CHAPTER lII.—HOME-COMING.

Otago Witness, Issue 2437, 28 November 1900, Page 57

CHAPTER lII.— HOME-COMING.

HEISJ Stephen Lome left the restaurant he strolled about the streets for a couple of hours, renewing his acquaintance with the world, until it was time for him to take the train 'to Westbourne Park. Then he went back to the station, took his ticket and bought a couple of evening papers. ' When the train came in he got into a first-class carriage, settled himself in a corner seat and began to read. For years he had known practically nothing of the progress of the world, md so the news of the day interested him Very little ; but as his eyes Avandered idly over the columns they were arrested by two paragraphs which, as it happened, t were placed side by side in 'two adjacent columns. The first that caught his eyes ran thus : — "We are informed that Messrs Vincent and Curzo'n, the pioprietors of the patent processes for applying liquid air as a motive power — which has already so far superseded steam, and electricity both in railway and marine, engines — are about to transform their business into a limited liability company, which will practically control the use of the new power over the whole world. The company is being formed by g combination of English and American capitalists, and the capital, most of which is already promised, is expected to be in the neighbourhood of 20 millions sterling." That was his invention— the invention which the default of the law had enabled these people to steal from him. That 20 millions should be his to-day — and here he was going home with a few' shillings in his pocket, to live on a pittance of between two and three hundred a year. He shut his teeth hard to keep back the curses which rose to his lips. If there had not been two or three other people in the carriage his rags* would probably have broken out into wild ravings. But the habit of discipline was still strong upon him, and so he managed to keep his teeth shut. Then his eye shifted to the next paragraph which ran as follows: — • "Stephen Lome, one of the members of the society calling themselves Atomists, and whe was concerned in the outrage at the Law Courts six years ago, was released this morning by order of the Home Secretary from. Parkhurst Prison, Tsle of Wighk It is a curious coincidence that during the previous night a prisoner, Marcus Crane, the ringleader of this gang, who was undergoing a sentence of twenty years' penal sei*vitude, managed to escape from the. same prison.

The authorities decline to give any information as to how the escape was effected, but it is admitted that up to the present all efforts to capture the fugitive have been unavailing." When the train pulled up at Westbourne Park he £ot out and looked up and down the platform. As the crowd drifted away towards the steps, die woman who had spoken to him over the" edge of the dock six years before, and whom he had seen and spoken with less than a dozen times since then, came towards him with both hands outstretched. They clasped hands and kissed each other without a word. The years had passed very lightly -over her, and he was proud to see that she was still in all the glory of beautiful womanhood — still, in his eyes at* least, the same lovely Concha whom he had wooed and won as a slender, dark-eyed, olive-skinned maiden scarcely sixteen, a little more than eighteen years ago in sunny Seville. "So you are with me again, dearest !" she half whispered in Spanish. "Here is ticket for your luggage, and don't forget that- your new name is Darrell. I have got a cab waiting outside." "And Viola?" he said. "Is she here?" as he took the little bit of yellow paper from her. "No, the child is not quite well. The j prospect of seeing you again has made her feverish, almost hysterical, so I thought it better to leave her at home. But you i will soon see her. It is only a few minutes' drive from here."This meeting' had, been arranged for the purpose of enabling Stephen Lome to assume the new identity which was to be his in the world of freedom. His Avife had come back with Viola from | France about six months before to make a home in London for her husband, who had almost finished his term 01 service as engineei with a French mining company in South Africa. The luggage which he took out of the cloak room consisted of two steamer trunks and a portmanteau, labelled exactly as they would have been for a saloon passenger, by the Union Line from Capetown, and the name upon them was Stephen Darrell. - ! There was a bundle of rugs and an overcoat with them, and this latter he put on, partly because the night was chilly, but chiefly to hide his ill-fitting and somewhat-shabby-looking clothes. As soon as they were in the cab she slipped "her arm through his and raised his thin, toil-hardened hand to her cheek, saying : "An,d so, my Stephen, I have got you again after all these long years ! You will fipd that I have been working and thinking of you, and you have been thinking yonder, have you notV" "Yes," he said, turning his, hand over and clasping hers. "Yes, I have been thinking, and now the rime has come to work again, thank God! lam a man again at last, not a thing with a number." \ "Hush, dearie !" she whispered, as though she was afraid that someone could hear them even .there .in the rattling cah. "That is past and gone now, and we shall remember it only when we think of the just revenge that we shall work for and win, but not to-night. This is the night of your welcome home. I have made a little supper for you — one of the old sort you know — and there is champagne too. I have been extravagant for once. My poor dear, I suppose you have forgotten what the taste of wine is like." "No," he said, "not quite. I had some measured out by the ounce when I was ill in the hospital, and .this afternoon I treated myself to a dinner and half a bottle of Burgundy. It was like a feast of the gods to* me. But yours will be better still, Conchita mia ! But tell me," he went on with a sudden change of tone, "about Viola. Does she know che truth — I mean the whole truth?" j "No," she replied, "I thought that it would be better that she should hear it from your lips when the time comes. But I have prepared the way. I have told her that you were driven away from us by a conspiracy to ruin you; ti.at ever since you left us you have been obliged to live in distant countries iinder another name, and that even now it is not safe for you to come home under your own name. I have cold her everything but the one truth — where you have been." "But," she went on, dropping her voice to a low, fierce whisper, "I have taught her that these enemies of yours are still j alive ; itharfc they have robbed ydu of i everything you possess ; that you are coming back at last to take your just revenge upon them. 1 have taught her to hate them. I have made revenge a religion to her. I have taught her that the law helps the rich to rob the poor, and punishes the poor with imprisonment and death when j they turn upon their oppressors. "I have sown the seed. It will je for you to finish the ivork and see that the harvest is a good one. And she is beautiful, too ; beautiful with the beauty of the North arfd the South — yours snd mine. But there, you will see for yourself in a ■. moment now. Here we are." I As she said this the cab stopped before the gate of one of a curving row of com-fortable-looking hous*"» in a bright, pleasant, street on the Paddington side of the Harrow road. Almost at the same moment the front dooi opened, a tall, slim, girlish figui'e ran out, and for the first time for more than six years Stephen Lome looked upon the lace of his daughter, the daughter whom he had determined should be chief of the instruments of his long-cherished vengeance. Under the circumstances there was natuially, not very much to be said while the luggage was being unloaded from the cab and her father was going upstairs to the first-floor drawing room, in which supper had been prepared. Viola, therefore, after a quick grasp of both hands in the passage and a hastily uttered welcome which, thanks to the training she had received, might have been just such a greeting as a daughter would have given her father on a homecoming from yeais of foreign travel, went upstairs before him and busied herself with

the last arrangements of the supper — thaft welcoming feast, the festival which she had been taught to look forward to ever since that day which, far away in -the dim past of childhood, she remembered as the day when the old home was broken up, when her father went away with someone in a cab and never came back until now. From middle life six years is not a long time to look back ; indeed, so fast do the years go running on, Jike the wavelets oi a swift-riowing stream, that they seem only like weeks or even less. But during the first age of life years are almost like eternities, and it was through such years as these that Viola looked back to the day_when she had parted from her father. Her remembrance of him was ol a man not physically big nor strong, but still a man in the prime of life. His hair was -thick and. brown, and curly, and his moiistache and eloss-clipped beard, of the "same colour, also strong and thick-growing ; his eyes bright and steady ; his face with just a little colour in the cheeks, and the skin smooth and fair. But now when she saw him come into the room and look about him like a man who had just come from one world into another ; when- she saw that the brown, curly hair was lank and 'ohm and grey, that the smooth skin was seamed with wrinkles, and "that the bright eyes, though still bright a& she had remembered tliem,"were covered bydroopihg"brows and • underlined by dark shadows ; when, too, she saw. that the tall, spare form which she had remembered so straight and active was drooping and moving with/ the gait of an - enfeebled manthen all in a moment the moral of the lessons which her mother had been teaching her for all these years came home to her with such a shock that it seemed almost as though a nail had been driven into her brain to fix them there. The difference between her father as she had seen him last and as .she saw him now was to her the net result of the evil which his enemies had wrought upon him. His wife closed the door behind him, and for a moment or two he stood looking at Viola, the little girl he had left behind him/ and who in every line of her form >and feature^ of her face reproduced her mother's beauty with added subtler charms wnich he could not then« analyse. He stopped and, holding out his hands, said very gently and softly : "And this is our little Viola?" Then the alteration in his voice struck her even more acutely than the change in his appearance had done. It seemed like the voice of a stranger speaking with her father's lips. It was his voice and yet not his ; there was a feebleness and hesitation in . it which she did not- understand ; and oddly enough, it struck even her as the voice of it man -who had not' been accustomed to speaking freely and by his own will for a long time. "Yes, father, it is I — your own little Viola, although I am growing so big now," she said, dropping instinctively into her mother's- native 'Spanish, which had now become a mother tongue to her-, and which sounded to him like a far-away echo of the -days when -he- had -wooed her mother in -the same speech. . ■- "Yes, I am just the same, only changed, of course ; but not so much changed as you are. __ What have they been doing to you all these years, these enemies of yours? Ah, how they must have made you suffer! But now you are here at home with us again, and we shall make you .forget it all." The bright and cheerful appearance of the room, the prettily spread table, • with its white cloth, the "bright steel and silver, the flowers and the glittering glasses, with a hundred more details of dainty comforts which to him were now only far-off memories, the fire burning in the grate behind the tiled hearth, fenced in by the brightly -polishe,d fender, the general air of comfort seen by his eyes, accustomed for so long to the rigid simplicity, the ghastly, comfortless neatness of the prison cell, intoxicated him as a draught of strong win» might have done. He caught her up in his arms again and kissed her once more, and said in a voice which sounded very strange to "her : "Yes, my dear one, it is I, your fatlier—the lover of your mother when she was just such another dainty little beauty, as you are now, although," he went on,, with a. look lound at his wife, "she might even now be only your elder sister Jby ? few years. I have come back from my exile •again to live with you, to work with you,to love with you." • "And hate with us, too, padre mio. Is not that so also?" she said, freeing herself from his arms. "Yes," he said, gravely-, but still smiling, "that is true. With us love must now mean hate as well. Hope with us must be revenge." And chen he went on, turning again to his wife, "Querida mia, I thank yoii ; she has already told me that you have 'taught the lesson well." "Yes," replied his wife, "and you shall see that she has learnt it well. But now let us forget all that for the present. We must only remember now that you are a man from a long exile ; a husband and a father who has not seen his home, his wife, nor his child for all these years. We can talk of other things to-morrow. To-night Jet us only remember that yoii have come home. Now we shall get the supper, and you, meanwhile, get the champagne ready for opening." With that she beckoned to Viola, and they both- left the room. The champagne knife lay on the' table with the wirecutter and the corkscrew already opened. It was or the tip of his now unready tongue to say : "Marcus Crane escaped last night." . But it seemed cruel, almost murderous, in fact, to spoil the promised happiness or that evening of delight by such cruel tidings as this — tidings infinitely more cruel than even he then imagined them to be ; so he shut his teeth, and, picking up the knife, commenced, with some misgivings, the long-unaccustomed task of opening a bottle of jhampagne.