"I should rather not say anything about it," Fred replied. "I hope with all my heart that Frank is not guilty, but----"

"What do you think?" Captain Bayley repeated; "have you any grounds whatever for believing him guilty?"

"No, sir, and I do not wish you to be in the slightest degree influenced by what I said." He paused, but Captain Bayley's eyes were still fixed upon him, as if commanding a complete answer.

"Well, sir," he went on hesitatingly, "I must own that, sad as it is to say so, I fear Frank did it."

"Did he confess it to you?" Captain Bayley asked, in a strained, strange voice.

"No, uncle, not in so many words, but he said things which seemed to me to mean that. When I tried to dissuade him from running away, and urged him to remain till his innocence could be proved, he said angrily, 'What's the use of talking like that, when you know as well as I do that it can't be proved.' Afterwards he said, 'It is a bad job, and I have been an awful fool. But who could have thought that note would ever be traced back to Litter?' and other remarks of the same kind. He may be innocent, uncle--you know how deeply I wish we could prove him so--but I fear, I greatly fear, that we shall be doing Frank more service by letting the matter drop. You know the fellows in the school all believe him innocent, and though his going away has staggered some of them, the general feeling is still all in his favour; therefore they are sure to speak of him as a sort of victim, and when he returns, which of course he will do in a few years' time, the matter will have died away and have been altogether forgotten."

The old officer sat down at the table and hid his face in his hands.

All this time Alice, pale and silent, had sat and listened with her eyes fixed upon the speaker, but she now leapt up to her feet.

"Uncle," she said, "don't believe him, he is not speaking the truth, I am sure he is not. He hates Frank, and I have known it all along, because Frank is bigger and better than he; because Frank was generous and kind-hearted; because every one liked Frank and no one liked him. He is telling a lie now, and I believe every word he has said since he came into the room is false."

"Hush! child," the old officer said; "you must not speak so, my dear. If it was only the word of one lad against another, it would be different; but it is not so. The proof is very strong against Frank. I would give all I am worth if I could still believe him innocent, and had he come to me and put his hand in mine, and said, 'Uncle, I am innocent,' I would have believed him against all the evidence in the world. It is not I who condemn him, he has condemned himself. He sends me no word; he cannot look me in the face and declare himself innocent. He runs away at night, knowing well that there could be but one construction as to this, and that all would judge him guilty. No, Alice, it breaks my heart to say so, but I can struggle no longer against these facts. The lad whom I have loved as a son has turned out a thief."

"No, uncle, no," the girl cried pa.s.sionately, "I will never believe it, not to the end of my life. I cannot prove him innocent, but I know he is so, and some day it will be proved; but till then I shall still think of him as my dear brother, as my true-hearted brother, who has been wrongfully accused, and who is the victim of some wicked plot of which, perhaps, Fred Barkley knows more than any one else," and, bursting into a pa.s.sion of tears, she ran from the room. Fred looked after her with an expression of pity and sorrow.

"Poor child!" he said, "it is a terrible blow for her, and she scarce knows what she is saying."

"It is a terrible blow," Captain Bayley said, in a dreary voice, "a most terrible blow to me and to her. No wonder she feels it; and I have been planning and hoping that some day, a few years hence, those two would get to like each other in a different way. I had, by my will, divided my fortune equally between you and him, but I have liked him best. Of course, I brought him up, and he has been always with me; it was natural that I should do so. Still I wanted to be fair, and I divided it equally. But I was pleased at the thought that her fortune, which is, as you know, a very large one, would be his, and enable him to make a great figure in the world if he had chosen; and now it is all over.

"Go away now, my boy, the blow has been too much for me. I am getting an old man, and this is the second great blow I have had. Do not take to heart the wild words of poor little Alice. You see she scarcely knows what she is saying."

Without another word Fred took his departure. When once out of sight of the house his steps quickened, and he walked briskly along.

"Splendid!" he said to himself; "a grand stroke indeed, and perfectly safe. Frank is not likely to return for twenty years, if ever, and I don't think the old man is good for another five. I expect I shall have some trouble with that little cat, Alice; but she is only a child, and will come round in time, and her fortune will be quite as useful to me as it would have been to him. I always knew he was little better than a fool, but I could hardly have hoped that he would have walked into the trap as he has done. I suppose that other blow old Bayley spoke of was that affair of his daughter. That was a lucky business for me too."

Fred Barkley was not mistaken, it was of his daughter Captain Bayley had been thinking when he spoke. He had married young when he first went out to India, and had lost his wife two years later, leaving him with a daughter six months old. He had sent her home to England, and after a twenty years' absence he had returned and found her grown up.

She had inherited something of her father's pa.s.sionate disposition, and possessed, in addition, an amount of sullen obstinacy which was wholly alien to his nature. But her father saw none of these defects in her character. She was very beautiful, with an air of pride and hauteur which he liked. She had a right to be proud, he thought, for she was a very wealthy heiress, for, his two elder brothers having died childless while he was in India, the fine property of their father had all descended to him.

Though the girl had many suitors, she would listen to none of them, having formed a strong attachment to a man in station altogether beneath her. He had given lessons in drawing at the school which had been her home as well as her place of education during her father's absence, for Captain Bayley had quarrelled with his sisters, both of whom, he considered, had married beneath them.

The fact that Ella Bayley was an only child, and that her father was a wealthy man, was known in the school, and had, in some way, come to the ears of the drawing-master, who was young, and by no means ill-looking.

He had played his cards well. Ella was romantic and impetuous, and, before long, returned the devotion which her teacher expressed for her.

When her father returned home, and Ella left school to take her place at the head of his establishment, she had hoped that she should be able to win from him a consent to her engagement; but she found his prejudices on the subject of birth were strong, and she waited two years before she broached the subject.

The wrath of Captain Bayley was prodigious; he heaped abusive epithets upon the man of her choice, till Ella's temper rose also. There was a pa.s.sionate quarrel between father and daughter. The next morning Ella was missing; a week afterwards Captain Bayley received a copy of the certificate of her marriage, with a short note from Ella, saying that when he could make his mind up to forgive her and her husband, and to acknowledge that the latter did not deserve the abusive language that he had applied to him, she should be glad to return and resume her place as his affectionate and loving daughter. She gave an address at which he could communicate to her.

Three years pa.s.sed before Captain Bayley's anger had sufficiently calmed down for him to write to his daughter saying that he forgave her. The letter was returned by the people at the house, with a note saying that many months had elapsed since any inquiries had been made for letters for Mrs. Smedley, and that they had altogether lost sight of her. Now that the Captain had once made up his mind to forgive his daughter, he was burning with impatience to see her again, and he at once employed a detective to find out what had become of her.

From the person to whose house the letter had been directed the detective learned the address where she and her husband had resided while in London.

For a time it seemed they had lived expensively, the sale of Ella's jewels keeping them in luxury for some months. Then hard times had come upon them; the man had altogether lost his connection as a teacher, and could, or would, do nothing to support his wife and himself; they had moved from the place they had first lived at, and taken much smaller lodgings.

Here the people of the house reported their life had been very unhappy; the husband had taken to drink, and there had been fierce and frequent quarrels between them, arising--the landlady had gleaned, from the loud and angry utterance of the husband--from the wife's refusal to appeal to her father for a.s.sistance. They had left this place suddenly, and in debt; thence they had moved from lodging to lodging at short intervals, their position getting worse, until they were last lodged in a wretched garret. From this point they were traced with great trouble down to Nottingham, where the husband obtained a precarious living by producing designs for embroidery and curtains.

Had he been steady he might have soon done fairly, but a great part of his time was spent in public-houses, and he was seldom sober. When returning home one night in a state of drunkenness, he was run over by a heavy van and killed. As his wife possessed but a few shillings in the world, he was buried at the expense of the parish and his widow at once left the town.

The people where she lodged believed that she had gone to London, taking with her her six months old child, and had started to tramp the way on foot. The woman said that she doubted whether she could ever have got there. She was an utterly broken woman, with a constant racking cough, which was like to tear her to pieces, and before she set out her landlady had urged upon her that the idea of her starting to carry a heavy child to London was nothing short of madness.

After this all trace of Ella had been lost. Advertis.e.m.e.nts offering large rewards appeared in the papers; the books of every workhouse between Nottingham and London, and indeed of almost every workhouse in England, were carefully searched to see if there was any record of the death of a woman with a child about the time of her disappearance. A similar search was made at all the London hospitals, and at every inst.i.tution where she might have crawled to die; but no trace had ever been found of her.

That she was dead was not doubted; for it was found that at Nottingham she had once gone to the parish doctor for some medicine for her child.

The physician had taken particular notice of her, had asked her some questions, and had made a note in his case-book that the mother of the child he had prescribed for was in an advanced stage of consumption, and had probably but a few weeks, certainly not more than a few months, to live.

It was long before the search was given up as hopeless, and many hundreds of pounds were spent by Captain Bayley before he abandoned all hope of discovering, if not his daughter, at least her child. During the year which elapsed before he was forced to acknowledge that it was hopeless, Captain Bayley had suffered terribly. His self-reproaches were unceasing, and he aged many years in appearance.

It was three years after this, on the death of his sister, Mrs. Norris, whose husband had died some years before, that he took Frank into his house and adopted him as his son, stating, however, to all whom it might concern, that he did not regard him as standing nearer to him as his heir than his other nephew, Fred Barkley, but that his property would be divided between them as they might show themselves worthy of it. It was three years later still, that, at the death of her father, an old fellow-officer, his household was increased by the addition of Alice, who had been left to his guardianship, but who had soon learned, like Frank, to address him as uncle.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XV.

THE MISSING HEIR.

IT was a long time before the house in Eaton Square in any way recovered its former appearance. Captain Bayley had lost much of his life and vivacity, and, as the servants remarked to each other, nothing seemed to put him out. He went for his morning ride in the Park, or his afternoon visit to the Club, as usual, but his thoughts seemed far away; he pa.s.sed old friends without seeing them, and if stopped he greeted them no longer with a cheery ring in his voice, or a quick smile of welcome.

Every one who knew him remarked that Bayley was going down hill terribly fast, and was becoming a perfect wreck.

Frank's name was never now mentioned in the house. Its utterance had not been forbidden, but it had been dropped as a matter concerning which a hopeless disagreement existed. Alice had changed almost as much as her uncle. Her spirits were gone; her voice was no longer heard singing about the house; she no longer ran up and down the stairs with quick springing footsteps, and indeed seemed all at once to have changed from a young girl into a young woman. Sometimes, as she sat, the tears filled her eyes and rolled fast down her cheeks; at other times she would walk about with her eyebrows knitted, and hands clenched, and lips pursed together, a little volcano of suppressed anger.

Although no discussion on the subject had taken place between her and her guardian, it was an understood thing that she maintained her opinion, and that she regarded Fred Barkley as an enemy. If she happened to be in the room when he was announced, she would rise and leave it without a word; if he remained to a meal, she would not make her appearance in the dining or drawing rooms.

"Alice still regards me as the incarnation of evil," Fred said, with a forced laugh, upon one of those occasions.

"The child is a trump," Captain Bayley said warmly, "a warm lover and a good hater. What a thing it is," he said, with a sigh, "to be at an age when trust and confidence are unshakable, and when nothing will persuade you that what you wish to believe is not right; what would I not give for that child's power of trust?"

The household in Eaton Square were almost unanimous in Frank's favour.

His genial, hearty manners rendered him a universal favourite with the servants; and although none knew the causes of Frank's sudden disappearance, the general opinion was that, whatever had happened, he could not have been to blame in the matter.

His warmest adherent was Evan Holl, who had months before been introduced to the house as a.s.sistant knife and boot cleaner by Frank. He did not sleep there, going home at nine o'clock in the evening when his work was done.

"Do you know, Harry," he said, one day, "what a rum crest, as they calls it,--I asked the butler what it meant, and he says as how it was the crest of the family--Captain Bayley has; he's got it on his silver, and I noticed it when I was in the pantry to-day helping the butler to clean some silver dishes which had been lying by unused for some time. 'All families of distinction,' the butler said,--he is mighty fond of using hard long words--'all families of distinction,' says he, ''as got their own crest, which belongs to them and no one else. Now this 'ere crest of the guv'nor's is a hand holding a dagger, and the hand has only got three fingers.' I said as how there was two missing, and that the chap as did it couldn't have known much of his business to go and leave out two fingers. But the butler says, 'That's your hignorance,' says he; 'the hand 'as got only three fingers because a hancestor of the Captain's in the time of the Crusaders'---- 'And what's the Crusaders?'

says I. 'The Crusaders was a war between the English and the Americans hundreds of years ago,' says he."

Harry burst into a shout of laughter. "Mr. Butler does not know anything about it, for the Crusades were wars between people who went out to the Holy Land to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks who held it."

"Ah, well," Evan said, "it don't make no odds whether they was Turks or Americans. However, the butler says as how the Captain Bayley what lived in those days, he saw a red Injun a-crawling to stab the king, who was a-lying asleep in his tent, and just as his hand was up to stick in the knife, Captain Bayley he gives a cut with his sword which whips off two of the fingers, and before the Injun could turn round and go at him he gives another cut, and takes off his hand at the wrist, and the next cut he takes off his head; so the hand with three fingers holding a dagger was given him to carry as a crest. I suppose after a time the hand got wore out, or got bad, so as he couldn't have carried it about no longer, and instead of that, as a kind of remembrance of the affair, he 'as them put on his forks and spoons."

Mrs. Holl had been listening with grave interest to the narrative.