’I have very little doubt it was so—­though I wasn’t old enough when he died to hear as much from his own lips.  My father went straight from the University to Vienna, where he began his career in the diplomatic service, and where he soon afterwards married a dowerless English girl of good family.  He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies, the youngest in long clothes.  Mother and babies all came over to England, and were at once established at Fellside.  I can remember the voyage—­and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow of my father’s death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of broken health and broken spirits.  We had no one but the dowager to look to as children—­hardly another friend in the world.  She did what she liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so they have never heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached their ears.  But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever, though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school.  The time came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had been said about Lord Maulevrier.  The men who told me about the old scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night, when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor’s son, he told me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he thought himself the better bred of the two.  I smashed his nose for him, but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared the matter.’

‘Did you ever hear the exact story?’

’I have heard a dozen stories; and if only a quarter of them are true my grandfather was a scoundrel.  It seems that he was immensely popular for the first year or so of his government, gave more splendid entertainments than had been given at Madras for half a century before his time, lavished his wealth upon his favourites.  Then arose a rumour that the governor was insolvent and harassed by his creditors, and then a new source of wealth seemed to be at his command; he was more reckless, more princely than ever; and then, little by little, there arose the suspicion that he was trafficking in English interests, selling his influence to petty princes, winking at those mysterious crimes by which rightful heirs are pushed aside to make room for usurpers.  Lastly it became notorious that he was the slave of a wicked woman, false wife, suspected murderess, whose husband, a native prince, disappeared from the scene just when his existence became perilous to the governor’s reputation.  According to one version of the story, the scandal of this Rajah’s mysterious disappearance, followed not long after by the Ranee’s equally mysterious death, was the immediate cause of my grandfather’s recall.  How much, or how little of this story—­or other dark stories of the same kind—­is true, whether my grandfather was a consummate scoundrel, or the victim of a baseless slander,—­whether he left India a rich man or a poor man, is known to no mortal except Lady Maulevrier, and compared with her the Theban Sphinx was a communicative individual.’