Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/242

238 either—to see my name cleared from the stain that rests upon it. If there is any truth in my heart, Isabella, that truth is yours alone. Can you trust me, as the woman who loves trusts—through life and till death, under every shadow and through every cloud?"

I don't know whether essence of peppermint, tincture of myrrh, and hair-oil, are the proper ingredients in a cough-mixture; but I know that Isabella poured them into the glass measure very liberally.

"You do not answer me, Isabella. Ah, you cannot trust the branded criminal—the escaped lunatic—the man the world calls a murderer!"

"Not trust you, Richard?" Only four words, and only one glance from the gray eyes into the brown, and so much told! So much more than I could tell in a dozen chapters, told in those four words and that one look!

Gus opens the half-glass door at this very moment. "Are you coming to tea?" he asks; "here's Sarah Jane up to her eyes in grease and muffins."

"Yes, Gus, dear old friend," said Richard, laying his hand on Darley's shoulder; "we're coming in to tea immediately, brother!"

Gus looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.

"Oh!" he said, "I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder."

They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called "embodied indigestions," they laughed a great deal, and talked still more—so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination—which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely—or, in short, to use his own expressive language, "what the row was all about?"

Nobody, however, took the trouble to set Mr. P. C.'s doubts at rest, and he drank his tea with perfect contentment, but without sugar, and in a dense intellectual fog. "It doesn't matter," he murmured; "perhaps Richard will turn again and be Lord Mayor of London town, and then my children will read his adventures in a future Pinnock, and they may understand it.