Part 53 (1/2)

”Was Lady Bell there?” he asked, quietly.

Jack leaped to his feet.

”Lady Bell! I see what you mean!” he groaned. ”Len, you are in love yourself, and yet you ask me to sell myself----”

Leonard flushed.

”Jack, much as I care for you, I swear that I am thinking as much of her good and happiness as of your own. If you marry her--which, after all, you _cannot_--if you could you would make her life miserable; if you marry Lady Bell, you will at least make _her_--happy.”

Jack paced up and down for a moment. Then he turned, white and haggard, and held out his hand:

”You are right. Would to Heaven you were not! I see it, I cannot help it. I will not make her life miserable. But--but--I must go and tell her. Heaven help us both!”

CHAPTER XXV.

Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise. Quite ignorant and unconscious of all that was going on in London, Stephen remained down at the Hurst.

What he had written to his mother was quite true; as a matter of fact Stephen was far too clever to write direct falsehoods--he was kept at Hurst Leigh very much against his will.

Squire Ralph had left him everything--money, house, lands, everything excepting the few legacies to servants, and Stephen had been hard at work, and was still hard at work ascertaining how much that everything was.

And, as day followed day, and disclosure succeeded disclosure, he became fascinated and possessed by the immense wealth which had fallen into his hands, or, say rather, which he had seized upon.

For many years the old squire had lived upon less than half his income; the remainder he had invested and speculated with, and as often happens to the miser, the luck of Midas had fallen upon him.

Everything he touched had turned to gold. The most unlikely speculations had proved successful; properties which he had bought for a mere song, and which had been regarded by the most wary as dangerous and profitless, had become profitable and valuable.

Some of these risky speculations he had, not unnaturally, kept concealed from the prudent Hudsley, who only now, by the discovery of scrip and bonds in out-of-the-way desks and bureaus, learned what kind of man his old friend had really been.

Not a day pa.s.sed but it brought to light some addition to the old man's gains, and served to swell the immense total.

Even the lands round Hurst had been manipulated by the old man, so that leases ran out almost at his death, and rents were raised.

One speculation will serve as an instance; he had purchased, some fifteen years before his death, the freehold of an estate bordering upon London; and in a locality which was then regarded as hopelessly unfas.h.i.+onable. A great capitalist had ruined himself by building large houses on the property, foreseeing that at some time or other the tide of the great city would reach this. .h.i.therto high and dry spot. But he had made a miscalculation, and he died before the tide which was to bring him wealth reached his property; old Ralph had then stepped in and bought it--houses, land, everything. In ten years' time the tide of fas.h.i.+on rolled that way, and now what had once been a neglected and forgotten quarter was the center of fas.h.i.+onable London.

It reads like a romance, but like many other romances, it was true.

Old Ralph himself had no idea of his own wealth, and that when he died he should leave behind him one of the most colossal fortunes in England.

Almost stunned by the immense total--so far as it had been arrived at--Stephen went about the place silent and overwhelmed.

But one thought was always ringing like a bell in his brain--”And I had nearly lost all this!”

Sometimes, in the quiet of the library, where he sat surrounded by books and papers, by accountants' statements and estimates, he would grow pale and tremble as he reflected by what a narrow chance he had secured this Midas-like wealth.

But had he secured it? and when the question presented itself, as it did a hundred, aye, a thousand times a day, he would turn ashy pale, and clutch the edge of the table to keep himself from reeling.

Where was that will--the real, true, valid will--which left everything away from him to Una?