Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/109

18, 1863.]

sat looking at the door which had closed upon the scene in the lamp-lit hall, almost as if the intensity of her gaze could have pierced the solid oaken panel and revealed to her that which was taking place outside the dining-room.

Richard Thornton and her husband, both watching her face, wondered at the sudden change in its expression,—the look of rapt wonder and amazement that had come over it from the moment in which Launcelot Darrell had gone out into the hall. Richard guessed that something strange and unexpected had occurred, but Gilbert Monckton, who was quite in the dark as to his wife’s feelings, could only stare blankly at her face, and mutely wonder at the mystery which tortured him. Laura Mason, who had been throughout the day alarmed by her lover’s manner, was too anxious about Launcelot Darrell to observe the face of her friend.

“I’m sure there’s something wrong,” she said; “I’m sure there is, Mr. Monckton. You don’t know how Launcelot’s been going on all day, frightening me out of my wits. Hasn’t he now, Eleanor? Hasn’t he, Mr. Thornton? Saying he won’t be a pauper, dependent upon his wife, and that you’ve wounded his feelings by talking about Art as if you were a bricklayer; or as if he was a bricklayer, I forget which. I had a presentiment all day that something was going to happen; and Launcelot did go on so, staring at the fire, and hammering the coals, and sighing as if he had something awful on his mind—as if he’d committed a crime, you know, and was brooding over it,” added the young lady, with an evident relish of the last idea.

Mr. Monckton looked contemptuously at his ward. The girl’s frivolous babble was in horrible discord with his own anxiety—a kind of parody of his own alarm.

“What do you mean by committing crimes, Laura?” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll never learn to talk like a reasonable being. Is there anything so very miraculous in the fact that some old acquaintance of Mr. Darrell’s has come down to Berkshire to see him, and that, having taken so much trouble, he scarcely cares to go back without seeing him?”

Laura Mason breathed a sigh of relief.

“You don’t think, then, that Launcelot has done something dreadful, and that this man has come to arrest him!” she asked. “It seems so odd his coming here on a dark winter’s night; and Launcelot looked angry when he saw the card the servant gave him. I’m sure it’s something dreadful. Let’s go into the drawing-room, Eleanor. We shall have to pass through the hall, and if there’s anything wrong we can find out all about it.”

Eleanor started as Laura addressed her, and rose suddenly, aroused by the necessity of having to attend to something that had been said to her, but scarcely knowing what that something was.

“Eleanor!” exclaimed her husband, “how pale you are, and how strangely you look at that door. One would think that you were influenced by Laura’s absurd fears.”

“Oh, no! I’m not frightened of anything; only I—”

She paused, hesitating, and looking down in painful embarrassment.

“Only what?”

“I happened to see the person who has come to speak to Mr. Darrell, and—and—his face reminded me of a man I saw a long time ago.”

Richard looked up quickly.

“But was there anything so very startling in the mere coincidence of a likeness?”

“Oh, no, nothing startling.”

“Upon my word, Eleanor,” exclaimed Gilbert Monckton, impatiently, “we seem to live in an atmosphere of mystery, which, to say the least of it, is far from agreeable to those who are only honoured with the post of lookers-on. There, there, go to the drawing-room with Laura. Mr. Thornton and I will follow you almost immediately. We shall have very little pleasure in sitting over our wine, with a consciousness that a kind of Gunpowder Plot is going on in the hall outside.”

The lawyer filled his glass with claret, and pushed the crystal jug towards Richard; but he left the wine untasted before him, and he sat silently brooding over his suspicions with a bent brow and rigidly-compressed lips.

It was no use to struggle against his destiny, he thought. Life was to be always a dreary French novel, in which he was to play the husband and the victim. He had loved and trusted this girl. He had seen innocence and candour beaming in her face, and he had dared to believe in her; and from the very hour of her marriage a horrible transformation had taken place in this frank and fearless creature. A hundred changes of expression, all equally mysterious to him, had converted the face he loved into a wearisome and incomprehensible enigma, which it was the torment of his life to endeavour vainly and hopelessly to guess. Richard Thornton opened the door, and Eleanor gladly made her escape from the dining-room, holding Laura’s hand in hers, and with the Signora following close behind her. The three women entered the hall in a group, and stood for a moment looking at Launcelot Darrell and the stranger.

Mr. Darrell stood near the open hall-door with his hands in his pockets, and his head bent in that sulky attitude which Eleanor had good reason to remember. The stranger, smoothing the wet nap of his hat with a careful hand, seemed to be talking in a tone of remonstrance, and, as it were, urging something upon his companion. This was