Craven’s eyes changed slowly from dull suffering to blazing wrath. Uncontrolled rage filled him. How dared Yoshio interfere? How dared he drag him back into the hell from which he had so nearly escaped? He caught the man’s shoulder savagely.
“Damn you!” he cried chokingly. “What the devil do you mean—” But the Jap’s very impassiveness checked him and with an immense effort he regained command of himself. And imperturbably Yoshio advanced the tray again.
“Master’s mail,” he repeated, in precisely the same voice as before, but this time he raised his veiled glance to Craven’s face. For a moment the two men stared at each other, the grey eyes tortured and drawn, the brown ones lit for an instant with deep devotion. Then Craven took the letters mechanically and dropped heavily into a chair. The Jap picked up the revolver and, quietly replacing it in the drawer from which it had been taken, left the room, noiseless as he had entered it. He seemed to know intuitively that it would be left where he put it.
Alone, Craven leaned forward with a groan, burying his face in his hands.
At last he sat up wearily and his eyes fell on the letters lying unopened on the table beside him. He fingered them listlessly and then threw them down again while he searched his pockets absently for the missing cigarette case. Remembering, he jerked himself to his feet with an exclamation of pain. Was all life henceforward to be a series of torturing recollections? He swore, and flung his head up angrily. Coward! whining already like a kicked cur!
He got a cigarette from a near table and picking up the letters carried them out on to the verandah to read. There were two, both registered. The handwriting on one envelope was familiar and his eyes widened as he looked at it. He opened it first. It was written from Florence and dated three months earlier. With no formal beginning it straggled up and down the sides of various sheets of cheap foreign paper, the inferior violet ink almost indecipherable in places.
“I wonder in what part of the globe this letter will find you? I have been trying to write to you for a long time—and always putting it off—but they tell me now that if I am to write at all there must be no more mañana. They have cried ‘wolf’ so often in the last few months that I had grown sceptical, but even I realise now that there must be no delay. I have delayed because I have procrastinated all my life and because I am ashamed—ashamed for the first time in all my shameless career. But there is no need to tell you what I am—you told me candidly enough yourself in the old days—it is sufficient to say that it is the same John Locke as then—drunkard and gambler, spendthrift and waster! And I don’t think that my worst enemy would have much to add to this record, but then my worst enemy has always been myself. Looking back now over my life—queer what a stimulating effect the certainty of death has to the desire to find even one good action wherewith to appease one’s conscience—it is a marvel to me that Providence has allowed me to cumber the earth so long. However, it’s all over now—they give me a few days at the outside—so I must write at once or never. Barry, I’m in trouble, the bitterest trouble I have ever experienced—not for myself, God knows I wouldn’t ask even your help, but for another who is dearer to me than all the world and for whose future I can do nothing. You never knew that I married. I committed that indiscretion in Rome with a little Spanish dancer who ought to have known better than to be attracted by my beaux yeux—for I had nothing else to offer her. We existed in misery for a couple of years and then she left me, for a more gilded position. But I had the child, which was all I cared about. Thank God, for her sake, that I was legally married to poor little Lola, she has at least no stain on her birth with which to reproach me. The officious individual who is personally conducting me to the Valley of the Shadow warns me that I must be brief—I kept the child with me as long as I could, people were wonderfully kind, but it was no life for her. I’ve come down in the social scale even since you knew me, Barry, and at last I sent her away, though it broke my heart. Still even that was better than seeing her day by day lose all respect for me. My miserable pittance dies with me and she is absolutely unprovided for. My family cast off me and all my works many years ago, but I put my pride in my pocket and appealed for help for Gillian and they suggested—a damned charitable institution! I was pretty nearly desperate until I thought of you. I know no one else. For God’s sake, Barry, don’t fail me. I can and I do trust Gillian to you. I have made you her guardian, it is all legally arranged and my lawyer in London has the papers. He is a well-known man and emanates respectability—my last claim to decency! Gillian is at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris. My only consolation is that you are so rich that financially she will be no embarrassment to you. I realize what I am asking and the enormity of it, but I am a dying man and my excuse is—Gillian. Oh, man, be good to my little girl. I always hoped that something would turn up, but it didn’t! Perhaps I never went to look for it, quien sabe? I shall never have the chance again....”
The signature was barely recognisable, the final letter terminating in a wandering line as if the pen had dropped from nerveless fingers.
Craven stared at the loose sheets in his hands for some time in horrified dismay, at first hardly comprehending, then as the full significance of John Locke’s dying bequest dawned on him he flung them down and, walking to the edge of the verandah, looked over the harbour, tugging his moustache and scowling in utter perplexity. A child—a girl child! How could he with his soiled hands assume the guardianship of a child? He smiled bitterly at the irony of it. Providence was dealing hard with the child in the Paris convent, from dissolute father to criminal guardian. And yet Providence had already that morning intervened on her behalf—two minutes later and there would have been no guardian to take the trust. Providence clearly held the same views as John Locke on charitable institutions.
He thought of Locke as he had known him years ago, in Paris, a man twenty years his senior—penniless and intemperate but with an irresistible charm, rolling stone and waster but proud as a Spaniard; a man of the world with the heart of a boy, the enemy of nobody but himself, weak but lovable; a ragged coat and the manners of a prince; idealist and failure.
Craven read the letter through again. Locke had forced his hand—he had no option but to take up the charge entrusted to him. What a legacy! Surely if John Locke had known he would have rather committed his daughter to the tender mercies even of the “institution.” But he had not known and he had trusted him. The thought was a sudden spur, urging him as nothing else could have done, bringing out all that was best and strongest in his nature. In a few hours he had crashed from the pinnacle on which he had soared in the blindness of egoism down into depths of self-realisation that seemed bottomless, and at the darkest moment when his world was lying in pieces under his feet—this had come. Another chance had been given to him. Craven’s jaw set squarely as he thrust Locke’s dying appeal into his pocket.
He ripped open the second letter. It was, as he guessed, from the lawyer and merely confirmed Locke’s letter, with the additional information that his client had died a few hours after writing the said letter and that he had forwarded the news to the Mother Superior of the Convent School in Paris.
Craven went back into the sitting-room to write cables.
CHAPTER III
Owing to a breakdown on the line the boat-train from Marseilles crawled into the Gare du Lyon a couple of hours late. Craven had not slept. He had given his berth in the waggon-lit to an invalid fellow passenger and had sat up all night in an overcrowded, overheated carriage, choked with the stifling atmosphere, his long legs cramped for lack of space.