Roger Ingleton, Minor Part 48

"I am in difficulties, my child, which you could not understand."

"I could. Do tell me."

"The fact is," said the captain, taking up his pen and dotting the blotting-pad as he spoke, "that when on former occasions I have tried to claim your sympathy I--well, I was not quite successful. I do not want the pain of a similar failure again."

"I would do anything, anything to help you, if I could!"

He took her hand and held it in his.

"I am in great straits," said he. "An old Indian debt has followed me here. I cannot meet it, and ruin stares me in the face. You know I am a poor man; that I am living on other people--you have reminded me of that often enough; that of all the money which pa.s.ses my hands, scarcely enough to live on belongs by right to me. You know all that?"

"Yes; I know that we are poor. How much do you owe?" she asked.

"I cannot say. Not long ago it was some hundreds, but by this time it is nearer thousands. Nothing grows so rapidly as a debt, my child-- even," added he, with an unctuous drop of his voice, "a debt of honour."

"And will not your creditor wait?"

"My creditor has waited, but refuses to do so any longer. In a month from now, my child, your father and those he loves best will be paupers."

"Is there no way of meeting it? None whatever?"

"I cannot pay; I shrink from borrowing. The trust funds in my charge are sacred--"

"Of course!" said she, astonished that he should name them in such a connection. "Is there nothing else?"

"My creditor is Robert Ratman--or as he calls himself, and possibly is, Roger Ingleton. As you know, he claims to be the elder brother of our Roger, and I--"

"Yes, yes," said she; "Roger told me about that. He is your creditor?"

"He is. I got into his clutches in India, little guessing who he was, and he is crus.h.i.+ng me now. There is but one way, and one only, of escaping him--and that way is, I fear, impossible, Rosalind."

"What is it?" said she, with pale face, knowing what was to come.

"He loves you. As my son-in-law he would be no longer my creditor."

She drew away her hand with a shudder.

"Father," said she, in a dry hard voice which startled him, "do you really mean this?"

"Is it a time for jesting?" said he. "I ask nothing of you. I merely state facts. You dislike him--there is an end of it. Only remember we are not now dealing with Robert Ratman, but with an injured man who has not had a fair chance. The good in him," continued the father, deluded by the pa.s.sive look on his daughter's face, and becoming suddenly warm in his champions.h.i.+p of the absent creditor, "has been smothered; but for aught we know it may still be there. A wife--"

She stopped him with a peremptory motion of her hand.

"Please do not say anything more. Your debt--when does it fall due?"

"In a week or ten days, my child. Consider--"

She interrupted again.

"No more, please," she said, almost imploringly. "I will think what can be done to help you in a week. Good-bye, dear father."

She stooped, with face as white as marble, and touched his forehead with her cold lips.

"Loyal girl," said the father, when the door had closed behind her; "she will stand by me yet. After all, Ratman has his good points--clever, cheerful, good man of business--"

Here abruptly the soliloquy ended, and Captain Oliphant buried his face in his hands, a miserable man.

To Rosalind, as she walked rapidly across the park, there came but one thought. Her father--how could she help him? how could she save him, not so much from his debts as from the depths into which they were plunging him?

"My poor father," said she. "Only a man in desperate plight could think of such a remedy. He never meant it. He does not really suppose--no, no; he said he did not ask anything. He told me because I asked. Poor darling father!"

And with something very like a sob she hurried on to Yeld.

She went straight to Dr Brandram's.

"Well, my dear young lady, it does one good to see you back," said he; "but bless me, how pale you look."

"Do I? I'm quite well, thank you. Dr Brandram," said she, "do you know anything about this Mr Ratman?"

The Doctor stared at this abrupt inquiry.

"Nothing more than you and every one else does--that he is a rank impostor!"

"I don't mean that. I mean, where is he? I want to see him very much."

"You want to see him? He has vanished, and left no track. Is it nothing I can help you in?"

"No," said she, looking very miserable. "I hoped you could have told me where to find him. Good-bye, and thank you."

She departed, leaving the doctor sorely disturbed and bewildered. He stood watching her slight figure till it disappeared in the Vicarage garden, and then shrugging his shoulders, said, "Something wrong, somewhere. Evidently not a case for me to be trusted with. It's about time Armstrong came home."

Whereupon he walked over to the post office and dispatched the telegram which, as the reader knows, procured Tom Oliphant the unspeakable pleasure of a game of football on the following afternoon.

"Well," said the tutor to his friend in the doctor's parlour that evening, "what's all this about?"

"That's what I'm not likely to know myself," said the doctor; and he narrated the circ.u.mstances of Miss Oliphant's mysterious call.

"Humph!" said the tutor. "She wants to see him in his capacity of Robert Ratman, evidently, and not of Roger Ingleton, major."

"So it seemed to me."

"And you say she had just come from visiting her father at Maxfield?"

"Yes."

"On the principle that two and two make four, I suppose we may conclude that my co-trustee is on toast at present," said the tutor.

"And further, that that co-trustee being somebody's father, you are the man to get him off it."