Captain Bayley's Heir: A Tale of the Gold Fields of California

Fred made no reply.

"Do you think we shouldn't have proved his innocence?" roared his uncle.

"I am sorry to say anything which is displeasing to you, uncle, but I fear that you would never have proved Frank's innocence."

The words seemed to have a sobering effect on Captain Bayley. The blood seemed to die out of his face; he put one hand on a chair, as if to steady himself, while he looked fixedly in his nephew's face.

"Do you mean, Fred," he said, in a low voice, "do you mean that you have a doubt of Frank's innocence?"

"I should rather not say anything about it," Fred replied. "I hope with all my heart that Frank is not guilty, but – "

"What do you think?" Captain Bayley repeated; "have you any grounds whatever for believing him guilty?"

"No, sir, and I do not wish you to be in the slightest degree influenced by what I said." He paused, but Captain Bayley's eyes were still fixed upon him, as if commanding a complete answer.

"Well, sir," he went on hesitatingly, "I must own that, sad as it is to say so, I fear Frank did it."

"Did he confess it to you?" Captain Bayley asked, in a strained, strange voice.

"No, uncle, not in so many words, but he said things which seemed to me to mean that. When I tried to dissuade him from running away, and urged him to remain till his innocence could be proved, he said angrily, 'What's the use of talking like that, when you know as well as I do that it can't be proved.' Afterwards he said, 'It is a bad job, and I have been an awful fool. But who could have thought that note would ever be traced back to Litter?' and other remarks of the same kind. He may be innocent, uncle – you know how deeply I wish we could prove him so – but I fear, I greatly fear, that we shall be doing Frank more service by letting the matter drop. You know the fellows in the school all believe him innocent, and though his going away has staggered some of them, the general feeling is still all in his favour; therefore they are sure to speak of him as a sort of victim, and when he returns, which of course he will do in a few years' time, the matter will have died away and have been altogether forgotten."

The old officer sat down at the table and hid his face in his hands.

All this time Alice, pale and silent, had sat and listened with her eyes fixed upon the speaker, but she now leapt up to her feet.

"Uncle," she said, "don't believe him, he is not speaking the truth, I am sure he is not. He hates Frank, and I have known it all along, because Frank is bigger and better than he; because Frank was generous and kind-hearted; because every one liked Frank and no one liked him. He is telling a lie now, and I believe every word he has said since he came into the room is false."

"Hush! child," the old officer said; "you must not speak so, my dear. If it was only the word of one lad against another, it would be different; but it is not so. The proof is very strong against Frank. I would give all I am worth if I could still believe him innocent, and had he come to me and put his hand in mine, and said, 'Uncle, I am innocent,' I would have believed him against all the evidence in the world. It is not I who condemn him, he has condemned himself. He sends me no word; he cannot look me in the face and declare himself innocent. He runs away at night, knowing well that there could be but one construction as to this, and that all would judge him guilty. No, Alice, it breaks my heart to say so, but I can struggle no longer against these facts. The lad whom I have loved as a son has turned out a thief."

"No, uncle, no," the girl cried passionately, "I will never believe it, not to the end of my life. I cannot prove him innocent, but I know he is so, and some day it will be proved; but till then I shall still think of him as my dear brother, as my true-hearted brother, who has been wrongfully accused, and who is the victim of some wicked plot of which, perhaps, Fred Barkley knows more than any one else," and, bursting into a passion of tears, she ran from the room. Fred looked after her with an expression of pity and sorrow.

"Poor child!" he said, "it is a terrible blow for her, and she scarce knows what she is saying."

"It is a terrible blow," Captain Bayley said, in a dreary voice, "a most terrible blow to me and to her. No wonder she feels it; and I have been planning and hoping that some day, a few years hence, those two would get to like each other in a different way. I had, by my will, divided my fortune equally between you and him, but I have liked him best. Of course, I brought him up, and he has been always with me; it was natural that I should do so. Still I wanted to be fair, and I divided it equally. But I was pleased at the thought that her fortune, which is, as you know, a very large one, would be his, and enable him to make a great figure in the world if he had chosen; and now it is all over.

"Go away now, my boy, the blow has been too much for me. I am getting an old man, and this is the second great blow I have had. Do not take to heart the wild words of poor little Alice. You see she scarcely knows what she is saying."

Without another word Fred took his departure. When once out of sight of the house his steps quickened, and he walked briskly along.

"Splendid!" he said to himself; "a grand stroke indeed, and perfectly safe. Frank is not likely to return for twenty years, if ever, and I don't think the old man is good for another five. I expect I shall have some trouble with that little cat, Alice; but she is only a child, and will come round in time, and her fortune will be quite as useful to me as it would have been to him. I always knew he was little better than a fool, but I could hardly have hoped that he would have walked into the trap as he has done. I suppose that other blow old Bayley spoke of was that affair of his daughter. That was a lucky business for me too."

Fred Barkley was not mistaken, it was of his daughter Captain Bayley had been thinking when he spoke. He had married young when he first went out to India, and had lost his wife two years later, leaving him with a daughter six months old. He had sent her home to England, and after a twenty years' absence he had returned and found her grown up.

She had inherited something of her father's passionate disposition, and possessed, in addition, an amount of sullen obstinacy which was wholly alien to his nature. But her father saw none of these defects in her character. She was very beautiful, with an air of pride and hauteur which he liked. She had a right to be proud, he thought, for she was a very wealthy heiress, for, his two elder brothers having died childless while he was in India, the fine property of their father had all descended to him.

Though the girl had many suitors, she would listen to none of them, having formed a strong attachment to a man in station altogether beneath her. He had given lessons in drawing at the school which had been her home as well as her place of education during her father's absence, for Captain Bayley had quarrelled with his sisters, both of whom, he considered, had married beneath them.

The fact that Ella Bayley was an only child, and that her father was a wealthy man, was known in the school, and had, in some way, come to the ears of the drawing-master, who was young, and by no means ill-looking. He had played his cards well. Ella was romantic and impetuous, and, before long, returned the devotion which her teacher expressed for her.

When her father returned home, and Ella left school to take her place at the head of his establishment, she had hoped that she should be able to win from him a consent to her engagement; but she found his prejudices on the subject of birth were strong, and she waited two years before she broached the subject.

The wrath of Captain Bayley was prodigious; he heaped abusive epithets upon the man of her choice, till Ella's temper rose also. There was a passionate quarrel between father and daughter. The next morning Ella was missing; a week afterwards Captain Bayley received a copy of the certificate of her marriage, with a short note from Ella, saying that when he could make his mind up to forgive her and her husband, and to acknowledge that the latter did not deserve the abusive language that he had applied to him, she should be glad to return and resume her place as his affectionate and loving daughter. She gave an address at which he could communicate to her.

Three years passed before Captain Bayley's anger had sufficiently calmed down for him to write to his daughter saying that he forgave her. The letter was returned by the people at the house, with a note saying that many months had elapsed since any inquiries had been made for letters for Mrs. Smedley, and that they had altogether lost sight of her. Now that the Captain had once made up his mind to forgive his daughter, he was burning with impatience to see her again, and he at once employed a detective to find out what had become of her.

From the person to whose house the letter had been directed the detective learned the address where she and her husband had resided while in London.

For a time it seemed they had lived expensively, the sale of Ella's jewels keeping them in luxury for some months. Then hard times had come upon them; the man had altogether lost his connection as a teacher, and could, or would, do nothing to support his wife and himself; they had moved from the place they had first lived at, and taken much smaller lodgings.

Here the people of the house reported their life had been very unhappy; the husband had taken to drink, and there had been fierce and frequent quarrels between them, arising – the landlady had gleaned, from the loud and angry utterance of the husband – from the wife's refusal to appeal to her father for assistance. They had left this place suddenly, and in debt; thence they had moved from lodging to lodging at short intervals, their position getting worse, until they were last lodged in a wretched garret. From this point they were traced with great trouble down to Nottingham, where the husband obtained a precarious living by producing designs for embroidery and curtains.

Had he been steady he might have soon done fairly, but a great part of his time was spent in public-houses, and he was seldom sober. When returning home one night in a state of drunkenness, he was run over by a heavy van and killed. As his wife possessed but a few shillings in the world, he was buried at the expense of the parish and his widow at once left the town.

The people where she lodged believed that she had gone to London, taking with her her six months old child, and had started to tramp the way on foot. The woman said that she doubted whether she could ever have got there. She was an utterly broken woman, with a constant racking cough, which was like to tear her to pieces, and before she set out her landlady had urged upon her that the idea of her starting to carry a heavy child to London was nothing short of madness.

After this all trace of Ella had been lost. Advertisements offering large rewards appeared in the papers; the books of every workhouse between Nottingham and London, and indeed of almost every workhouse in England, were carefully searched to see if there was any record of the death of a woman with a child about the time of her disappearance. A similar search was made at all the London hospitals, and at every institution where she might have crawled to die; but no trace had ever been found of her.

That she was dead was not doubted; for it was found that at Nottingham she had once gone to the parish doctor for some medicine for her child. The physician had taken particular notice of her, had asked her some questions, and had made a note in his case-book that the mother of the child he had prescribed for was in an advanced stage of consumption, and had probably but a few weeks, certainly not more than a few months, to live.

It was long before the search was given up as hopeless, and many hundreds of pounds were spent by Captain Bayley before he abandoned all hope of discovering, if not his daughter, at least her child. During the year which elapsed before he was forced to acknowledge that it was hopeless, Captain Bayley had suffered terribly. His self-reproaches were unceasing, and he aged many years in appearance.

It was three years after this, on the death of his sister, Mrs. Norris, whose husband had died some years before, that he took Frank into his house and adopted him as his son, stating, however, to all whom it might concern, that he did not regard him as standing nearer to him as his heir than his other nephew, Fred Barkley, but that his property would be divided between them as they might show themselves worthy of it. It was three years later still, that, at the death of her father, an old fellow-officer, his household was increased by the addition of Alice, who had been left to his guardianship, but who had soon learned, like Frank, to address him as uncle.

CHAPTER XV.

THE MISSING HEIR

IT was a long time before the house in Eaton Square in any way recovered its former appearance. Captain Bayley had lost much of his life and vivacity, and, as the servants remarked to each other, nothing seemed to put him out. He went for his morning ride in the Park, or his afternoon visit to the Club, as usual, but his thoughts seemed far away; he passed old friends without seeing them, and if stopped he greeted them no longer with a cheery ring in his voice, or a quick smile of welcome. Every one who knew him remarked that Bayley was going down hill terribly fast, and was becoming a perfect wreck.

Frank's name was never now mentioned in the house. Its utterance had not been forbidden, but it had been dropped as a matter concerning which a hopeless disagreement existed. Alice had changed almost as much as her uncle. Her spirits were gone; her voice was no longer heard singing about the house; she no longer ran up and down the stairs with quick springing footsteps, and indeed seemed all at once to have changed from a young girl into a young woman. Sometimes, as she sat, the tears filled her eyes and rolled fast down her cheeks; at other times she would walk about with her eyebrows knitted, and hands clenched, and lips pursed together, a little volcano of suppressed anger.

Although no discussion on the subject had taken place between her and her guardian, it was an understood thing that she maintained her opinion, and that she regarded Fred Barkley as an enemy. If she happened to be in the room when he was announced, she would rise and leave it without a word; if he remained to a meal, she would not make her appearance in the dining or drawing rooms.

"Alice still regards me as the incarnation of evil," Fred said, with a forced laugh, upon one of those occasions.

"The child is a trump," Captain Bayley said warmly, "a warm lover and a good hater. What a thing it is," he said, with a sigh, "to be at an age when trust and confidence are unshakable, and when nothing will persuade you that what you wish to believe is not right; what would I not give for that child's power of trust?"

The household in Eaton Square were almost unanimous in Frank's favour. His genial, hearty manners rendered him a universal favourite with the servants; and although none knew the causes of Frank's sudden disappearance, the general opinion was that, whatever had happened, he could not have been to blame in the matter.

His warmest adherent was Evan Holl, who had months before been introduced to the house as assistant knife and boot cleaner by Frank. He did not sleep there, going home at nine o'clock in the evening when his work was done.

"Do you know, Harry," he said, one day, "what a rum crest, as they calls it, – I asked the butler what it meant, and he says as how it was the crest of the family – Captain Bayley has; he's got it on his silver, and I noticed it when I was in the pantry to-day helping the butler to clean some silver dishes which had been lying by unused for some time. 'All families of distinction,' the butler said, – he is mighty fond of using hard long words – 'all families of distinction,' says he, ''as got their own crest, which belongs to them and no one else. Now this 'ere crest of the guv'nor's is a hand holding a dagger, and the hand has only got three fingers.' I said as how there was two missing, and that the chap as did it couldn't have known much of his business to go and leave out two fingers. But the butler says, 'That's your hignorance,' says he; 'the hand 'as got only three fingers because a hancestor of the Captain's in the time of the Crusaders' – 'And what's the Crusaders?' says I. 'The Crusaders was a war between the English and the Americans hundreds of years ago,' says he."

Harry burst into a shout of laughter. "Mr. Butler does not know anything about it, for the Crusades were wars between people who went out to the Holy Land to recover the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks who held it."

"Ah, well," Evan said, "it don't make no odds whether they was Turks or Americans. However, the butler says as how the Captain Bayley what lived in those days, he saw a red Injun a-crawling to stab the king, who was a-lying asleep in his tent, and just as his hand was up to stick in the knife, Captain Bayley he gives a cut with his sword which whips off two of the fingers, and before the Injun could turn round and go at him he gives another cut, and takes off his hand at the wrist, and the next cut he takes off his head; so the hand with three fingers holding a dagger was given him to carry as a crest. I suppose after a time the hand got wore out, or got bad, so as he couldn't have carried it about no longer, and instead of that, as a kind of remembrance of the affair, he 'as them put on his forks and spoons."

Mrs. Holl had been listening with grave interest to the narrative.

"Does I understand you to say, Evan, that no other family but that of the master's put this three-fingered hand with a knife on to their things?"

"That's so, mother; leastways it's what the butler says about it."

"Then if that's the case," Mrs. Holl said thoughtfully, "any one who has got this crest, as you calls it, on his things must be a relation of the Captain."

"I suppose so, mother; he might be a long distance off, you know, because this ere affair took place hundreds of years ago, and there may be a lot of the same family about in different parts."

"So there might," Mrs. Holl said, in a disappointed voice.

"Why, mother," Harry said, "one would think it made some difference to you, you speak so mournfully about it."

"It don't make no difference to me, Harry," Mrs. Holl said, "but it makes a lot of difference to you. You know I told you two or three months ago how you come to be here. I don't know as I told you that round the neck of your mother, when she died in that room, was a bit of silk ribbon, and on it was a little seal of gold, with a red stone in it, which I put by very careful for you, though what good such a thing would do to you, or anybody else, I didn't see. Well, on that red stone there was something cut; and father he took it to a chap as understands about those things, who got some red wax, and hotted it, and dropped some of it on a paper, and then squeezed this 'ere stone down on it, and looks at the mark through a eye-glass, and he tells father that it was a hand with three fingers holding a dagger."

"That was curious, mother," Harry said, "very curious. Can you fetch me the seal and let me have a look at it? I don't remember ever having seen it."

The seal was fetched by Mrs. Holl from a pill-box, in which it was carefully stored away in the corner of a drawer. Harry examined it closely.

"It looks like a hand holding a dagger," he said, "but it's too small for me to see whether it has three fingers or four. Evan, will you run round with it to the little watchmaker's in the next street, and ask him to look at it with one of the glasses he sticks in his eye when he is at work, and to tell you whether it has three fingers or four."

Evan returned in a few minutes with the news that the watchmaker at once said that the hand had but three fingers.

"Well, from that, Harry," Mrs. Holl said, "if what this man have been and told Evan is right, you must be some relation to Captain Bayley."

"A cousin, fifty times removed, perhaps," Harry laughed, "but at any rate, it is pleasant to be able to think that I come of a good family."

"You knew that before, Harry," Mrs. Holl said severely, "for I told you over and over again that your mother was a lady, though she was in bad circumstances, and I think, after charring in respectable houses for the last twenty years, I ought to know a lady when I sees one. Well, there's nothing as you think I could do about it?"

"I should think not," Harry laughed. "How the old gent would stare if Evan was to walk up to him and say, 'Captain Bayley, I have got a foster-brother at home who, I think, is a relation of yours.' That would be a nice piece of cheek, wouldn't it?"

Evan laughed.

"However, mother, I votes as in future we calls Harry Harry Bayley instead of Harry Holl."

"You won't do anything of the sort, Evan," the cripple lad answered hotly. "Holl's my name, and you don't suppose I am going to drop the name of the father and mother who brought me up, and have tended me all these years, for Bayley or any other name; besides, even if it should turn out that I am remotely connected with the family, there is no reason why my name should be Bayley, for, of course, if my mother had been a Bayley, she would have changed her name when she married."

Harry thought but little more of the matter, but Mrs. Holl turned it over frequently in her mind, and discussed it with John. John said, "He didn't think much would come of it; still, he didn't see as how there could be any harm in asking, seeing that she had set her mind on it."

So Mrs. Holl resolved to move in the matter. Evan, on being appealed to, said that he did not see how she was to get to speak with Captain Bayley; the footman wouldn't be likely to show her in to his master unless she stated her business. But after much pressing, and declaring over and over again he wished he had never said a word about the hand with three fingers, Evan consented, if he found an opportunity, to ask Captain Bayley to see his mother. This opportunity, however, did not arrive, Evan's duties never bringing him in contact with his employer. At last Mrs. Holl became desperate, and one morning, after breakfast, she went to Captain Bayley's house. The ring at the area-bell brought out the cook.

"What is it?" she said sharply.

"I am the mother, ma'am, of Evan, as works here."

"Well, come down, if you want to see him."

"I don't want to see him, I want to see Captain Bayley."

"I will tell the footman," the cook said, "but I don't think it likely as you can see the Captain."

The footman soon made his appearance. Fortunately he was very young, and had not yet acquired that haughtiness of manner which characterises his class. Evan had before told him that his mother wanted to see Captain Bayley, and had begged him to do his best, should she come, to facilitate her doing so.

"Good morning," he said. "Your boy told me you would be likely enough coming. So you want to see the Captain; he has just finished his breakfast and gone into the study. Now, what shall I say you wants to see him for? I can't show you in, you know, without asking him first."

The young footman was, indeed, curious to know what Mrs. Holl's object could be in wishing to see his master. Evan had resisted all his attempts to find out, simply saying that it was a private affair of his mother's.

"Will you say to him," Mrs. Holl said, "that the mother of the boy as works here under you is most anxious for to see him just for two or three minutes; that it ain't nothing to do with the boy, but she wishes particular to ask Captain Bayley a question – if he will be so good as to see her – that no one else but hisself could answer."

"It's a rum sort of message," the young footman said, "but, anyhow, I will give it; the Captain ain't as hot-tempered as he used to be, and he can but say he won't see you."

Captain Bayley looked mystified when the footman delivered Mrs. Holl's message to him; then he remembered that it was Frank who had introduced her son to help in the house, and he wondered whether her errand could have any connection with him.

"Well, show her up, James," he said; "but just tell her that my time is precious, and that I don't want to listen to long rambling stories, so whatever she has got to say, let her say it straight out."