Miriam's manner toward him was the same as it had always been so long as he could remember. He had once thought—indeed, he had made to her the accusation—that she was always conscious of the social gulf existing between them; that she always remembered that she was by birth and breeding a lady, whereas he was the son of an obscure Frenchman who was nothing but a clockmaker whose name could be read (and can to this day be deciphered) on a hundred timepieces in remote East Anglian farms. Since his change of fortune he had, as all men who rise to a great height or sink to the depths will tell, noted a corresponding change in his friends. Even Captain Clubbe had altered, and the affection which peeped out at times almost against his puritanical will seemed to have suffered a chill. The men of Farlingford, and even those who had sailed in “The Last Hope” with him, seemed to hold him at a distance. They nodded to him with a brief, friendly smile, but were shy of shaking hands. The hand which they would have held out readily enough, had he needed assistance in misfortune, slunk hastily into a pocket. For he who climbs will lose more friends than the ne'er-do-well. Some may account this to human nature for righteousness and others quite the contrary: for jealousy, like love, lies hidden in unsuspected corners.
Juliette de Gemosac had been quite different to Loo since learning his story. Miriam alone remained unchanged. He had accused her of failing to rise superior to arbitrary social distinctions, and now, standing behind her in the fire-lit dining-room of the rectory, he retracted that accusation once and for all time in his own heart, though her justification came from a contrary direction to that from which it might have been expected.
Miriam alone remained a friend—and nothing else, he added, bitterly, in his own heart. And she seemed to assume that their friendship, begun in face of social distinctions, should never have to suffer from that burthen.
“I should like to hear,” she repeated, seeing that he was silent, “all that has happened since you went away; all that you may care to tell me.”
“My heritage, you mean?”
She moved in her seat but did not look round. She had laid aside her hat on coming into the house, and as she sat, leaning forward with her hands clasped together in her lap, gazing thoughtfully at the fire which glowed blue and white for the salt water that was in the drift-wood, her hair, loosened by the wind, half concealed her face.
“Yes,” she answered, slowly.
“Do you know what it is—my heritage?” lapsing, as he often did when hurried by some pressing thought, into a colloquialism half French.
She shook her head, but made no audible reply.
“Do you suspect what it is?” he insisted.
“I may have suspected, perhaps,” she admitted, after a pause.
“When? How long?”
She paused again. Quick and clever as he was, she was no less so. She weighed the question. Perhaps she found no answer to it, for she turned toward the door that stood open and looked out into the hall. The light of the lamp there fell for a moment across her face.
“I think I hear them returning,” she said.
“No,” he retorted, “for I should hear them before you did. I was brought up at sea. Do not answer the question, however, if you would rather not. You ask what has happened since I went away. A great many things have happened which are of no importance. Such things always happen, do they not? But one night, when we were quarrelling, Dormer Colville mentioned your name. He was very much alarmed and very angry, so he perhaps spoke the truth—by accident. He said that you had always known that I might be the King of France. Many things happened, as I tell you, which are of no importance, and which I have already forgotten, but that I remember and always shall.”
“I have always known,” replied Miriam, “that Mr. Dormer Colville is a liar. It is written on his face, for those who care to read.”
A woman at bay is rarely merciful.
“And I thought for an instant,” pursued Loo, “that such a knowledge might have been in your mind that night, the last I was here, last summer, on the river-wall. I had a vague idea that it might have influenced in some way the reply you gave me then.”
He had come a step nearer and was standing over her. She could hear his hurried breathing.
“Oh, no,” she replied, in a calm voice full of friendliness. “You are quite wrong. The reason I gave you still holds good, and—and always will.”
In the brief silence that followed this clear statement of affairs, they both heard the rattle of the iron gate by the seawall. Sep and his father were coming. Loo turned to look toward the hall and the front door, dimly visible in the shadow of the porch. While he did so Miriam passed her hand quickly across her face. When Loo turned again and glanced down at her, her attitude was unchanged.
“Will you look at me and say that again?” he asked, slowly.
“Certainly,” she replied. And she rose from her chair. She turned and faced him with the light of the hall-lamp upon her. She was smiling and self-confident.
“I thought,” he said, looking at her closely, “as I stood behind you, that there were tears in your eyes.”
She went past him into the hall to meet Sep and his father, who were already on the threshold.
“It must have been the firelight,” she said to Barebone as she passed him.
A minute later Septimus Marvin was shaking him by the hand with a vague and uncertain but kindly grasp.
“Sep came running to tell me that you were home again,” he said, struggling out of his overcoat. “Yes—yes. Home again to the old place. And little changed, I can see. Little changed, my boy. Tempora mutantur, eh? and we mutamur in illis. But you are the same.”
“Of course. Why should I change? It is too late to change for the better now.”
“Never! Never say that. But we do not want you to change. We looked for you to come in a coach-and-four—did we not, Miriam? For I suppose you have secured your heritage, since you are here again. It is a great thing to possess riches—and a great responsibility. Come, let us have tea and not think of such things. Yes—yes. Let us forget that such a thing as a heritage ever came between us—eh, Miriam?”
And with a gesture of old-world politeness he stood aside for his niece to pass first into the dining-room, whither a servant had preceded them with a lamp.
“It will not be hard to do that,” replied Miriam, steadily, “because he tells me that he has not yet secured it.”
“All in good time—all in good time,” said Marvin, with that faith in some occult............