“You remember she was born at Rondebosch?”
“Yes,” he said listlessly. “Even she admits it,” he added with a feeble attempt at a jest.
“Does she admit this?” asked Lady Mary. She pushed a telegram across the table to Jim, and he picked it up and read:
“Eunice May Weldon died in Cape Town at the age of twelve months and three days, and is buried at Rosebank Cemetery. Plot No. 7963.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JIM read the cablegram again, scarcely believing his eyes or his understanding,
“Buried at the age of twelve months,” he said incredulously, “but how absurd. She is here, alive, besides which, I recently met a man who knew the Weldons and remembered Eunice as a child. There is no question of substitution.”
“It is puzzling, isn’t it?” said Lady Mary softly, as she put the telegram in her bag. “But here is a very important fact. The man who sent me this cablegram is one of the most reliable private detectives in South Africa.”
Eunice Weldon was born, Eunice Weldon had died, and yet Eunice Weldon was very much alive at that moment, though she was wishing she were dead.
Jim leant his elbow on the table and rested his chin on his palm.
“I must confess that I am now completely rattled,” he said. “Then if the girl died, it is obvious the parents adopted another girl and that girl was Eunice. The question is, where did she come from, because there was never any question of her adoption, so far as she knew.”
She nodded.
“I have already cabled to my agent to ask him to inquire on this question of adoption,” she said, “and in the meantime the old idea is gaining ground, Jim.”
His eyes met hers.
“You mean that Eunice is your daughter?”
She nodded slowly.
“That circular scar on her wrist? You know nothing about it?”
She shook her head.
“It may have been done after “—she faltered—“after—I lost sight of her.”
“Lady Mary, will you explain how you came to lose sight of her?” asked Jim.
She shook her head.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Then perhaps you will answer another question. You know Mrs. Groat?”
She nodded.
“Do you know a woman named Weatherwale?”
Lady Mary’s eyes opened.
“Mary Weatherwale, yes. She was a farmer’s daughter who was very fond of Jane, a nice, decent woman. I often wondered how Jane came to make such a friend. Why do you ask?”
Jim told her what had happened when Mrs. Weatherwale had arrived at Grosvenor Square.
“Let us put as many of our cards on the table as are not too stale to exhibit,” she said. “Do you believe that Jane Groat had some part in the disappearance of my daughter?”
“Honestly I do,” said Jim. “Don’t you?”
She shook her head.
“I used to think so,” she said quietly, “but when I made inquiries, she was exonerated beyond question. She is a wicked woman, as wicked as any that has ever been born,” she said with a sudden fire that sent the colour flying to her face, “but she was not so wicked that she was responsible for little Dorothy’s fate.”
“You will not tell me any more about her?”
She shook her head.
“There is something you could say which might make my investigations a little easier,” said Jim.
“There is nothing I can say—yet,” she said in a low voice, as she rose and, without a word of farewell, glided from the room.
Jim’s mind was made up. In the light of that extraordinary cablegram from South Africa, his misunderstanding with Eunice faded into insignificance. If she were Lady Mary’s daughter! He gasped at the thought which, with all its consequences, came as a new possibility, even though he had pondered it in his mind.
He fixed upon Jane Groat as one who could supply the key of the mystery, but every attempt he had made to get the particulars of her past had been frustrated by ignorance, or the unwillingness of all who had known her in her early days.
There was little chance of seeing Septimus Salter in his office, so he went round to the garage where he housed his little car, and set forth on a voyage of discovery to Chislehurst, where Mr. Salter lived.
The old gentleman was alone; his wife and his eldest son, an officer, who was staying with him, had gone to Harrogate, and he was more genial in his reception than Jim had a right to expect.
“You’ll stay to dinner, of course,” he said.
Jim shook his head.
“No thank you, sir, I’m feeling rather anxious just now. I came to ask you if you knew Mrs. Weatherwale.”
The lawyer frowned.
“Weatherwale, Weatherwale,” he mused, “yes, I remember the name. I seldom forget a name. She appears in Mrs. Groat’s will, I think, as a legatee for a few hundred pounds. Her father was one of old Danton’s tenants.”
“That is the woman,” said Jim, and told his employer all that he had learnt about Mrs. Weatherwale’s ill-fated visit to London.
“It only shows,” said the lawyer when he had finished, “how the terrific secrets which we lawyers think are locked away in steel boxes and stowed below the ground in musty cellars, are the property of Tom, Dick and Harry! We might as well save ourselves all the trouble. Estremeda is, of course, the Spanish Marquis who practically lived with the Dantons when Jane was a young woman. He is, as obviously, the father of Digby Groat, and the result of this woman’s mad passion for the Spaniard. I knew there was some sort of scandal attached to her name, but this explains why her father would never speak to her, and why he cut her out of his will. I’m quite sure that Jonathan Danton knew nothing whatever about his sister’s escapade, or he would not have left her his money. He was as straitlaced as any of the Dantons, but, thanks to his father’s reticence, it would seem that Mrs. Groat is going to benefit.”
“And the son?” said Jim, and the lawyer nodded.
“She may leave her money where she wishes—to anybody’s son, for the matter of that,” said the lawyer. “A carious case, a very curious case”—he shook his grey head. “What do you intend doing?”
“I am going down to Somerset to see Mrs. Weatherwale,” said Jim. “She may give us a string which will lead somewhere.”
“If she’ll give you a string that will lead Mr. Digby Groat to prison,” growled the old lawyer, “get hold of it, Steele. and pull like the devil!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WHEN his alarm clock turned him out at six in the morning, Jim was both sleepy and inclined to be pessimistic. But as his mind cleared and he realized what results the day’s investigations might bring, he faced his journey with a lighter heart.
Catching the seven o’clock from Paddington, he reached the nearest station to Mrs. Weatherwale’s residence soon after nine. He had not taken any breakfast, and he delayed his journey for half an hour, whilst the hostess of a small inn facing the station prepared him the meal without which no Englishman could live, as she humorously described it, a dish of eggs and bacon.
It seemed as though he were in another world to that which he had left behind at Paddington. The trees were a little greener, the lush grasses of the meadows were a more vivid emerald, and overhead in the blue sky, defying sight, a skylark trilled passionately and was answered somewhere from the ground. Tiny furry shapes in their bright spring coats darted across the white roadway almost under his feet. He crossed a crumbling stone bridge and paused to look down into the shallow racing stream that foamed and bubbled and swirled on its way to the distant sea.
The old masons who had dressed these powdery ashlars and laid the moss-green stones of the buttresses, were dead when burly Henry lorded it at Westminster. These stones had seen the epochs pass, and the maidens who had leant against the parapet listening with downcast eyes to their young swains had become old women and dust and forgotten.