CHAPTER I.

A WAY OUT OF THE DIFFICULTY.

Two hours after the receipt of Mrs. McDermott’s second letter, Squire Culpepper was on his way to Sugden’s bank. His heart was heavy, and his step slow. He had never had to borrow a farthing from any man—at least, never since he had come into the estate—and he felt the humiliation, as he himself called it, very bitterly. There was something of bitterness, too, in having to confess to his friend Cope how all his brilliant castles in the air had vanished utterly, leaving not a wrack behind.

He could see, in imagination, the sneer that would creep over Cope’s face as the latter asked him why he could not obtain a mortgage on his fine new mansion at Pincote; the mansion he had talked so much about—about which he had bored his friends; the mansion that was to have been built out of the Alcazar shares, but of which not even the foundation-stone would ever now be laid. Then, again, the Squire was far from certain as to the kind of reception which would be accorded him by the banker. Of late he had seemed cool, very cool—refrigerating almost. Once or twice, too, when he had called, Mr. Cope had been invisible: a Jupiter Tonans buried for the time being among a cloud of ledgers and dockets and transfers: not to be seen by any one save his own immediate satellites. The time had been, and not so very long ago, when he could walk unchallenged through the outer bank office, whoever else might be waiting, and so into the inner sanctum, and be sure of a welcome when he got there. But now he was sure to be intercepted by one or other of the clerks with a “Will you please to take a seat for a moment while I see whether Mr. Cope is disengaged.” The Squire groaned with inward rage as, leaning on his thick stick, he limped down Duxley High Street and thought of all these things.

As he had surmised it would be, so it was on the present occasion. He had to sit down in the outer office, one of a row of six who were waiting Mr. Cope’s time and pleasure to see them. “He won’t lend me the money,” said the Squire to himself, as he sat there choking with secret mortification. “He’ll find some paltry excuse for refusing me. It’s almost worth a man’s while to tumble into trouble just to find out who are his friends and who are not.”

However, the banker did not keep him waiting more than five or six minutes. “Mr. Cope will see you, sir,” said a liveried messenger, who came up to him with a low bow; and into Mr. Cope’s parlour the Squire was thereupon ushered.

The two men met with a certain amount of restraint on either side. They shook hands as a matter of course, and made a few remarks about the weather; and then the banker began to play with his seals, and waited in bland silence to hear whatever the Squire might have to say to him.

Mr. Culpepper fidgeted in his chair and cleared his throat. The crucial moment was come at last. “I’m in a bit of a difficulty, Cope,” he began, “and I’ve come to you, as one of the oldest friends I have, to see whether you can help me out of it.”

“I should have thought that Mr. Culpepper was one of the last people in the world to be troubled with difficulties of any kind,” said the banker, in a tone of studied coldness.

“Which shows how little you know about either Mr. Culpepper or his affairs,” said the Squire, dryly.

The banker coughed dubiously. “In what way can I be of service to you?” he said.

“I want five thousand five hundred pounds by this day week, and I’ve come to you to help me to raise it.”

“In other words, you want to borrow five thousand five hundred pounds?”

“Exactly so.”

“And what kind of security are you prepared to offer for a loan of such magnitude?”

“What security! Why, my I.O.U., of course.”

Mr. Cope took a pinch of snuff slowly and deliberately before he spoke again. “I am afraid the document in question could hardly be looked upon as a negotiable security.”

“And who the deuce wanted it to be considered as a negotiable security?” burst out the Squire. “Do you think I want everybody to know my private affairs?”

“Possibly not,” said the banker, quietly. “But, in transactions of this nature, it is a matter of simple business that the person who advances the money should have some equivalent security in return.”

“And is not my I.O.U. a good and equivalent security as between friend and friend?”

“Oh if you are going to put the case in that way, it becomes a different kind of transaction entirely,” said the banker.

“And how else did you think I was going to put the case, as you call it?” asked the Squire, indignantly.

“Commercially, of course: as a pure matter of business between one man and another.”

“Oh, ho that’s it, is it?” said the Squire, grimly.

“That’s just it, Mr. Culpepper.”

“Then friendship in such a case as this counts for nothing, and my I.O.U. might just as well never be written.”

“Let us be candid with each other,” said the banker, blandly. “You want the loan of a very considerable sum of money. Now, however much inclined I might be to lend you the amount out of my own private coffers, you will believe me when I say that I am not in a position to do so. I have no such amount of available capital in hand at present. But if you were to come to me with a good negotiable security, I could at once put you into the proper channel for obtaining what you want. A mortgage, for instance. What could be better than that? The estate, so far as I know, is unencumbered, and the sum you need could easily be raised on it on very easy terms.”

“I took an oath to my father on his deathbed that I would never raise a penny by mortgage on Pincote, and I never will.”

“If that is the case,” said the banker, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, “I am afraid that I hardly see in what way I can be of service to you.” He coughed, and then he looked at his watch, an action which Mr. Culpepper did not fail to note and resent in his own mind.

“I am sorry I came,” he said, bitterly. “It seems to have been only a waste of your time and mine.”

“Don’t speak of it,” said the banker, with his little business laugh. “In any case, you have learned one of the first and simplest lessons of commercial ethics.”

“I have, indeed,” answered the Squire, with a sigh. He rose to go.

“And Miss Culpepper, is she quite well?” said Mr. Cope; rising also. “I have not had the pleasure of seeing her for some little time.”

The Squire faced fiercely round. “Look you here, Horatio Cope,” he said; “you and I have been friends of many years’ standing. Fast friends, I thought, whom no reverses of fortune would have separated. Finding myself in a little strait, I come to you for assistance. To whom else should I apply? It is idle to say that you could not help me out of my difficulty, were you willing to do so.”

“No, believe me——” interrupted the banker; but Mr. Culpepper went on without deigning to notice the interruption.

“You have not chosen to do so, and there’s an end of the matter, so far. Our friendship must cease from this day. You will not be sorry that it is so. The insults and slights you have put upon me of late have all had that end in view, and you are doubtless grateful that they have had the desired effect.”

“You judge me very hardly,” said the banker.

“I judge you from your own actions, and from them alone,” said the Squire, sternly. “Another point, and I have done. Your son was engaged to my daughter, with your full sanction and consent. That engagement, too, must come to an end.”

“With all my heart,” said the banker, quietly.

“For some time past your son, acting, no doubt, on instructions from his father, has been gradually paving the way for something of this kind. There have been no letters from him for five weeks, and the last three or four that he sent were not more than as many lines each. No doubt he will feel grateful at being released from an engagement that had become odious to him; and on Miss Culpepper’s side the release will be an equally happy one. She had learned long ago to estimate at his true value the man to whom she had so rashly pledged her hand. She had found out, to her bitter cost, that she had promised herself to a person who had neither the instincts nor the education of a gentleman—to an individual, in fact, who was little better than a common boor.”

This last thrust touched the banker to the quick. His face flushed deeply. He crossed the room and called down an India-rubber tube: “What is the amount of Mr. Culpepper’s balance?”

Presently came the answer: “Two eighty eleven five.”

“Two hundred and eighty pounds, eleven shillings, and five pence,” said Mr. Cope, with a sneer. “May I ask, sir, that you will take immediate steps for having this magnificent balance transferred to some other establishment.”

“I shall take my own time about doing that,” said Mr. Culpepper.

“What a pity that your new mansion was not finished in time—quite a castle it was to have been, was it not? A mortgage of five or six thousand could have been a matter of no difficulty then, you know. If I recollect rightly, all the furniture and decorations were to have come from London. Nothing in Duxley would have been good enough. I merely echo your own words.”

The Squire winced. “I am rightly served,” he muttered to himself. “What can one expect from a man who swept out an office and cleaned his master’s shoes?” He rose to go. For all his bitterness, there was a little pathetic feeling at work in his heart. “So ends a friendship of twenty years,” was his thought. “Goodbye, Cope,” he said aloud as he moved towards the door.

The banker, standing with his back to the fire, and looking straight at the opposite wall, neither stirred nor spoke, nor so much as turned his head to take a last look at his old friend. And so, without another word, the Squire passed out.

A bleak north wind was blowing as the Squire stepped into the street. He paused for a moment to button his coat more closely around him. As he did so, a poor ragged wretch passed trembling by without saying a word. The Squire called the man back and gave him a shilling. “My plight may be bad enough, but his is a thousand times worse,” he said to himself as he walked down the street.

Where to go, or what to do next, he did not know. He had gone to see Mr. Cope without any very great expectation of being able to obtain what he wanted, and yet, perhaps, not without some faint hope nestling at his heart that his friend would find him the money. But now he knew for a fact that nothing was to be got from that quarter, he felt a little chilled, a little lonely, a little lost as to what he should do next. That something must be done, he knew quite well, but he was at a nonplus as to what that something ought to be. To raise five thousand five hundred pounds at a few days’ notice, with no better security to offer than a simple I.O.U., was by no means an easy matter, as the Squire was beginning to discover to his cost. “Why not ask Sir Harry Cripps?” he said to himself. But then he bethought himself that Sir Harry had a very expensive family, and that only six months ago he had given up his hunter, and dispensed with a couple of carriage-horses, and had talked of going on to the continent for four or five years. No: it was evident that Sir Harry Cripps could do nothing for him.

In what other direction to turn he knew not. “If poor Lionel Dering had only been alive, I could have gone to him with confidence,” he thought. “Why not try Kester St. George?” was his next thought. “No: Kester isn’t one of the lending kind,” he muttered, with a shake of the head. “He’s uncommonly close-fisted, is Kester. What he’s got he’ll stick to. No use trying there.”

Next moment he nearly ran against General St. George, who was coming from an opposite direction. They started at sight of each other, then shook hands cordially. Their acquaintanceship dated only from the arrival of the General at Park Newton, but they had already learned to like and esteem one another.

After the customary greetings and inquiries were over, said Mr. Culpepper to the General: “Is your nephew Kester still stopping with you at Park Newton?”

“Yes, he is still there,” answered the General; “though he has talked every day for the last month or more about going. Kester is one of those unaccountable fellows that you can never depend on. He may stay for another month, or he may take it into his head to go by the first train to-morrow.”

“I heard a little while ago that he was ill; but I suppose he is better again by this time?”

“Yes—quite recovered. He was laid up for three or four days, but he soon got all right again.”

“Your other nephew—George—Tom—Harry—what’s his name—is he quite well?”

“You mean Richard—he who came from India? Yes, he is quite well.”

“He’s very like his poor brother, only darker, and—pardon me for saying so—not half so agreeable a young fellow.”

“Everybody seems to have liked poor Lionel.”

“Nobody could help liking him,” said the Squire, with energy. “I felt the loss of that poor boy almost as much as if he had been my own son.”

“Not a soul in the world had an ill word to say about him.”

“I wish that the same could be said of all of us,” said the Squire. And so, after a few more words, they parted.

As General St. George had told the Squire, Kester was still at Park Newton. The doctor who was called in to attend him after his sudden attack on the night that the footsteps were heard in the nailed-up room, prescribed a bottle or two of some harmless mixture, and a few days of complete rest and isolation. As Kester would neither allow himself to be examined, nor answer any questions, there was very little more that could be done for him.

Kester’s first impulse after his recovery—and a very strong impulse it was—was to quit Park Newton at once and for ever. Further reflection, however, convinced him that such a step would be unwise in the extreme. It would at once be said that he had been frightened away by the ghost, and that was a thing that he could by no means afford to have said of him. For it to get gossiped about that he had been driven from his own house by the ghost of Percy Osmond, might, in time, tend to breed suspicion; and from suspicion might spring inquiry, and that might ultimately lead to nobody knew what. No: he would stay on at Park Newton for weeks—for months even, if it suited him to do so. The incident of his sudden illness was a very untoward one: on that point there could be no doubt whatever; but not if he could anyhow help it should the faintest breath of suspicion spring therefrom.

The Squire’s troubles had faded into the background for a few minutes during his interview with General St. George, but they now rushed back upon him with, as it seemed, tenfold force. There was nothing left for him now but to go home, and yet he had never felt less inclined to do so in his life. He dreaded the long quiet evening, with no society but that of his daughter. Not that Jane was a dull companion, or anything like it; but he dreaded to encounter her pleading eyes, her pretty caressing ways, the lingering embrace she would give him when he entered the house, and her good-night kiss. He felt how all these things would tend to unman him, how they would merely serve to deepen the remorse which he felt already. If only he could meet with some one to take home with him!—he did not care much who it was—some one who would talk to him, and enliven the evening, and take off for a little while the edge of his trouble, and so help him to tide over the weary hours that intervened between now and the morrow, by which time something might happen—he knew not what—or some light be vouchsafed to him which would show him a way out of his difficulties.

These, or something like these, were the thoughts that were floating hazily in his mind, when in the distance he spied Tom Bristow striding along at his usual energetic rate. The Squire being still very lame, wisely captured a passing butcher boy, and, with the promise of sixpence, bade him hurry after Tom, and not come back without him.

“You must come back with me to Pincote,” he said, when the astonished Tom had been duly captured. “I’ll take no refusal. I’ve got a fit of mopes, and if you don’t come and help to keep Jenny and me alive this evening, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.” So saying, the Squire linked his arm in Tom’s, and turned his face towards Pincote; and nothing loath was Tom to go with him.

“I’ve done a fine thing this afternoon,” said Mr. Culpepper, as they drove along in the basket-carriage, which had been waiting for him at the hotel. “I’ve broken off Jenny’s engagement with Edward Cope.”

Tom’s heart gave a great bound. “Pardon me, sir, for saying so,” he said as calmly as he could, “but I never thought that Mr. Cope was in any way worthy of Miss Culpepper.”

“You are right, boy. He was not worthy of her.”

“From the first time of seeing them together, I felt how entirely unfitted was Mr. Cope to appreciate Miss Culpepper’s manifold charms of heart and mind. A marriage between two such people would have been a most incongruous one.”

“Thank Heaven! it’s broken now and for ever.”

“I’ve broken off your engagement to Edward Cope,” whispered the Squire to Jane in the hall, as he kissed her. “Are you glad or sorry, dear?”

“Glad—very, very glad, papa,” she whispered back as she rained a score of kisses on his face. Then she began to cry, and with that she ran away to her own room till she could recover herself.

“Women are queer cattle,” said the Squire, turning to Tom, “and I’ll be hanged if I can ever make them out.”

“From Miss Culpepper’s manner, sir,” said Tom, gravely, “I should judge that you had told her something that pleased her very much indeed.”

“Then what did she begin snivelling for?” said the Squire, gruffly.

“Why not tell him everything?” said the Squire to himself, as he and Tom sat down in the drawing-room. “He knows a good deal already,—why not tell him more? I know he can do nothing towards helping me to raise five thousand pounds, but it will do me good to talk to him. I must talk to somebody—and I feel sure my secret is quite safe with him. I’ll tell him while Jenny’s out of the room.”

The Squire coughed and hemmed, and poked the fire violently before he could find a word to say. “Bristow,” he burst out at last, “I want to raise five thousand five hundred pounds in five days from now, and as I’m rather a bad hand at borrowing, I thought that you could, maybe, give me a hint as to how it could best be done. Cope would have advanced it for me in a moment, only that he happens to be rather short of funds just now, and I don’t want to trouble any of my other friends if it can anyhow be managed without.” He began to hum the air of an old drinking-song, and poked the fire again. “Capital coals these,” he added. “And I got ’em cheap, too. The market went up three shillings a ton the very day after these were sent in.”

“Five thousand five hundred pounds is rather a large amount, sir,” said Tom, slowly.

“Of course it’s a large amount,” said the Squire, testily. “If it were only a paltry hundred or two I wouldn’t trouble anybody. But never mind, Bristow—never mind. I didn’t suppose that you could help me when I mentioned it; and, after all, it’s a matter of very little consequence whether I raise the money or not.”

“I can only suggest one way, sir, by which the money could be raised in so short a time.”

“Eh!” said the Squire, turning suddenly on him, and dropping the poker noisily in the grate. “You don’t mean to say that you can see how it’s to be done!”

“I think I do, sir. Do you know the piece of ground called Prior’s Croft?”

“Very well indeed. It belongs to Duckworth, the publican.”

“Between you and me, sir, Duckworth’s hard up, and would be glad to sell the Croft if he could do it quietly and without its becoming generally known that he is short of money.”

“Well?” said the Squire, a little impatiently. He could not understand what Tom was driving at.

“I dare engage to say, sir, that you could have the Croft for two thousand pounds, cash down.”

“Confound it, man, what an idiot you must be!” said the Squire fiercely, bringing his fist down on the table with a tremendous bang. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted to borrow money, and not to spend it? In fact, as you know quite well, I’ve got none to spend.”

“Precisely so,” said Tom, coolly. “And that is the point to which I am coming, if you will hear me out.”

The Squire’s only answer was to glare at him, as if in doubt whether he had not taken leave of his senses.

“As I said before, sir, Duckworth will take two thousand pounds for the Croft, cash down. Now I, sir, will engage to raise two thousand pounds for you by to-morrow, at noon, with which to buy the piece of ground in question. The purchase can be effected, and the necessary deeds made out and completed, by ten o’clock the following morning. If you will entrust those deeds into my possession, I will guarantee to effect a mortgage for six thousand pounds, in your name, on the Croft.”

If the Squire had looked suspicious with regard to Tom’s sanity before, he now seemed to have no doubt whatever on the point. He quietly took up the poker again, as if he were afraid that Tom might spring at him unexpectedly.

“So you could lend me two thousand pounds could you?” said the Squire drily.

“I did not say that, sir. I said that I could raise two thousand pounds for you, which is a very different matter from lending it out of my own pocket.”

“Humph! And who, sir, do you think would be such a consummate ass as to advance six thousand pounds on a plot of ground that had just been bought for two thousand?”

“Strange as such a transaction may seem to you, sir, I give you my word of honour that I should find no difficulty in carrying it out. Have I your permission to do so?”

“I suppose that the two thousand raised by you would have to be repaid out of the six thousand raised by mortgage, leaving me with a balance of four thousand in hand?” said the Squire, without heeding Tom’s question, a smile of incredulity playing round his mouth.

“No, sir,” answered Tom. “The two thousand pounds could remain on interest at five per cent. for whatever term might suit your convenience. Again, sir, I ask, have I your permission to negotiate the transaction for you?”

Mr. Culpepper gazed steadily for a moment or two into Tom’s clear, cold eyes. There were no symptoms of insanity visible there, at any rate. “And do you mean to tell me in sober seriousness,” he said, “that you can raise this money in the way you speak of?”

“In sober seriousness, I mean to tell you that I can. Try me.”

“I will try you,” answered the Squire, impulsively. “I will try you, boy. You are a strange fellow, and I begin to think that there’s more in you than I ever thought there was. But here comes Jenny. Not a word more just now.”