtfulness to examine his profile at her leisure. It was a strong face, she reflected, stronger and harder far than that of the youth she had loved fifteen years ago.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly, to dissipate an emotion induced by his proximity and those memories of their youth.

He turned swiftly, and the baffling, rather grim smile which played about his mouth, together with the fixed and merciless stare of his gla.s.s eye, embarra.s.sed her to the point of actual nervousness.

"You shall have them at your own price when I put them up for sale," he answered.

She coloured. Her first thought was that he intended to snub her, but she quickly dismissed the idea. No, he must have meant that the moment was not propitious. Perhaps he, also, had been thinking of....

"You never married in all those years?" she asked abruptly, and with a little tremor in her voice that she could not control.

"No."

"Why?"

He smiled at her in a quizzical way and shrugged his shoulders.

"Ah, here we are," he said as the car drew up before the stately entrance to Redhurst Towers. Springing out, he made his way round to the other side in order to help her to alight. McPhulach, however, was before him and stood with his arm crooked at an angle of forty-five degrees, his body bent, and an ingratiating leer on his face.

"Hae a care o' yon step, ye'r leddys.h.i.+p," he remarked.

But the lady was equal to the occasion. Ignoring his arm, she sprang to the ground.

"Will you be so kind as to bring my furs from the car?" she asked sweetly, and to herself: "Why on earth has John brought this uncouth, seafaring savage with him?"

The sound of the approaching motor had brought a child of about twelve running out on to the terrace. She waited at the head of the stone steps, colouring up shyly as she met the stranger's gaze.

"This is my little girl, Elfrida," said Lady Betty. "Elfrida, this is your Uncle John."

The child held her hand out frankly to her grim relative, and there was no suggestion of shrinking in her manner.

"I came out to be the first to welcome you home to Redhurst, Uncle John," she said a trifle primly. Then, becoming all child again, she turned to her mother. "Oh, mummy, I thought you'd never come. I'll go and tell them you're here. We're all having tea in the hall."

As he watched the fair-haired child disappear, Calamity thought, with something of a pang, that she might have been his own. But this feeling lasted only a moment, and he remembered once more that she was the child of the man who had ruined him.

"Welcome home," said Lady Betty softly.

"Thank you," he answered without enthusiasm.

"It has been home to me, and I have loved it for fourteen years," she said, and then continued archly, obviously inviting and expecting a denial. "And now you've come to turn me out."