But plainest of all these dim pictures of the memory was one of a white man who at rare intervals came into the scene and took her on his knee. He had iron-gray hair and beard which were shaggy and matted, and he always had a pipe between his lips and a glittering eye-glass on a black watered-silk ribbon for her to play with. Furthermore, he always brought some present when he came to see her, and gave another present also, if he was pleased, to the black women with whom she lived. It was he who hung round her neck the Aggry bead that she still had locked away in the bottom tray of her jewel case.
She remembered this man with a vague kindness. But if Godfrey O'Neill cut her off from him with such completeness it must have been for some profoundly good reason. Uncle Godfrey had been far from squeamish. Uncle Godfrey in his lazy way stuck to friends when everybody else voted them far outside the pale. And therefore, she had argued, the iron-gray haired man with the eyeglass must have done something peculiarly disgraceful.
That he was her father she was entirely sure. Occasionally she had tried to argue with herself that she was little more than a babe when she saw him last, and was no judge, and that possibly the iron-gray man was her father's friend. But something stronger than mere human reason always rose up in arms against such a suggestion.
Sir Edward's halting lecture had roused up one recollection in her head that heretofore had persistently eluded her. A thousand times in those dreams of Africa, and the hot villages, and the pet monkey with its red seed necklace, and all the other old dim scenes, she had on the tip of her memory the name of the iron-gray man with the eyeglass, and a thousand times she had missed catching it by the smallest hair. In a flash it came back--he was Meredith.
Was he alive still? She could not tell; but that she would find out now. For once she adjudged old Godfrey O'Neill to be wrong. She was not going to let the discreet veil remain any longer over a man who, whatever his subsequent career had been, at any rate was a martyr once, and her father.
"Well, Carter-me-lad," said Captain Image, coming into the room, "they tell me you're the most unpopular man in Liverpool. They want to give you dinners, and put your photo in the papers, and hear you make a speech, and you won't have anything to do with anybody. What's broke? Tin troubling you?"