XXVI

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.

Jim heaved a sigh as he resumed his trudge. Life would not be long enough for him, if Eunice⁠ ⁠… if!⁠⸺⁠

He shook the thought from him and climbed steadily to his destination.

Hill Farm was a small house standing in about three acres of land, devoted mainly to market garden. There was no Mr. Weatherwale. He had been dead for twelve years, Jim learnt at the inn, but the old lady had a son who assisted in the management of the farm.

Jim strode out to what was to prove a pleasant walk through the glories of a Somerset countryside, and he found Mrs. Weatherwale in the act of butter-making. She had a pasture and a dozen cows, as she informed him later.

“I don’t want to talk about Jane Groat,” she said decisively, when he broached the object of his visit. “I’ll never forgive that boy of hers for the trouble he gave me, apart from the insult. I gave up my work and had to hire a woman to take charge here and look after the boy⁠—there’s my fare to London⁠—”

“I dare say all that could be arranged, Mrs. Weatherwale,” said Jim with a laugh. “Mr. Digby Groat will certainly repay you.”

“Are you a friend of his?” she asked suspiciously, “because if you are⁠—”

“I am not a friend of his,” said Jim. “On the contrary, I dislike him probably as much as you do.”

“That is not possible,” she said, “for I would as soon see the devil as that yellow-faced monkey.”

She wiped her hands on her apron and led the way to the sunny little parlour.

“Sit ye down, Mr. What-you-may-call-it,” she said briskly.

“Steele,” murmured Jim.

“Mr. Steele, is it? Just sit down there, will you?” She indicated a window-seat covered with bright chintz. “Now tell me just what you want to know.”

“I want to know something about Jane Groat’s youth, who were her friends, and what you know about Digby Groat?”

Mrs. Weatherwale shook her head.

“I can’t tell you much about that, sir,” she said. “Her father was old Danton who owned Kennett Hall. You can see it from here”⁠—she pointed across the country to a grey mass of buildings that showed above the hill-crest.

“Jane frequently came over to the farm. My father had a bigger one in those days. All Hollyhock Hill belonged to him, but he lost his money through horses, drat them!” she said good-humouredly, and apparently had no particular grievance against the thoroughbred racehorse.

“And we got quite friendly. It was unusual, I admit, she being a lady of quality and me being a farmer’s daughter; but lord! I’ve got stacks of letters from her, or rather, I had. I burnt them this morning.”

“You’ve burnt them?” said Jim in dismay. “I was hoping that I should find something I wanted to know from those.”

She shook her head.

“There’s nothing there you would find, except a lot of silly nonsense about a man she fell in love with, a Spanish man.”

“The Marquis of Estremeda?” suggested Jim.

She closed her lips.

“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t,” she said. “I’m not going to scandalize at my time of life, and at her time of life too. We’ve all made mistakes in our time, and I dare say you’ll make yours, if you haven’t made them already. Which reminds me, Mr.⁠—I don’t remember your name?”

“Steele,” said Jim patiently.

“Well, that reminds me there’s a duck of a girl in that house. How Jane can allow a beautiful creature like that to come into contact with a beast like Digby, I don’t know. But that is all by the way. No, I burnt the letters, except a few. I kept one or two to prove that a boy doesn’t change his character when he grows up. Why, it may be,” she said good-humouredly, “when Digby is hanged the newspaper reporters would like to see these, and they will be worth money to me!”

Jim laughed. Her good-humour was infectious, and when after an absence of five minutes she returned to the room with a small box covered with faded green plush, he asked:

“You know nothing of Digby Groat’s recent life?”

She shook her head.

“I only knew him as a boy, and a wicked little devil he was, the sort of boy who would pull a fly’s wings off for the sport of it. I used to think those stories about boys were lies, but it was true about him. Do you know what his chief delight was as a boy?”

“No, I don’t,” smiled Jim. “It was something unpleasant, I am sure.”

“To come on a Friday afternoon to Farmer Johnson’s and see the pigs killed for market,” she said grimly. “That’s the sort of boy he was.”

She took out a bundle of faded letters and fixing her large steel-rimmed spectacles, read them over.

“Here’s one,” she said; “that will show you the kind of kid he was.”

“I flogged Digby today. He tied a bunch of crackers round the kitten’s neck and let them off. The poor little creature had to be killed.”

“That’s Digby,” said Mrs. Weatherwale, looking over her glasses. “There isn’t a letter here which doesn’t say that she had to beat him for something or other,” she read on, reading half to herself, and Jim heard the word “baby.”

“What baby was that?”

She looked at him.

“It wasn’t her baby,” she said.

“But whose was it?” insisted Jim.

“It was a baby she was looking after.”

“Her sister-in-law’s?” demanded Jim.

The woman nodded.

“Yes, Lady Mary Danton’s poor little soul⁠—he did a cruel thing to her too.”

Jim dare not speak, and without encouragement Mrs. Weatherwale said:

“Listen to this, if you want to understand the kind of little devil Digby was.”

“I had to give Digby a severe flogging today. Really, the child is naturally cruel. What do you imagine he did? He took a sixpence, heated it in the fire and put it on the poor baby’s wrist. It left a circular burn.”

“Great God!” said Jim, springing to his feet, his face white. “A circular burn on the wrist?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“Yes, why?”

So that was the explanation, and the heiress to the Danton millions was not Digby Groat or his mother, but the girl who was called Eunice Weldon, or, as the world would know her, Dorothy Danton!