Hugo Part 9

'Wait a moment,' Hugo put in. 'Tudor knew you were hiding in the flat?'

'Not much!' exclaimed Ravengar. 'I dropped on him like something out of the sky. It cost me some trouble to get in. I had a silly old housekeeper to dispose of.'

Hugo's heart fell.

'Great heavens!' he sighed.

'Why? What's the matter?'

'Nothing. But tell me what you wanted to get into the flat for at all.

What is there between you and Tudor?'

'Man! he's taken Camilla from me!' The accents of rage and despair were in Ravengar's voice as he uttered these words. 'He's taken her from me!

She was my typewriter, you know. I fell in love with her. We were engaged!'

Hugo was startled for a moment; then he smiled bitterly and incredulously. It seemed too monstrous and absurd that Camilla should have betrothed herself to this forbidding, ugly, ageing, and terrible man.

'You were engaged? Never! Perhaps you aren't aware that she was engaged to Tudor?'

'I tell you we were engaged.'

'She accepted you?'

'Why not? I meant well by the girl.'

'And then she disappeared?'

Hugo spoke with a certain cynicism.

'How do you know?' Ravengar demanded angrily.

'I only guess.'

'Well, she did. I can't imagine why. I meant well by her. And the next thing is, I find her working in your shop, and in the arms of that scoundrel, Tudor.' He hesitated, and then, as he proceeded, his tones softened to an appeal. 'Owen, why were you watching last night? I must know. It's an affair of life or death to me.'

Hugo did not believe most of Ravengar's story, and he perceived the difficulty of his own position and the necessity for caution.

'I was watching because Miss Payne thought herself in some mysterious danger,' he said.

'She came to me, as you have done, to ask my help. And I won't hide from you that it was she herself who informed me definitely that Tudor had invited her to marry him, and that she had consented.'

'She shall not marry him!' cried Ravengar, exasperated.

'You are right,' said Hugo. 'She shall not. I have yet to be convinced even that he meant to marry her.'

'The rascal! He and I had business relations for several years before I discovered who he was. Of course, you know?'

'Indeed I don't,' said Hugo, 'if he isn't Francis Tudor.'

'He has as much right to the name of Tudor as you have to the name of Hugo,' Ravengar sneered. 'He is the son of the man who dishonoured my father's name by pretending to marry that woman in Minneapolis. Even if I hated my father, I've no cause to love _that_ branch of our complicated family connections.'

Hugo whistled.

'I did not think there was so much money there,' he said at length.

'There wasn't. The fellow came into twenty thousand two years ago, and he has never earned a cent.'

'Yet he's living at the rate of five thousand a year at least.'

'It's like him!' Ravengar snorted. 'It's like him!'

'Perhaps he can't help it,' Hugo said queerly. 'Everyone isn't like you and me.'

'He can help robbing me of my future wife!'

'But she left you of her own accord.'

'Owen, she must marry me. It is essential. You must bring your influence to bear,' Ravengar burst out wildly. 'She must be my wife!'

'My dear fellow,' Hugo protested calmly, 'what are you dreaming of? I have no influence. You talk like a man at his wits' end.'

There was a silence.

'I am a man at his wits' end,' Ravengar murmured, half sadly. 'I trusted that girl. She knows all my secrets.'

'What secrets?' asked Hugo, struck by the phrase.

'My business secrets, of course. What else do you fancy?'

'My fancy is too active,' said Hugo, with careful casualness. 'It runs away with me. I was thinking of other sorts of secrets, and of that curious principle of English law that a wife can't give evidence against her husband.... You must pardon my fancy,' he added.

'Do you mean to insinuate that my eagerness to marry Camilla Payne is in order to prevent her from being able to--'

'No, Louis; I mean to insinuate nothing. Can't you see a joke?'

'I cannot,' said Ravengar. 'Not that variety of joke.'

'The appreciation of humour was never your strong point.'

Something in Hugo's manner made Ravengar spring forward; then he checked himself.

'Owen,' he entreated, 'don't let's quarrel again. I beg you to help me.

Help me, and I'll promise never to interfere with you in your business--I'll swear it.'

'Then it was you, after all, that instructed Polycarp?'

Ravengar gave an affirmative sign.