It was to Durban that the fugitive had taken ship at Naples. He had landed on those shores within a month of the day on which his son had quitted them. And the first man he met there was one who recognised him on the spot. But good came of it; the man was an old friend, and proved a true one; he was down from Johannesburg on business, and when he returned Mr. Ringrose accompanied him. With this staunch friend the ironmaster's secret was safe; and partly through him, and partly with him--for within the year the pair were partners--the man who had lost a fortune bit by bit in the old country had made another by leaps and bounds in the new. Which was a sufficiently romantic story when Harry came to hear it in detail at a later date. At the time it was but the bare fact that the father cared to chronicle or the son to hear. It was the result on which Mr. Ringrose preferred to dwell. That very day he had returned with interest (before he knew that his wife had been paying it all these years) the money those four old friends had lent him through Gordon Lowndes. He had barely touched it, and would have returned it long ago, only he did not want his wife and son to know that he was alive until he could come back to them a rich enough man to atone in some degree for the wrong that he had done them--for the poverty and the shame they had endured for his sake.
Harry said that Lowndes had spoken as though his father was a millionaire. Mr. Ringrose smiled slightly as he shook his head.
"That's entirely his own idea," said he. "There might have been some truth in it in a few more years; but, as it is, it was no great pile I set myself to make, and I am more than content in having made it. In point of fact I am a poorer man than I was when you were born, but I am a free man for the first time for many years. This very day I have paid every penny that I owed here in town. A cheque is also on its way to the old firm, with which they can settle to-morrow any outstanding liabilities, and put the rest into the works in my name. And now I can face your mother. I could not do it until I could tell her this."
Yet he had not been a dozen hours in England; the cheques had been written on board, and posted the moment he landed. On reaching London he had gone straight to Gordon Lowndes, and it was only the almost simultaneous arrival of Scrafton which had kept him so long from seeking his own. Scrafton, who had latterly taken to pestering his victim almost daily, had ultimately left him (to the delight of Lowndes) with the avowed intention of carrying out his old threat and going straight to Harry Ringrose. In what followed Harry's father had once more yielded, against his better judgment, to Gordon Lowndes.