Part 27 (1/2)
His ingenuity was unparalleled, and he was, moreover, a friend of her father's bitterest enemy. Therefore, what had she to hope from him?
The attack upon the Minister and his methods was only postponed in order to lure her and her father into a sense of security. What was to prevent the allegation being made after she had given herself to him in marriage? As she walked there in the evening light beneath the high dark pines she fully realised the insecurity of the position. In the end the man Borselli must triumph, and she, with her father, would be equally a victim.
What her father had told her of the incident in the Chamber that afternoon revealed the truth. Dubard had, by his clever scheming, succeeded in postponing the blow until after she had become his wife.
She knew well his intimate friends.h.i.+p with Angelo Borselli, and felt a.s.sured that it was in the interests of the Under-Secretary that he had opened that safe which His Excellency had believed to be closed so effectively to everyone.
”You will seek to retaliate, will you not?” she asked her father suddenly. ”You will surely not allow Borselli another opportunity of conspiring against you! He should be removed from office upon some pretext or other.”
Her father smiled at her words, and replied--
”It would be easy to retaliate, my dear, but it would be unwise.”
”Why? If he remains in office, he may to-morrow, or on some occasion when you least expect it, level a blow that might crush you?”
”I know! I know!” he groaned. ”I am not safe by any means. Until Vito discovers what has really occurred I must remain patiently inactive.”
”But why not remove Borselli from office? You could surely do that! It is your duty to yourself to do so!”
”Ah! You do not know everything, Mary,” answered her father very gravely. ”To attempt his dismissal at the present moment would be a most injudicious course. By making charges against him I should also implicate myself. If I spoke a single word to his detriment, it would be suicidal. I should be seeking my own downfall.”
”Then, to speak plainly, you are unable to dismiss him?” she said in a low, distinct voice, looking her father straight in the face with a glance of reproach. ”You are entirely in that man's hands?”
His Excellency, grave and thoughtful again, nodded in the affirmative, sighed heavily, and then admitted--
”You know the truth, my dear. My secrets are, unfortunately, his?”
And she echoed his sigh with her white lips compressed. She foresaw, alas! that for her there was no hope of escape from that hideous compact she had been compelled to make. She had given herself as the price of her father's honour, the price of his very life, to a man whom she could neither trust nor love--a man who, when it suited his own interests, would break his bond without the slightest compunction, and allow the crus.h.i.+ng blow to fall upon her house--a blow that must be fatal to her beloved father, who stood there so grave and thoughtful at her side.
She contemplated the future, but saw in it only a grey, limitless sea of blank despair.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.
BILLY GRENFELL IS PHILOSOPHIC.
”Then we must break up the home, I suppose?”
”I suppose so, Billy, much as I regret it. But a fellow has to take advantage of the main chance in his life, you know, and this is mine?”
declared George Macbean, leaning back in his padded chair at the breakfast-table in their high-up old room in Fig Tree Court, Temple.
”I should think so! An appointment in the Italian Ministry of War at such a salary isn't an offer that comes to every man, and you'd be a fool if you didn't accept it. You must have some high official friend whom you've never told me about--eh?” And William Grenfell, barrister-at-law, known as ”Billy” to his intimates, with whom Macbean shared chambers, took up his friend's letter and re-read it, asking, ”What's the signature? These foreigners sign their names in such an abominable manner that n.o.body can ever read them.”
”Angelo Borselli, the Under-Secretary. I met him in the summer, while I was staying with my uncle near Rugby.”
”And he offers you a billet like this? By Jove, you're lucky!” And the big, burly, clean-shaven fellow of about thirty-five, one of the ever-increasing briefless brigade, rose and looked out across the quiet courtyard. ”You'll throw over that pompous a.s.s Morgan-Mason, won't you?
I wonder how you stood the cad so long.”
”Necessity, my dear fellow. It has been writing letters for Morgan-Mason or starve--I preferred the former,” remarked Macbean, with a smile.
The old panelled sitting-room, with its well-filled bookcase, its pipe-rack, its threadbare carpet, and its greasy, leather-covered chairs, worn but comfortable, differed but little from any other chambers in that old-world colony of bachelors. Macbean and Grenfell had had diggings together and employed the same laundress for the past three years, the former spruce and smart, mixing with the West End world in which his employer moved, while the latter was a thorough-going Bohemian, eccentric in many ways, unsuccessful, yet nevertheless a man br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with cleverness. They had been fast friends ten years before, and when opportunity had offered to share chambers they had eagerly embraced it.
Billy never had a brief. He idled in the Courts with a dummy brief before him in order to impress the public, but his slender income was mostly derived from contributions to certain critical reviews, who took his ”stuff” and paid him badly for it.
George Macbean, though he could so ill afford it, bore the major portion of the expenses of their small household, for he knew well the little reverses of fortune that had been Billy's, and what a good, generous fellow he really was at heart.