Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/404



I HAVE often told you," said James Mayfield to me the evening before my marriage with his daughter Kate, "that I owed my prosperity—or more accurately, my escape from destruction—to an accident, a chance, a miracle. Stand up and look at that piece of paper let into the overmantel. Have you ever observed it before?"

Yes," I said, rising and examining a faded document under a glass panel in the oak. "I have now and then noticed it, but have never been able to make out what it is."

"What do you take it for?"

"Well, it looks like half a sheet of business note-paper covered with indistinct figures that do not seem ordinary."

"Yes," he said, gazing with half-closed eyes at the paper through the smoke of his cigar. "They are not ordinary, nor is their history."

"It is not possible to make them out, they are so blurred and faint. Are they very old ?"

"Twenty years. They are much faded since I first saw them," said he, crossing his legs. "Now you may as well know the history of that half-sheet of business paper, and what it has to do with me and your Kate's mother. Sit down and I will tell it to you."

I dropped back into my chair.

"Our Kate is nearly nineteen, as, no doubt, you are aware. It is the night before your marriage. You, thank Heaven! run no such risk as I ran the night before my marriage. There is no date on that blurred copy of figures, but if there were you would find it originated on the night before I was to be married, twenty years ago. You are short of thirty now, I was short of thirty then. You are now in what I should then have considered affluent circumstances. I am going to give you to-morrow our only child, and a fourth share in the business of Strangway, Mayfield & Co., of which I am the sole surviving partner, and that fourth share ought to bring you a thousand to twelve hundred a year. The night that document over the chimney came into existence I was accountant to Strangway & Co., at a salary of one hundred and fifty pounds per annum."

My father-in-law paused, and knocked the ash off his cigar.

"At that time," he went