A Master of Deception. Richard Marsh
any more. As time went on a doubt began to grow up within him as to whether his uncle had not some inkling of the relations which existed between him and his daughter. That his doubt was well founded he was ultimately to learn. One morning, soon after his uncle's arrival, a request came to him to go to him at once in his room. When he went in he was struck, not by any means for the first time, by certain points about his uncle's appearance. He felt convinced that his relative's was not, from the insurance point of view, a good life. Rodney Elmore knew little of medicine, yet he hazarded a private opinion that Graham Patterson was a promising subject for an apoplectic stroke--the kind of man who, at any moment of undue stress, might have cerebral trouble from which he might not find it easy to recover. He caught himself wondering whether if, by any mischance, his uncle became the victim of such a catastrophe, it might not be worth his while to marry his cousin, if, indeed, that would not be the lady's own point of view. Were Graham Patterson to have such a stroke, it was at least within the range of possibility that he might never again be in a condition to manage his own affairs; in which case who would be so likely to be appointed administrator as the husband of his only child?
While such gruesome imaginings occupied his mind, the subject of them continued to regard him with a stolid silence which at last struck him as singular.
"I was told, sir, that you wished to speak to me."
He said this with the little air of pleasant deference of which he was such a master and which became him so well. His uncle still said nothing, but continued to glare at him with his bloodshot eyes as if he were some strange object in an exhibition. He really looked so odd that Rodney began to wonder if that stroke was already in the air. He tried again to move him to speech.
"I trust, sir, that nothing disagreeable has happened."
Yet some seconds passed before his uncle did speak. When he did it was with a hard sort of ferocity which his listener felt accorded well with the singularity of his appearance.
"You took my daughter to the Palace Theatre last night."
Rodney wondered from whom he had learned the fact, being convinced that it was not from his daughter. However, since he could scarcely ask, he tried another line, one which he was conscious went close to the verge of insolence.
"I hope, sir, that the Palace is not a theatre to which you object. Just now it has one of the best entertainments in London."
Only in a very narrow sense could his uncle's response be regarded as a reply to his words.
"You're an infernal young scoundrel!"
Rodney did not attempt to feign resentment he did not feel. His quickly-moving wits told him that he was at last brought face to face with a position which he had for some time foreseen, and that for him the best attitude would probably be one of modest humility--at least, to begin with.
"I don't think, sir, you are entitled to use such language to me on such slight grounds."
"Don't you? You--you--beauty!"
Obviously Mr. Patterson had substituted a different word for the one he had intended to use. Taking a slip of paper out of the drawer of the writing-table at which he was seated, he held it out towards Rodney.
"You see that?"
"I do, sir."
"You know what it is?"
"It appears to be a cheque."
"You know what cheque it is."
"If you will allow me to examine it more closely I shall perhaps be able to say."
"You can examine it as closely as you please so long as it is in my hands. I wouldn't trust it in your hands for a good deal."
"Why do you say that?"
"You impudent young blackguard!"
"And that, sir?"
"I say it, you brazen young hypocrite, because that cheque happens to be a forgery, and you are the man who forged it."
"Sir! I know that you are used to allow yourself a large license in the way of language, but this time, although you are my uncle, you go too far."
"I intend to go much farther before I've done--and don't you throw the fact that I'm your uncle in my face, the most decent men have blackguards for relatives. This cheque was originally made out for eight pounds. I told you to ask young Metcalf to get cash for it. Between this room and Metcalf's desk you altered it to eighty pounds. It was easily done--especially by an expert like you. He brought you eighty pounds; you gave me eight, and kept seventy-two. You were aware that Metcalf was leaving the office that day to join his brother in Canada; you calculated that probably before the thing was discovered he would be on the high seas, and that, therefore, since everyone knew how much he was in want of cash, I should lay the guilt at his door--you dirty cur! But I didn't, never for one instant; the instant I saw the cheque I recognised your hand."
"You recognised my hand? What do you mean by that, sir?"
Mr. Patterson took something else out of his writing-table drawer, which, this time, he handed to his nephew.
"Look at that."
It was a portrait--the photograph of a man in the early prime of life.
"Don't you think it might be yours?"
Rodney felt that, allowing for the changes made by a few superimposed years, the resemblance to himself was striking, so striking that it was startling. The eyes looked at him out of the portrait with an expression which he recognised as so like his own that it bewildered him.
"That's the portrait of your father. You don't remember him?"
"Not at all."
"I knew him all his life. You are so like what he was at your age that more than once when I have looked at you I have had an uncomfortable feeling that he had come back again to haunt me. Never was son more like his father, in all things."
Rodney winced, scarcely knowing why. His uncle went on.
"Your mother never spoke to you of him?"
"Never."
"She had what she supposed to be sufficient reasons for her reticence; she wished to hide from you, if possible, the knowledge of what manner of man your father was, thinking that the knowledge of the heritage of shame which he had left behind might drive you to walk in his footsteps. I was of a different opinion. I held that if you had in you any of the makings of a decent man, the knowledge of the sort of man your father was would serve you as a warning to keep off the path he'd followed. However, you were your mother's child, not mine, thank God; she had her way, though I warned her that the time would probably come when I should have to tell you the story she would rather have bitten off her tongue than tell."
Mr. Patterson paused, keeping his eyes fixed on the young man in front of him. There was a quality in his gaze which made Rodney conscious of a sense of discomfort to which he had been hitherto a stranger.
"You are so like your father that you even have his Christian name. Rodney Elmore the first was one of those creatures who sometimes come into the world, who could not run straight if they tried--and they never try. He was one of Nature's thieves; a born scamp; a lifelong blackguard. Your mother was my only sister; the only relative I had. I did not understand him so well before she married him as I did afterwards, but I understood him well enough to have kept her from marrying him if I could. But he was one of those hounds who, if they cannot get what they want by fair means, will not hesitate to get it by foul; he even won his wife by foul means, taking advantage of her girlish innocence so that she had to become his wife to save her good name. She lived for six years with him in hell. Then he was detected in a series of frauds which would probably have resulted in his being sent to penal servitude for life. Rather than face the music, he committed suicide."
Again Mr. Patterson paused, and his nephew, on his side, kept still. It seemed to him that his uncle's voice was the voice of doom; he was aware of a sensation of actual physical pain as he listened,