40+ Adventure Novels & Lost World Mysteries in One Premium Edition. Henry Rider Haggard
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to her to sit down. She did so, and fixed her great grey eyes on him with some curiosity. The effect was remarkable; her father fidgeted, made a mistake in his calculations, glanced all round the room with his shifty eyes (ah, how changed from those bold black eyes with which Maria Lee fell in love four-and-twenty years ago!) and finally threw down his pen with an exclamation that would have shocked Angela had she understood it.
"How often, Angela, have I asked you not to stare me out of countenance! It is a most unladylike trick of yours."
She blushed painfully.
"I beg your pardon; I forgot. I will look out of the window."
"Don't be a fool; look like other people. But now I want to speak to you. In the first place, I find that the household expenditure for the last year was three hundred and fifty pounds. That is more than I can afford; it must not exceed three hundred this year."
"I will do my best to keep the expenses down, father; but I can assure you that there is no money wasted now."
Then came a pause, which, after humming and hawing a little, Philip was the first to break.
"Do you know that I saw your cousin George yesterday? He is back at last at Isleworth."
"Yes, Pigott told me that he had come. He has been away a long while."
"When did you last see him?"
"When I was about thirteen, I believe; before he lost the election, and went away."
"He has been down here several times since then. I wonder that you did not see him."
"I always disliked him, and kept out of his way."
"Gad, you can't dislike him more than I do; but I keep good friends with him for all that, and you must do the same. Now, look here, Angela, will you promise to keep a secret?"
"Yes, father, if you wish it."
"Well, then, I appear to be a poor man, don't I? And remember," he added, hastily, "that, with reference to household expenses, I am poor; but, as a matter of fact"—and here he sunk his voice, and glanced suspiciously round—"I am worth at this moment nearly one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in hard cash."
"That is six thousand pounds a year at four per cent.," commented
Angela, without a moment's hesitation. "Then I really think you might
put a flue into the old greenhouse, and allow a shilling a week to
Mrs. Jakes' mother."
"Curse Mrs. Jakes' mother! Nobody but a woman would have interrupted with such nonsense. Listen. You must have heard how I was disinherited on account of my marriage with your mother, and the Isleworth estates left to your cousin George, and how, with a refined ingenuity, he was forbidden to bequeath them back to me or to my children. But mark this, he is not forbidden to sell them to me; no doubt the old man never dreamt that I should have the money to buy them; but, you see, I have almost enough."
"How did you get so much money?"
"Get it! First, I took the gold plate my grandfather bought, and sold it. I had no right to do it, but I could not afford to have so much capital lying idle. It fetched nearly five thousand pounds. With this I speculated successfully. In two years I had eighteen thousand. The eighteen thousand I invested in a fourth share in a coal-mine, when money was scarce and coals cheap. Coals rose enormously just then, and in five years' time I sold my share to the co-holders for eighty-two thousand, in addition to twenty-one thousand received by way of interest. Since then I have not speculated, for fear my luck should desert me. I have simply allowed the money to accumulate on mortgage and other investments, and bided my time, for I have sworn to have those estates back before I die. It is for this cause that I have toiled, and thought, and screwed, and been cut by the whole neighbourhood for twenty years; but now I think that, with your help, my time is coming."
"With my help. What is it that you wish me to do?"
"Listen," answered her father, nervously tapping his pencil on the account-book before him. "George is not very fond of Isleworth—in fact, he rather dislikes it; but, like all the Caresfoots, he does not care about parting with landed property, and, though we appear to be good friends, he hates me too much ever to consent, under ordinary circumstances, to sell it to me. It is to you I look to overcome that objection."
"I! How?"
"You are a woman and you ask me how you should get the blind side of a man!"
"I do not in the least understand you."
Philip smiled incredulously.
"Then I suppose I must explain. If ever you take the trouble to look at yourself in the glass, you will probably see that Nature has been very kind to you in the matter of good looks; nor are you by any means deficient in brains. Your cousin George is very fond of a pretty woman, and, to be plain, what I want you to do is to make use of your advantages to get him under your thumb and persuade him into selling the property."
"Oh! father, how can you?" ejaculated Angela, in an agony of shame.
"You idiot, I won't want you to marry him; I only want you to make a fool of him. Surely, being of the sex you are, you won't find that an uncongenial occupation."
Angela's blushes had given away to pallor now, and she answered with cold contempt:
"I don't think you quite understand what a girl feels—at least, what I feel, for I know no other girls. Perhaps it would be useless for me to try to explain. I had rather go blind than use my eyes for such a shameful purpose."
"Angela," said her father, with as much temper as he ever showed now, "let me tell you that you are a silly fool; you are more, you are an encumbrance. Your birth," he added, bitterly, "robbed me of your mother, and the fact of your being a girl deprived our branch of the family of their rights. Now that you have grown up, you prefer to gratify your whims rather than help me to realize the object of my life by a simple course of action that could do no one any harm. I never asked you to commit yourself in any way. Well, well, it is what I must expect. We have not seen much of each other heretofore, and perhaps the less we meet in the future the better."
"You have no right to talk to me so," she answered, with flashing eyes, "though I am your daughter, and it is cowardly to reproach me with my birth, my sex, and my dependence. Am I responsible for any of these things? But I will not burden you long. And as to what you wanted me to do, and think such a little of, I ask you, is it what my poor mother would have wished her daughter——"
Here Philip abruptly rose, and left the room and the house.
"She is as like her mother as possible," he mused, as soon as he was clear of the house. "It might have been Hilda herself, only she is twice as beautiful as Hilda was. I shall have another bad night after this, I know I shall. I must get rid of that girl somehow, I cannot bear her about me; she is a daily reminder of things I dare not remember, and whenever she stares at me with those great eyes of hers, I feel as though she were looking through me. I wonder if she knows the story of Maria Lee!"
And then dismissing, or trying to dismiss, the matter from his mind, he took his way across the fields to Isleworth Hall, a large white brick mansion in the Queen Anne style, about two miles distant from the Abbey, and, on arrival, asked for his cousin George, and was at once shown into that gentleman's presence.
Years had told upon George more than they had upon Philip, and, though there were no touches of grey in the flaming red of his hair, the bloodshot eyes, and the puckered crowsfeet beneath them, to say nothing of the slight but constant trembling of the hand, all showed that he was a man well on in middle-life, and who had lived every day of it. Time, too, had made the face more intensely unpleasant and vulgar-looking than ever. Such Caresfoot characteristics as it possessed were, year by year, giving place, in an increasingly greater degree, to the kitchen-maid strain introduced by the mother. In short, George Caresfoot did not even look a gentleman, whereas Philip certainly did.
"You don't seem very well, George. I am afraid that your travels have not agreed with you."
"My