Some twenty
cases of enteric and diphtheria, were housed there, a few of them doomed
beyond hope. Melrose had been peremptorily asked for a subscription to
the fund raised, and had replied in his own handwriting that owing to the
heavy expenses he had been put to by the behaviour of his Mainstairs
tenants, as reported to him by his agent, Mr. Faversham, he must
respectfully decline. The letter was published in the two local papers
with appropriate comments, and a week later an indignation meeting to
protest against the state of the Threlfall property, and to petition the
Local Government Board to hold an inquiry on the spot, was held in
Carlisle, with Tatham in the chair. And everywhere the public indignation
which could not get at Melrose, who now, except for railway journeys,
never showed himself outside the wall of his park, was beginning to fall
upon the "adventurer" who was his tool and accomplice, and had become the
supplanter of his young and helpless daughter. Men who four months before
had been eager to welcome Faversham to his new office now passed him in
the street without recognition. At the County Club to which he had been
easily elected, Colonel Barton proposing him, he was conspicuously cut by
Barton himself, Squire Andover and many others following suit. "An
impostor, and a cad!" said Barton fiercely to Undershaw. "He took me
in--and I can't forgive him. He is doing all Melrose's dirty work for
him, better than Melrose could do it himself.
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