Phantom Fortune, a Novel. M. E. Braddon

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      'Yes, your family secret is an attribute of a fine old race. The Pelopidæ, for instance—in their case it was not a single skeleton, but a whole charnel house. I don't think your skeleton need trouble you, Maulevrier. It belongs to the remote past.'

      'Those things never belong to the past,' said the young man. 'If it were any other kind of taint—profligacy—madness, even—the story of a duel that went very near murder—a runaway wife—a rebellious son—a cruel husband. I have heard such stories hinted at in the records of families. But our story means disgrace. I seldom see strangers putting their heads together at the club without fancying they are telling each other about my grandfather, and pointing me out as the grandson and heir of a thief.'

      'Why use unduly hard words?'

      'Why should I stoop to sophistication with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a pocket on Ludgate Hill.'

      'Nothing was ever proved against your grandfather.'

      'No, he died in the nick of time, and the inquiry was squashed, thanks to the Angersthorpe interest, and my grandmother's cleverness. But if he had lived a few weeks longer England would have rung with the story of his profligacy and dishonour. Some people say he committed suicide in order to escape the inquiry; but I have heard my mother emphatically deny this. My father told her that he had often talked with the people who kept the little inn where his father died, and they were clear enough in their assertion that the death was a natural death—the sudden collapse of an exhausted constitution.'

      'Was it on account of this scandal that your father spent the best part of his life away from England?' Hammond asked, feeling that it was a relief to Maulevrier to talk about this secret burden of his.

      The young Earl was light-hearted and frivolous by nature, yet even he had his graver moments; and upon this subject of the old Maulevrier scandal he was peculiarly sensitive, perhaps all the more so because his grandmother had never allowed him to speak to her about it, had never satisfied his curiosity upon any details of that painful story.

      'I have very little doubt it was so—though I wasn't old enough when he died to hear as much from his own lips. My father went straight from the University to Vienna, where he began his career in the diplomatic service, and where he soon afterwards married a dowerless English girl of good family. He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies, the youngest in long clothes. Mother and babies all came over to England, and were at once established at Fellside. I can remember the voyage—and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow of my father's death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of broken health and broken spirits. We had no one but the dowager to look to as children—hardly another friend in the world. She did what she liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so they have never heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached their ears. But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever, though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school. The time came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had been said about Lord Maulevrier. The men who told me about the old scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night, when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor's son, he told me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he thought himself the better bred of the two. I smashed his nose for him, but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared the matter.'

      'Did you ever hear the exact story?'

      'I have heard a dozen stories; and if only a quarter of them are true my grandfather was a scoundrel. It seems that he was immensely popular for the first year or so of his government, gave more splendid entertainments than had been given at Madras for half a century before his time, lavished his wealth upon his favourites. Then arose a rumour that the governor was insolvent and harassed by his creditors, and then a new source of wealth seemed to be at his command; he was more reckless, more princely than ever; and then, little by little, there arose the suspicion that he was trafficking in English interests, selling his influence to petty princes, winking at those mysterious crimes by which rightful heirs are pushed aside to make room for usurpers. Lastly it became notorious that he was the slave of a wicked woman, false wife, suspected murderess, whose husband, a native prince, disappeared from the scene just when his existence became perilous to the governor's reputation. According to one version of the story, the scandal of this Rajah's mysterious disappearance, followed not long after by the Ranee's equally mysterious death, was the immediate cause of my grandfather's recall. How much, or how little of this story—or other dark stories of the same kind—is true, whether my grandfather was a consummate scoundrel, or the victim of a baseless slander—whether he left India a rich man or a poor man, is known to no mortal except Lady Maulevrier, and compared with her the Theban Sphinx was a communicative individual.'

      'Let the dead bury their dead,' said Hammond. 'Neither you nor your sisters can be the worse for this ancient slander. No doubt every part of the story has been distorted and exaggerated in the telling; and a great deal of it may be pure invention, evolved from the inner consciousness of the slanderer. God forbid that any whisper of scandal should ever reach Lady Lesbia's ears.'

      He ignored poor Mary. It was to him as if there were no such person. Her feeble light was extinguished by the radiance of her sister's beauty; her very individuality was annihilated.

      'As for you, dear old fellow,' he said, with warm affection, 'no one will ever think the worse of you on account of your grandfather's peccadilloes.'

      'Yes, they will. Hereditary genius is one of our modern crazes. When a man's grandfather was a rogue, there must be a taint in his blood. People don't believe in spontaneous generation, moral or physical, now-a-days. Typhoid breeds typhoid, and typhus breeds typhus, just as dog breeds dog; and who will believe that a cheat and a liar can be the father of honest men?'

      'In that case, knowing what kind of man the grandson is, I will never believe that the grandfather was a rogue,' said Hammond, heartily.

      Maulevrier put out his hand without a word, and it was warmly grasped by his friend.

      'As for her ladyship, I respect and honour her as a woman who has led a life of self-sacrifice, and has worn her pride as an armour,' continued Hammond.

      'Yes, I believe the dowager's character is rather fine,' said Maulevrier; 'but she and I have never hit our horses very well together. She would have liked such a fellow as you for a grandson, Jack—a man who took high honours at Oxford, and could hold his own against all comers. Such a grandson would have gratified her pride, and would have repaid her for the trouble she had taken in nursing the Maulevrier estate; for however poor a property it was when her husband went to India there is no doubt that it is a very fine estate now, and that the dowager has been the making of it.'

      The two young men strolled up to Easedale Tarn before they went back to Fellside, where Lady Maulevrier received them with a stately graciousness, and where Lady Lesbia unbent considerably at luncheon, and condescended to an animated conversation with her brother's friend. It was such a new thing to have a stranger at the family board, a man whose information was well abreast with the march of progress, who could talk eloquently upon every subject which people care to talk about. In this new and animated society Lesbia seemed like an enchanted princess suddenly awakened from a spell-bound slumber. Molly looked at her sister with absolute astonishment. Never had she seen her so bright, so beautiful—no longer a picture or a statue, but a woman warm with the glow of life.

      'No wonder Mr. Hammond admires her,' thought poor Molly, who was quite acute enough to see the stranger's keen appreciation of her sister's charms, and positive indifference towards herself.

      There are some things which women find out by instinct, just as the needle turns towards the magnet. Shut a girl up in a tower till she is eighteen years old, and on the day of her release introduce her to the first man her eyes have ever looked upon, and she will know at a glance whether he admires her.

      After luncheon the four young people started for Rydal Mount; with Fräulein