Lausanne, at the hotel where Gibbons wrote his history.
"Now you come to the mystery; there must be a mystery about Boodles, but
it must be respectable, a tragedy in high life, a regrettable incident,
not a shameful episode. Titania disappeared. What happened to her nobody
knows. You don't know, and Harold doesn't know. She may have gone for a
walk in the mountains and never come back, or she may have gone out in a
boat on Lake Geneva and been drowned, or she may have been murdered by a
madman in a pine-wood. It was all very sad and dreadful, and has
naturally cast a cloud over Boodles's life, though she knows nothing
about it, as she was scarcely a year old when her mother disappeared.
You have never got over it, Abel-Cain, and you don't think you ever
will, as Titania was your only child. You couldn't bear to keep any of
her photographs, so you destroyed them all.
"Now there is Harold. You can't kill him, Abel-Cain. So much mortality
might be suspicious, and if you let him marry again that would mean a
lot more names to remember. Harold went into the Catholic Church and
became a priest. At the present time he is in charge of a mission in
British Guiana. That's a good long way off, but you must look it up in
the map and make sure where it is."
The old man leaned back and mopped his face. He was working under a kind
of inspiration, and was afraid it might die out before he had got to the
end of the story. Again he plunged into the narrative, and continued--
"Harold didn't know what to do with Boodles. Young Catholic priests
cannot be bothered with babies, so he sent her to you, to old
grandfather, and asked you to bring her up. He couldn't pay anything, as
he had devoted his fortune to building a church and establishing his
mission, and besides, you didn't need it in those days, He was a good
fellow, Harold, an earnest, devoted man, but you haven't heard anything
of him for a long time. You called the child Boodles when she was a baby
because it was the sort of name that seemed to suit her, and you have
never got out of it. Her real name is--There must be a lot of them. They
always have a lot in high life. No girl with a long string of names
could be anything but well-born. Her name is Titania Katherine Mary
Fitzalan-Lascelles."
He read out the list again and again, grinning and crying at the same
time, and chuckling joyfully: "There's nothing of the Weevil in her
now."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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