Mosscrop nodded sympathetically. “And were you left without anything?”
“My mother’s private fortune had been diminished to almost nothing by bad investments and the treachery of others before her death. I had no one to advise me--I was all alone--and the lawyers and others probably robbed me cruelly. Only a few of her old family jewels were left to me--and one by one I had to part with these. Some of them, I daresay, were of great antiquity and priceless value, if I had only known, but I was forced to sell them for a song. There were wonderful signet-rings among them, all with the crest of the family--I suppose it must have been her family--and at first I thought of using it to trace them--but then my girlish pride----”
“What was the crest?” asked David. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late, now.”
Again Vestalia hesitated. Then she shook her head. “No; dear mamma’s wishes are sacred to me. I do not wish to learn what she thought it best to keep from me.”
“Well--and when the jewels were all sold?”
“Long before that I had begun to work for my living. I write a good hand naturally. I got employment as a copyist, but that did not last very long. I was ambitious, and I thought I might work my way into literature. But it is a very disheartening career, you know.”
Mosscrop had lifted his brows in some surprise. He nodded again, with a cursory “Ay!”
“The editors were not at all kind to me,” she went on. “I toiled like a slave, but I hardly ever got anything accepted, and then you had to wait months for your pay, and perhaps not get it at all. I should have starved long ago, if I hadn’t met an American woman at the Museum who was over here getting up pedigrees. Oh, not for herself. She made a regular business of it. Rich Americans paid her to hunt up their English ancestors, in genealogies and old records, and on tombstones and so on. I was her assistant for nearly a year, and things went fairly well with me. But three months ago she was taken ill and had to go home, and there I was stranded again. I tried to go on with some of the jobs she left unfinished, but the people had gone away, or hadn’t confidence in so young a person, and well--that’s all. My landlady turned me out at six o’clock this morning, and she has seized the few poor things I had left--and here I am.”