The Man of Gold by Evelyn Hervey Read Free Book Online Page B

forward half an inch.
    ‘Known,’ he said. ‘Known. Known to you, and to those children. Children will talk. Will talk. Will prattle. Cannot be silenced. ‘
    ‘Nevertheless, sir,’ Miss Unwin broke in on his almost incoherent muttering. ‘Nevertheless, I have spoken to the girls in a manner which I think they will not forget. I have told them that they should never have learnt what lies beneath that stone, that it is your particular secret for you to keep. I think they will not speak of it, to anyone, at any time.’
    But even as she pronounced the words, which at the moment of utterance she believed to be entirely true, a thought rose up from some recess of her mind.
    It presented itself as a picture. A curious picture. It showed two young girls, twins, dressed neatly but simply as she now saw to it that Louisa and Maria dressed, standing to either side of a person they should not have been associated with. The unmistakable roué, Captain Fulcher. Standing to either side of him, looking up laughingly, teasingly, and prattling away.
    They had been doing, unusually for them, just what their grandfather had feared they might do at some future time, prattling and joking – and letting slip in all innocence something of the secret of his hoarded wealth.
    Because there was a word that Miss Unwin heard in her mind to accompany this picture. There was innocent prattle in which the word ‘Gold’ had been said and repeated.
    And the word had been said. Its speaking was not a fear for the future, but something done in the past and not to be undone. And it was, too, she thought, from the veryway it had been mentioned an old often repeated joke of the twins with which they had teased the Captain.
    The Captain had been embarrassed by the laughing attack made on him. It had been plain to Miss Unwin the one time she had witnessed it that he was not a person used to children. He had no knowledge of the way to talk to the young. Indeed, she had said to herself at the time, the sort of people Captain Fulcher knows how to talk to are low jockeys and stableboys, the hangers-on at the racecourses from whom he hopes to gather information that may win him the bets he almost always speaks of as having lost.
    But nonetheless he must have heard what the twins had prattled to him about. Have heard more than once indeed giggling boasts that if he had lost money at the racecourse they knew where there were piles and piles of gold to make him happy again. No doubt he had paid scarcely any attention to the hornet-like buzzings of the two children. He had plainly been relieved on the occasion Miss Unwin remembered when she had told the girls that they must not annoy a visitor and had whisked them away.
    But still that word ‘gold’ had been spoken in his presence. Was it possible that he had later wondered whether the twins’ childish boasts concealed truth? Could he have asked them just where the gold they had laughingly spoken of was to be found? Or had he even made a point of listening at other times to the two of them talking together, have picked up some little hint passed from one to the other?
    Did he, too, know Mr Partington’s secret?
    Was this the reason that he had thought it worthwhile to make his attempt, at once seen to be hopeless, to borrow from his aged cousin in order to pay off the moneylender, Mr Davis? Or, worse, far worse, was this the reason why no more had been heard of the plump Mr Davis? When the moneylender had burst in on them he had spoken of bills already a week overdue. But after that, so far as sheherself knew, he had no longer been pressing. Was it possible that Captain Fulcher had ‘borrowed’ what he needed from one of Mr Partington’s hoards? And what if the old man should discover that he had?
    She dared not suggest to him now that the Captain, too, might know his secret. He had taken the news that she and the twins had learnt it badly enough. To find that a man like Jack Fulcher had some idea of the