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Melrose is well acquainted with both the past and recent history of Mr. Robert Smeath, who made a tool of Mrs. Melrose in the matter of a disgraceful theft of a valuable bronze from Mr. Melrose's collection " "The Hermes!" cried Victoria. "She has never said one word to me about it." "Miss Melrose has been telling me the story," said Tatham, smiling at the recollection.
It was not to be thought of. Victoria tried gently to investigate what skeleton might be lying in the Smeath closet, whereof Mr. Melrose possessed such very useful information. But Netta held her tongue. "Papa had been very unfortunate, and the Government would like to put him in prison if they could. Edmund had been always so cruel to him." Beyond this Victoria could not get.
The father, Robert Smeath, had found it more and more difficult to earn anything on which to keep his belongings, and as a picture dealer seemed to have fallen into bad odour with the Italian authorities, for reasons of which Netta could give no account. "And how much do you think Mr. Melrose allowed his wife and child?" asked Victoria, her eyes sparkling.
But the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence; although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character.
Henceforth they were strangers to each other, and she might arrange her future as she pleased. The letter was answered by Mrs. Robert Smeath in the third person, and all communications ceased. As a matter of fact the Smeath family were infinitely relieved by Melrose's letter, which showed that he did not intend to take any police steps to recover the bronze or its value.
"Eighty pounds a year! on which in the end the whole family seem to have lived. Finally, the mother died, and Mr. Smeath got into some scrape or other I naturally avoided the particulars which involved pledging half Mrs. Melrose's allowance for five years. And on the rest forty pounds she and her daughter, and her old father have been trying to live for the last two. You never heard such a story!
How she hated the word! how she hated the associations linked with it, and with the names on the boxes. They were bound up with a score of humbling memories, the memories of her shabby, struggling youth. She thought of her father the needy English artist, Robert Smeath, with just a streak, and no more than a streak, of talent, who had become rapidly "Italianate" in the Elizabethan sense had dropped, that is, the English virtues, without ever acquiring the Italian. He had married her mother, a Florentine girl, the daughter of a small impiegato living in one of the dismal new streets leading out of Florence on the east, and had then pursued a shifting course between the two worlds, the English and the Italian, ordering his household and bringing up his children in Italian fashion, while he was earning his keep and theirs, not at all by the showy pictures in his studio which no one would buy, but as jackal in antichit
"By George, that's a rum little girl! She glories in it. But she says her mother has been consumed with remorse ever since. Go on." "And if any attempt is made to blackmail or coerce Mr. Melrose, he will be obliged, much against his will, to draw the attention of the Italian police to certain matters relating to Mr. Smeath, of which he has the evidence in his possession. He warns Mrs.
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