“Great Heavens!” groaned the Admiral, “he has absconded.”
“And left me both a bankrupt and a thief.
“No, no, Harold,” sobbed his mother. “All will be right. What matter about money!”
“Money, mother! It is my honor.”
“The boy is right. It is his honor, and my honor, for his is mine. This is a sore trouble, mother, when we thought our life’s troubles were all behind us, but we will bear it as we have borne others.” He held out his stringy hand, and the two old folk sat with bowed grey heads, their fingers intertwined, strong in each other’s love and sympathy.
“We were too happy,” she sighed.
“But it is God’s will, mother.”
“Yes, John, it is God’s will.”
“And yet it is bitter to bear. I could have lost all, the house, money, rank–I could have borne it. But at my age–my honor–the honor of an admiral of the fleet.”
“No honor can be lost, John, where no dishonor has been done. What have you done? What has Harold done? There is no question of honor.”
The old man shook his head, but Harold had already called together his clear practical sense, which for an instant in the presence of this frightful blow had deserted him.
“The mater is right, dad,” said he. “It is bad enough, Heaven knows, but we must not take too dark a view of it. After all, this insolent letter is in itself evidence that I had nothing to do with the schemes of the base villain who wrote it.”
“They may think it prearranged.
“They could not. My whole life cries out against the thought. They could not look me in the face and entertain it.”
“No, boy, not if they have eyes in their heads,” cried the Admiral, plucking up courage at the sight of the flashing eyes and brave, defiant face. “We have the letter, and we have your character. We’ll weather it yet between them. It’s my fault from the beginning for choosing such a land-shark for your consort. God help me, I thought I was finding such an opening for you.”
“Dear dad! How could you possibly know? As he says in his letter, it has given me a lesson. But he was so much older and so much more experienced, that it was hard for me to ask to examine his books. But we must waste no time. I must go to the City.
“What will you do?”
“What an honest man should do. I will write to all our clients and creditors, assemble them, lay the whole matter before them, read them the letter and put myself absolutely in their hands.”
“That’s it, boy–yard-arm to yard-arm, and have it over.”
“I must go at once.” He put on his top-coat and his hat. “But I have ten minutes yet before I can catch a train. There is one little thing which I must do before I start.”
He had caught sight through the long glass folding door of the gleam of a white blouse and a straw hat in the tennis ground. Clara used often to meet him there of a morning to say a few words before he hurried away into the City. He walked out now with the quick, firm step of a man who has taken a momentous resolution, but his face was haggard and his lips pale.
“Clara,” said he, as she came towards him with words of greeting, “I am sorry to bring ill news to you, but things have gone wrong in the City, and–and I think that I ought to release you from your engagement.”
Clara stared at him with her great questioning dark eyes, and her face became as pale as his.
“How can the City affect you and me, Harold?”
“It is dishonor. I cannot ask you to share it.”
“Dishonor! The loss of some miserable gold and silver coins!”
“Oh, Clara, if it were only that! We could be far happier together in a little cottage in the country than with all the riches of the City. Poverty could not cut me to the heart, as I have been cut this morning. Why, it is but twenty minutes since I had the letter, Clara, and it seems to me to be some old, old thing which happened far away in my past life, some horrid black cloud which shut out all the freshness and the peace from it.”