HUSH-MONEY.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Babb, settling himself on a chair; then finding he had sat on the tails of his coat, he rose, held a tail in each hand, and reseated himself between them; ‘yes.’

‘Do you mean seriously to tell me that Mr. Jordan’s second wife was my sister?’

‘Well—in a way. That is, I don’t mean your sister in a way, but his wife in a way.’

‘I have heard nothing of this; what do you mean?’

‘I mean that he did not marry her.’

Jasper Babb’s face darkened. ‘I have been in his house and spoken to him, and not known that. What became of my sister?’

The old man fidgeted on his chair. It was not comfortable. ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Did she die?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Babb, ‘she ran off with a play-actor.’

‘Well—and after that?’

‘After what? After the play-actor? I do not know, I have not heard of her since. I don’t want to. Was not that enough?’

‘And Mr. Jordan—does he know nothing?’

‘I cannot tell. If you are curious to know you can ask.’

‘This is very extraordinary. Why did not Mr. Jordan tell me the relationship? He knew who I was.’

The old man laughed, and Jasper shuddered at his laugh, there was something so base and brutal in it.

‘He was not so proud of how he behaved to Eve as to care to boast of the connection. You might not have liked it, might have fizzed and gone pop.’

Jasper’s brow was on fire, his eyebrows met, and a sombre sparkle was in his eye.

‘You have made no effort to trace her?’

Mr. Babb shrugged his shoulders.

‘Tell me,’ said Jasper, leaning his elbow on the table, and putting his hand over his eyes to screen them from the light, and allow him to watch his father’s face—’tell me everything, as you undertook. Tell me how my poor sister came to Morwell, and how she left it.’

‘There is not much to tell,’ answered the father; ‘you know that she ran away from home after her mother’s death; you were then nine or ten years old. She hated work, and lusted after the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. After a while I heard where she was, that she was ill, and had been taken into Morwell House to be nursed, and that there she remained after her recovery.’

‘Strange,’ mused Jasper; ‘she fell ill and was taken to Morwell, and I—it was the same. Things repeat themselves; the world moves in a circle.’

‘Everything repeats itself. As in Eve’s case the sickness led up to marriage, or something like it, so will it be in your case. This is what Mr. Jordan and Eve did: they went into the little old chapel, and took each other’s hands before the altar, and swore fidelity to each other; that was all. Mr. Jordan is a Catholic, and would not have the knot tied by a church parson, and Eve would not confess to her name, she had that sense of decency left in her. They satisfied their consciences but it was no legal marriage. I believe he would have done what was right, but she was perverse, and refused to give her name, and say both who she was and whence she came.’

‘Go on,’ said Jasper.

‘Well, then, about a year after this I heard where she was, and I went after her to Morwell, but I did not go openly—I had no wish to encounter Mr. Jordan. I tried to persuade Eve to return with me to Buckfastleigh. Who can lay to my charge that I am not a forgiving father? Have I not given you cold potato, and would have furnished you with veal pie if the old woman had not finished the scraps? I saw Eve, and I told her my mind pretty freely, both about her running away and about her connection with Jordan. I will say this for her—she professed to be sorry for what she had done, and desired my forgiveness. That, I said, I would give her on one condition only, that she forsook her husband and child, and came back to keep house for me. I could not bring her to a decision, so I appointed her a day, and said I would take her final answer on that. But I was hindered going; I forget just now what it was, but I couldn’t go that day.’

‘Well, father, what happened?’

‘As I could not keep my appointment—I remember now how it was, I was laid up with a grip of lumbago at Tavistock—I sent one of the actors there, from whom I had heard about her, with a message. I had the lumbago in my back that badly that I was bent double. When I was able to go, on the morrow, it was too late; she was gone.’

‘Gone! Whither?’

‘Gone off with the play-actor,’ answered Mr. Babb, grimly. ‘It runs in the blood.’

‘You are sure of this?’

‘Mr. Jordan told me so.’

‘Did you not pursue her?’

‘To what end? I had done my duty. I had tried my utmost to recover my daughter, and when for the second time she played me false, I wiped off the dust of my feet as a testimony against her.’

‘She left her child?’

‘Yes, she deserted her child as well as her husband—that is to say, Mr. Ignatius Jordan. She deserted the house that had sheltered her, to run after a homeless, bespangled, bepainted play-actor. I know all about it. The life at Morwell was too dull for her, it was duller there than at Buckfastleigh. Here she could see something of the world; she could watch the factory hands coming to their work and leaving it; but there she was as much out of the world as if she were in Lundy Isle. She had a hankering after the glitter and paint of this empty world.’

‘I cannot believe this. I cannot believe that she would desert the man who befriended her, and forsake her child.’

‘You say that because you did not know her. You know Martin; would he not do it? You know Watt; has he any scruples and strong domestic affections? She was like them; had in her veins the same boiling, giddy, wanton blood.’

Jasper knew but too well that Martin and Watt were unscrupulous, and followed pleasure regardless of the calls of duty. He had been too young when his sister left home to know anything of her character. It was possible that she had the same light and careless temperament as Martin.

‘A horse that shies once will shy again,’ said the old man. ‘Eve ran away from home once, and she ran away from the second home. If she did not run away from home a third time it probably was that she had none to desert.’

‘And Mr. Jordan knows nothing of her?’

‘He lives too far from the stream of life to see the broken dead things that drift down it.’

Jasper considered. The flush of anger had faded from his brow; an expression of great sadness had succeeded. His hand was over his brow, but he was no longer intent on his father’s face; his eyes rested on the table.

‘I must find out something about my sister. It is too horrible to think of our sister, our only sister, as a lost, sunk, degraded thing.’

He thought of Mr. Jordan, of his strange manner, his abstracted look, his capricious temper. He did not believe that the master of Morwell was in his sound senses. He seemed to be a man whose mind had preyed on some great sorrow till all nerve had gone out of it. What was that sorrow? Once Barbara had said to him, in excuse for some violence and rudeness in her father’s conduct, that he had never got over the loss of Eve’s mother.

‘Mr. Jordan was not easy about his treatment of my daughter,’ said old Babb. ‘From what little I saw of him seventeen years ago I take him to be a weak-spirited man. He was in a sad take-on then at the loss of Eve, and having a baby thrown on his hands unweaned. He offered me the money I wanted to buy those fields for stretching the cloth. You may be sure when a man presses money on you, and is indifferent to interest, that he wants you to forgive him something. He desired me to look over his conduct to my daughter, and drop all inquiries. I dare say they had had words, and then she was ready in her passion to run away with the first vagabond who offered.’

Then Jasper removed his hand from his face, and laid one on the other upon the table. His face was now pale, and the muscles set. His eyes looked steadily and sternly at the mean old man, who averted his eyes from those of his son.

‘What is this? You took a bribe, father, to let the affair remain unsifted! For the sake of a few acres of meadow you sacrificed your child!’

‘Fiddlesticks-ends,’ said the manufacturer. ‘I sacrificed nothing. What could I do? If I ran after Eve and found her in some harlequin and columbine booth, could I force her to return? She had made her bed, and must lie on it. What could I gain by stirring in the matter? Let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘Father,’ said Jasper, very gravely, ‘the fact remains that you took money that looks to me very much like a bribe to shut your eyes.’

‘Pshaw! pshaw! I had made up my mind. I was full of anger against Eve. I would not have taken her into my house had I met her. Fine scandals I should have had with her there! Better let her run and disappear in the mud, than come muddy into my parlour and besmirch all the furniture and me with it, and perhaps damage the business. These children of mine have eaten sour grapes, and the parent’s teeth are set on edge. It all comes’—the old man brought his fist down on the table—’of my accursed folly in bringing strange blood into the house, and now the chastisement is on me. Are you come back to live with me, Jasper? Will you help me again in the mill?’

‘Never again, father, never,’ answered the young man, standing up. ‘Never, after what I have just heard. I shall do what I can to find my poor sister, Eve Jordan’s mother. It is a duty—a duty your neglect has left to me; a duty hard to take up after it has been laid aside for seventeen years; a duty betrayed for a sum of money.’

‘Pshaw!’ The old man put his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. He was shrunk with age; his eagle profile was without beauty or dignity.

Jasper followed him with his eye, reproachfully, sorrowfully.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘it seems to me as if that money was hush-money, and that you, by taking it, had brought the blood of your child on your own head.’

‘Blood! Fiddlesticks! Blood! There is no blood in the case. If she chose to run, how was I to stop her? Blood, indeed! Red raddle!’