Helen Vardons Confession | Page 5

with legal matters, that he was a lawyer. But
he was not in ordinary practice; and his business, whatever it was,
seemed to involve a good deal of travelling. That was all I knew about
him. As to his appearance, he was a huge, unwieldy man of a somewhat
Jewish cast of face, some years older, I should think, than my father;
pleasant spoken and genial in a somewhat heavy fashion, but quite
uninteresting. Hitherto I had neither liked nor disliked him. Now, it
need hardly be said, I regarded him with decided aversion; for if he
were not, as my father had said, "a blackmailing scoundrel," he had, at
any rate, taken the meanest, the most ungenerous advantage of my
father's difficulties, to say nothing of the callous, cynical indifference
that he had shown in regard to me and my wishes and interests.
It may seem a little odd that I found myself attaching no blame to my
father. Yet so it was. To me he appeared as merely the victim of
circumstances. No doubt he had done something indiscreet--perhaps
incorrect But discretion and correctness are not qualities that appeal to
a woman: whereas generosity--and my father was generous almost to a
fault--makes the most powerful appeal to feminine sympathies. As to
his honesty and good faith, I never doubted them for an instant; besides,
he had plainly said that no fraudulent intent could be ascribed to him.

What he had done I had not the least idea. Nor did I particularly care. It
was not the act, but it consequences with which I was concerned.
My meditations were interrupted at length by an apologetic tap at the
door, followed by the appearance of our housemaid.
"If you please, Miss Helen, shall I take Mr. Vardon's tea to the study, or
is he going to have it with you?"
The question brought me back from the region of tragedy and disaster
in which my thoughts had been straying, to the homely commonplaces
of everyday life.
"I'll just run down and ask him, Jessie," I answered; "and you needn't
wait. I'll come and tell you what he says."
I ran quickly down the stairs, but at the study door I paused with a
sudden revival of those terrors that had so lately assailed me. Suppose
he should open the subject and have something dreadful to tell me? Or
suppose that, even now, already--At the half-formed thought, I raised a
trembling hand, and, tapping lightly at the door, opened it and entered.
He was sitting at the table with a small pile of sealed and stamped
letters before him, and, as I stood, steadying my hand on the door knob,
he looked up with his customary smile of friendly welcome.
"Hail! O Dame of the azure hosen," said he, swinging round on his
revolving chair, "and how fares it with our liege lady, Queen Anne?"
"She is quite well, thank you," I replied.
"The Lord be praised!" he rejoined. "I seemed to have heard some
rumour of her untimely decease. A mere canard, it would seem; a
fiction of these confounded newspaper men. Or perchance I have been
misled by the jocose and boisterous Lecky."
The whimsical playfulness of speech, habitual as it was to him,
impressed me--perhaps for that very reason--with a vague uneasiness. It
was not what I had expected after that terrible conversation. The

anti-climax to my own tragic thoughts was too sudden; the descent to
the ordinary too uncomfortably steep. I perched myself on his knee, as I
often did, despite my rather excessive size, and passed my hand over
his thin, grey hair.
"Do you know," I said, clinging desperately to the common-place, "that
you are going bald? I can see the skin of your head quite plainly."
"And why not?" he demanded. "Did you think my hair grew out of my
cranium? But you won't see it long. I've heard of an infallible
hair-restorer."
"Indeed!"
"Yes, indeed! Guaranteed to grow a crop of ringlets on a bladder of lard.
We'll get a bottle and try it on the carpet broom; and if the result is
satisfactory--well, we'll just put Esau in his place in the second row."
"You are a very frivolous old person, Mr. Pater," said I. "Do you know
that?"
"I hope so," he replied. "And again I say, why not? When a man is too
old to play the fool, it is time to carry him to the bone-yard. Am I going
to have any tea?
"Of course you are. Will you have it here alone or shall we have tea
together?"
"What a question!" he exclaimed. "Am I in my dotage? Should I drink
tea in musty solitude when I might bask in the smiles of a lovely
maiden? Avaunt! No, I'll tell