bad, Alan. One of them is my own uncle, but the truth remains the truth. Alan, they are no better than thieves; all this wealth is stolen, and I thank God that you have found it out in time before you became one of them in heart as well as in name.”
“If you refer to the Sahara Syndicate,” he said, “the idea is sound enough; indeed, I am responsible for it. The thing can be done, great benefits would result, too long to go into.”
“Yes, yes, Alan, but you know that they never mean to do it, they only mean to get the millions from the public. I have lived with my uncle for ten years, ever since my poor father died, and I know the backstairs of the business. There have been half a dozen schemes like this, and although they have had their bad times, very bad times, he and Sir Robert have grown richer and richer. But what has happened to those who have invested in them? Oh! let us drop the subject, it is unpleasant. For myself it doesn’t matter, because although it isn’t under my control, I have money of my own. You know we are a plebeian lot on the male side, my grandfather was a draper in a large way of business, my father was a coal-merchant who made a great fortune. His brother, my uncle, in whom my father always believed implicitly, took to what is called Finance, and when my father died he left me, his only child, in his guardianship. Until I am five and twenty I cannot even marry or touch a halfpenny without his consent; in fact if I should marry against his will the most of my money goes to him.”
“I expect that he has got it already,” said Alan.
“No, I think not. I found out that, although it is not mine, it is not his. He can’t draw it without my signature, and I steadily refuse to sign anything. Again and again they have brought me documents, and I have always said that I would consider them at five and twenty, when I came of age under my father’s will. I went on the sly to a lawyer in Kingswell and paid him a guinea for his advice, and he put me up to that. ‘Sign nothing,’ he said, and I have signed nothing, so, except by forgery nothing can have gone. Still for all that it may have gone. For anything I know I am not worth more than the clothes I stand in, although my father was a very rich man.”
“If so, we are about in the same boat, Barbara,” Alan answered with a laugh, “for my present possessions are Yarleys, which brings in about £100 a year less than the interest on its mortgages and cost of upkeep, and the £1700 that Aylward paid me back on Friday for my shares. If I had stuck to them I understand that in a week or two I should have been worth £100,000, and now you see, here I am, over thirty years of age without a profession, invalided out of the army and having failed in finance, a mere bit of driftwood without hope and without a trade.”
Barbara’s brown eyes grew soft with sympathy, or was it tears?
“You are a curious creature, Alan,” she said. “Why didn’t you take the £17,000 for that fetish of yours? It would have been a fair deal and have set you on your legs.”
“I don’t know,” he answered dejectedly. “It went against the grain, so what is the use of talking about it? I think my old uncle Austin told me it wasn’t to be parted with—no, perhaps it was Jeekie. Bother the Yellow God! it is always cropping up.”
“Yes,” replied Barbara, “the Yellow God is always cropping up, especially in this neighbourhood.”
They walked on a while in silence, till suddenly Barbara sat down upon a bole of felled oak and began to cry.
“What is the matter with you?” asked Alan.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Everything goes wrong. I live in a kind of gilded hell. I don’t like my uncle and I loath the men he brings about the place. I have no friends, I scarcely know a woman intimately, I have troubles I can’t tell you and—I am wretched. You are the only creature I have left to talk to, and I suppose that after this row you must go away too to make your living.”
Alan looked at her there weeping on the log and his heart swelled within him, for he had loved this girl for years.
“Barbara,” he gasped, “please don’t cry, it upsets me. You know you are a great heiress——”
“That remains to be proved,” she answered. “But anyway, what has it to do with the case?”
“It has everything to do with it, at least so far as I am concerned. If it hadn’t been for that I should have asked you to marry me a long while ago, because I love you, as I would now, but of course it is impossible.”
Barbara ceased her weeping, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and looked up at him.
“Alan,” she said, “I think that you are the biggest fool I ever knew—not but that a fool is rather refreshing when one lives among knaves.”
“I know I am a fool,” he answered. “If I wasn’t I should not have mentioned my misfortune to you, but sometimes things are too much for one. Forget it and forgive me.”
“Oh! yes,” she said; “I forgive you; a woman can generally forgive a man for being fond of her. Whatever she may be, she is ready to take a lenient view of his human weakness. But as to forgetting, that is a different matter. I don’t exactly see why I should be so anxious to forget, who haven’t many people to care about me,” and she looked at him in quite a new fashion, one indeed which gave him something of a shock, for he had not thought the nymph-like Barbara capable of such a look as that. She and any sort of passion had always seemed so far apart.
Now after all Alan was very much a man, if a modest one, with all a man’s instincts, and therefore there are appearances of the female face which even such as he could not entirely misinterpret.
“You—don’t—mean,” he said doubtfully, “you don’t really mean——” and he stood hesitating before her.
“If you would put your question a little more clearly, Alan, I might be able to give you an answer,” she replied, that quaint little smile of hers creeping to the corners of her mouth like sunshine through a mist of rain.
“You don’t really mean,” he went on, “that you care anything about me, like, like I have cared for you for years?”
“Oh! Alan,” she said, laughing outright, “why in the name of goodness shouldn’t I care about you? I didn’t say that I do, mind, but why shouldn’t I? What is the gulf between us?”
“The old one,” he answered, “that between Dives and Lazarus—that between the rich and the poor.”
“Alan,” said Barbara, looking down, “I don’t know what has come over me, but for some unexplained and inexplicable reason I am inclined to give Lazarus a lead—across that gulf, the first one, I mean, not the second!”
Like the glance which preceded it, this was a saying that even Alan could not misunderstand. He sat himself on the log beside her, while she, still looking down, watched him out of the corners of her eyes. He went red, he went white, his heart beat very violently. Then he stretched out his big brown hand and took her small white one, and as this familiarity produced no remonstrance, let it fall, and passing his arm about her, drew her to him and embraced her, not once, but often, with such vigour that a squirrel which had been watching these proceedings from a neighbouring tree, bolted round it scandalized and was seen no more.
“I love you, I love you,” he said huskily.
“So I gather,” she answered in a feeble voice.
“Do you care for me?” he asked.
“It would seem that I must, Alan, otherwise I should scarcely—oh! you foolish Alan,” and heedless of her Sunday hat, which never recovered from this encounter, but was kept as a holy relic, she let her head fall upon his shoulder and began to cry again, this time for very happiness.
He kissed her tears away, then as he could think of nothing else to say, asked her if she would marry him.
“It is the general sequel to this kind of thing, I believe,” she answered; “or at any rate it ought to be. But if