She was waiting at six o’clock when Etherton rang her up on the telephone.
“Letty,” he said hurriedly, “I shan’t be home to dinner, nor tonight, at all; I’ve got to go away on business. Take care of yourself!”
“Oh!” she answered. “Can’t you run up for five minutes? Or shall I come down? Do let me!”
“No!” he replied. “Can’t manage either. I’m off, just now. See you in the morning. By-by!”
He rang off there and then, and the girl turned disconsolately away — to find the parlor-maid at her elbow. Dinner was ready, and she must sit down alone.
Chapter III
The Confidential Clerk
Had Lucas Etherton come home to dinner, his daughter’s naturally healthy appetite would have done justice to the carefully cooked food which always appeared on the tabie at Low Hall. But as things were, Letty could make no more than a pretense of eating, and she was glad to escape and get out into a favorite quiet nook in the garden. That had been an ideal day of spring, full of warmth and brightness, but the events of the last two hours had driven all its color away. What was the secret which Lucas Etherton had evidently been keeping to himself? Why should he take old Sir Cheville into his confidence about it? Why did he not take her into that confidence? — he and she had been inseparable, ever since she had come home from school eighteen months earlier. But, to be sure, there was a reason why her father was taking Sir Cheville into counsel — he owed Sir Cheville five thousand pounds. It galled her to think that money was owing to this proud, arrogant old man. There was a great deal of old-fashioned pride in the Etherton race, and Letty had her full share of it, and it was peculiarly distasteful to her to know that her father owed money to Marston Stanbury’s uncle which he could not pay on demand, and about which he spoke with curious uncertainty and vagueness. Moreover, she was utterly puzzled by what she had learned that afternoon. Her father’s mill was always running, he was employing four or five hundred workpeople, and there must be a lot of money about somewhere. Why, then, did he not pay Sir Cheville Stanbury his five thousand pounds and have done with him? And why, having said with emphasis that he wouldn’t tell Sir Cheville his plans if he owed him fifty thousand, did he suddenly turn round and say that, after all, he would take him into his confidence?
Letty Etherton was one of those people who become utterly miserable if left alone with a wearing secret. If her father had only come home that evening, she would have made a clean breast to him of her knowledge of what had happened at the mill, and have begged him to tell her what it all meant. But Lucas had not come, was not coming; she did not even know where his business had taken him. And there was no mother to turn to — Mrs. Etherton had been dead some years — and no brother and no sister. She needed a confidential ear that could be trusted, and the knowledge of this sent her thoughts instinctively flying to her godfather, Mr. Nicholas Getherfield, an old gentleman who lived, all alone, in a queer old house seven miles higher up the valley.
To think of Mr. Getherfield, with his sweet, quiet, old-world manners, his ready sympathy and understanding, was sufficient to make Letty long to go to him, and within a few minutes she had made up her mind; had got out her bicycle and taken the road which led far into the wilder, uninhabited parts of Lithersdale. In half an hour she had left the mills and houses behind, and was following a winding track that ran between the river and the hillside. And there, as she turned the corner of a coppice of stunted oak trees, just then bursting into leaf, she came face to face with her father’s clerk, Bradwell Pike, who was busily engaged at the roadside, mending a puncture in the tube of his bicycle.
Letty had no reason for sharing the boyish aversion which Marston always manifested whenever Pike crossed his path. She had known Pike ever since she was ten years old. He was as much a feature of the Old Mill as the ancient water-wheel or the stone sundial in the mill garden. She knew him as her father’s clerk — a quiet, reserved, hardworking fellow, eminently useful. She had grown so used to his looks and appearance that she had never particularly noticed them. Perhaps his nose was a trifle too long, and too thin about the nostrils; perhaps his eyes were too closely set together; perhaps he carried an habitual air of furtive secrecy — but Letty had never thought of him as anything else than the clerk at the mill. And she was only thinking of him in this way when she jumped off her bicycle at his side.
“Mr. Pike!” she exclaimed, “do you happen to know where my father has gone on business? He telephoned to me at six o’clock saying he was going somewhere, for the night, but he was in such a hurry that he didn’t say where. Do you know anything about it?”
Pike, who was endeavouring to locate the puncture in his tube, looked up eagerly from his work.
“I don’t, Miss Letty,” he answered. “I don’t know anything at all. He never said a word to me. He came into the office from the mill just before six, and I heard him telephoning to you — then he went out, straight off. But I should say he was going over to the station to catch the six-ten into Hallithwaite.”
“You don’t know of any reason — business reason — that would take him away?” suggested Letty.
“No,” answered Pike. “No, Miss Letty, can’t say that I do.”
He had located the puncture by that time, and he methodically proceeded to mark its whereabouts by drawing a pencil line round it. She stood watching his long, slender fingers — fingers of an unusual length and thinness — why, she could not tell. And Pike suddenly looked up at her.
“You’re not anxious about him, Miss Letty?” he asked.
“I don’t think he’s very well,” replied Letty half-evasively. “And — yes, I am a little anxious.”
Pike produced a small box from the bag which hung behind his saddle, and finding a bit of sandpaper in it began to clean the coating off his tube.
“Miss Letty,” he said suddenly, “you’ve known me a great many years. So has Mr. Etherton. I’ve been a good servant to him ever since I came to the Old Mill. So — I can speak. I saw you this afternoon.”
“Yes,” said Letty unsuspectingly. “On the moor.”
“I didn’t mean that,” answered Pike, with a swift side-glance. “I meant — at the mill. You were looking through the curtain on one side of your father’s room — I was looking through the curtain on the other side.”
Letty’s face flushed and she instinctively drew back a little.
“You were — listening?” she exclaimed.
“Just as you were, Miss Letty,” replied Pike. “It wasn’t my fault I came in there. I heard your father and Sir Cheville Stanbury talking, and — well, I did listen, for a minute or two. But — I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t know already.”
“You knew that — that my father owed that money to Sir Cheville Stanbury!” exclaimed Letty. “You did?”
Pike’s thin lips curved in a curious smile.
“I keep your father’s banking account,” he said. “There’s not much about it that I’m not aware of. I remember the time of his borrowing that money from Sir Cheville — and he wanted it pretty badly.”
Letty made no remark. She was astonished to find that Pike knew so much, and she stood, considering, while he proceeded to coat his little patch with the necessary solution. Something in the way in which he clapped the patch on the puncture and held it there seemed to denote his grip of things.
“There’s some queer secret about Mr. Etherton, Miss Letty,” he said suddenly, in his quietest manner. “I don’t know where the money goes! I mean — I don’t know where a lot of it’s gone, this last year or two. I’m uneasy. You mightn’t think it, but I’ve a fondness for your father. He’s always been very good to me. To be sure, I’ve served him well, but he’s been a kind employer. And, frankly, I don’t know what’s up! He draws big sums for something or other — and I don’t know what he’s doing with it. But, it isn’t going into the business, I know that. You’re uneasy yourself,” he added, with a suddenly sharp glance. “You know you are!”