Maude Cameron And Her Guardian

Volume 1
Chapter One

Charles Cameron was forty- four years old and had achieved the happy fortune of being able to select his practice when and as he chose, thanks to an unexpected inheritance from an uncle whom he had dimly remembered from his childhood and who had settled in India some forty years ago. Thus Charles Cameron was able to travel on the Continent during the summer and to enjoy the finest food and vintage wines when it pleased him.

His own parents had died when he was in hip twenties, by which time he had become a barrister’ s clerk in London, the city of his birth. In due course, he passed his examination and was engaged as a solicitor for the same firm with which he had spent his legal apprenticeship.

He had found the profession of law satisfying as to status in his community and because of the respectability of the profession which accrued to members of it, and his firm was quite proper and oldfashioned so that the litigation in which he was involved was mainly that of estates, transfers of property, and the like. There were no criminal cases, as the senior member of his firm regarded them as demeaning to the dignity of a reputable lawyer.

Charles Cameron had conducted himself with becoming propriety during his years with the firm, but he had never married. It was not that he did not enjoy the companionship of the opposite sex: quite he contrary. It was just that he did not wish to be saddled with the encumbrances that a wife and family would give him, since he wished to feel free to seek his fortune where the wind blew. Had he wished to marry, doubtless the fact that he was employed in one of London’ s leading legal offices would have prevented him from seeking a livelihood abroad if the opportunity had presented itself. But perhaps, too, with a bachelor’ s cynicism, he had decided that too many of his friends found their pleasures curtailed when they took unto themselves a wife.

Discreetly, then, he had an occasional mistress, taking care that none of his associates was aware of the identity of these lights of love. He was gallant and virile, and rather prepossessing, so it was easy to see that members of the opposite sex could readily be attracted to him.

Physically, he was almost six feet in height, with pleasant blue eyes, regular features, a sensuous mouth given a masculine imperiousness by a carefully trimmed moustache, firm chin and straight nose. His hair was brown, and in his mature age showed as yet no signs of grey.

The inheritance from his uncle came to him when he was thirtyfive, an at that time the thought occurred to him to withdraw gradually from practice so that he could have more time to himself and his relaxations. At the very outset he purchased a pleasant little house in the country, about forty- five miles to the northeast of London, and spent most of his summers there when he was not traveling, and an occasional weekend- particularly when in the throes of an amorous affair with one of his pro tem sweethearts.

In his lovemaking, as in his own decisive handling of business affairs at his office, he believed in taking the initiative and being aggressive. Innately, he found himself with a predilection for taking even more authority and command with the opposite sex. This if no way implied brutality or jealousy, but on the other hand, being well read in erotica, he had chanced upon several volumes which he discovered in a Parisian bookstall on the occasion of his first trip abroad following the inheritance. These books had detailed accounts of lovemaking wherein the hero demonstrated an imperious control over a mistress or a love- slave by employing a judicious amount of corporal chastisement. The idea intrigued him and from time to time, when he found a mistress who was rather less inhibited than the average young woman, he sought to introduce into the loveplay and the wooing some of this Gallic imaginativeness. In the main, he found that it was well received and that it led to exciting culmination.

This summer Charles Cameron faced a decision about which he had been thinking for several years, and that was his absolute retirement from the firm where he had spent so many years. To begin with, John Croce, the senior member of the firm had just died, and there was a change in the policy of the firm with new blood coming into it. Young Hubert Rascow, for example, the youngest nephew of he late junior partner, had taken a post of prominence in the office and declared rather pompously that he meant to go after lucrative criminal cases. The atmosphere was not what it had been and it would appear to augur a rather trying time of adjustment. Financially Charles Cameron was well off, and besides he had always intended to enjoy life to the fullest at a time when he still had his physical and mental faculties. This was assuredly as good a time as any.

He therefore gave his notice in May that he would leave the firm on what might be termed a Sabbatical at the end of June and he would decide when the summer was over what his future plans would be. He had reason to believe that he would not be greatly missed in the new order of things, but without making a final break, the door would still be open if he decided to return at the end of the summer. So, after standing all the members of the firm a final dinner at Simpson’ s, he betook himself to his little summer house and looked forward to enjoying the beauty of the countryside. A few miles from this sylvan retreat there lived a handsome divorcee named Mrs. Patricia Ellerby who, the last time she had met him in London, had given Charles Cameron reason to believe she would not regard it amiss if he paid her diligent attention. But it was pleasant to be by himself and make plans from day to day, to go on walks, to prepare meals at odd hours, and devote himself to many of the books he had always put off reading until now.

The first week of July brought Charles Cameron a letter which recalled to him a casual promise he had made some six months ago, and about which he had completely forgotten. An elderly attorney by the name of Douglas Rivers, having met him at the City Club prior to Christmas, had found Charles Cameron a sympathetic listener and had confided the story of his life. Rivers had married quite late in life an attractive young woman who had been left penniless by the machinations of a dissolute father and a spendthrift mother. He had taken pity on her, and the pity had turned to love, as it so often does. Having never married before and being in his fifties, Rivers had found the resurgence of a new and exquisite emotion in befriending this helpless and lovely young woman. She, for her part, had reciprocated his feelings with more ardor than he had dared to hope. Out of their union had come a child, a girl, named Maude. But after this bliss, the young wife had contracted pneumonia and died when Maude was only five. Rivers had thereupon hired a housekeeper while he went to the office daily to conduct his business affairs. But now he confessed himself to be ailing- indeed, Charles Cameron had noted the elderly barrister’ s jaundiced color and sunken eye sockets and opined privately to himself that Rivers was too long for this world. As a consequence, Rivers had told him, he was greatly concerned over his little girl and what her future would be. He himself had not done too well in the marketplace of life, and while he had been always “ of the most scrupulous fidelity to the exalted legal profession which he served, pursuit of this had not brought him great material gains.

Charles Cameron had made the usual sympathetic and philosophical reflections which one does when a casual acquaintance unburdens himself of such a story, but Rivers had mistaken this for sympathetic understanding. Seizing Charles Cameron’ s hand as he leaned across the table, he had fervently implored the latter to promise him that in the event of his death, Charles Cameron would do what he could to assure the future of the little girl. And Cameron, without giving sufficient meditation to what this promise might entail, had affably agreed. It was true that he had felt sorry for Douglas Rivers.

And now that chance promise, exacted by a chance meeting, had come home to roost with a vengeance. The rural postal carrier on his bicycle had just this morning left a letter from London with the address of Douglas Rivers, but with a. woman’ s flowing handwriting. Charles Cameron had opened it and sat up with a start It was from the housekeeper, who begged to inform him that her employer had died last week after a lingering illness, and that his final words had been to urge her to communicate with his dear friend Charles Cameron and to remind the latter of the promise that had been made last December. The letter went on, couched in sententious phrases, to inform Charles Cameron that Douglas Rivers had left almost no money for the child’ s welfare and that she, Mrs. Beddlington,- the housekeeper in question- had scarcely received her own wages for the past several months. She would be deeply grateful if Charles Cameron would arrange to have Mr. Rivers’ daughter come down to him at the earliest possible opportunity.

Charles Cameron winced and rubbed his chin reflectively. The devil take it, he thought to himself. How easy it is to pay lip service to a casual acquaintance and then to find that there is much more imposed upon one as a result of one’ s good breeding. If only he had not shown such a sympathetic ear to old Rivers that melancholy December day! But now the harm was done, and here was the proof.

What the devil would he do as the guardian of a little girl, particularly when he had no wife to serve as mother to the child? Of course, he could go about the business of hiring a housekeeper, but that would be to destroy his privacy and, in effect, to leave him as badly off as if he himself had taken a wife under his roof with all the pertaining responsibilities and encumbrances of such an act.

Yet, as he reflected, he realized that in all honor he was bound by what had been virtually a deathbed promise. Well, at least he could give the poor child what amounted to a pleasant summer vacation. Then in the fall it would be time to see about putting her into some kind of school. At the worst, he might scout around among his friends of longer acquaintance to see if there were not some sort of foster home in which she could be placed until she came of proper age to make her decisions for herself. And so, with a sigh of regret in the anticipation of an altered summer, quite different from the months of leisure and self- indulgence which he had promised himself, Charles Cameron penned a letter to Mrs. Beddlington and dispatched it that very afternoon.

Four days later he received another missive from Douglas Rivers’ housekeeper, notifying him that Miss Maude would arrive on the following Thursday afternoon. He had enclosed a fifty- pound note as a gesture of payment of Mrs. Beddlington’ s back wages and expenses for conveying the child to his domicile. And so the die was cast. And now it was Thursday noon already, and in a few hours the little summer house would lose its quiet and peaceful solitude to open its doors to a little girl. Heaven alone knows what a chatterbox or ill- tempered little minx she might be, Charles Cameron gloomily thought to himself as he went to the kitchen to prepare a bite of luncheon. When he had finished, he lighted his pipe and sat out on the back porch overlooking the broad of his little estate. He had no neighbors for several miles, and the only sound he could hear was the chattering of the squirrels in the old oak trees and the chirruping of the crickets as twilight fell on the landscape. Now all this peace and reverie would be broken. Well, it would teach him not to be receptive the next time someone had a hard luck story to tell, he reminded himself.