Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/194

184 restrained the impetuous girl. She wanted to know the end, she wanted to see what these two plotters would do next. Under the influence of her desire to rush into the room, she had moved forward a few paces, rustling the leaves about her as she stirred. The Frenchman’s acute hearing had detected that rustling sound.

“Quick, quick,” he whispered; “take the keys back, there is some one in the garden.”

Launcelot Darrell had risen from his knees. The door between the study and the dressing-room had been left ajar; the young man pushed it open, and hurried away with the keys in his hand. Victor Bourdon closed his lantern, and came to the window. He thrust aside the Venetian shutters, and stepped out into the garden. Eleanor crouched down with her back flat against the wall, completely sheltered by the laurels. The Frenchman commenced his search amongst the bushes on the right of the window, Eleanor’s hiding-place was on the left. This gave her a moment’s breathing time.

“The will!” she thought in that one moment, “they have left the genuine will upon the chair by the cabinet. If I could get that!”

The thought had flashed like lightning through her brain. Reckless in her excitement, she rose from her crouching position, and slid rapidly and noiselessly across the threshold of the open window into the study, before Victor Bourdon had finished his examination of the shrubs on the right.

Her excitement seemed to intensify every sense. The only light in the room was a faint ray which came across the small intermediate chamber from the open door of Maurice de Crespigny’s bed-room. This light was very little, but the open door was opposite the cabinet, and what light there was fell upon the very spot towards which Eleanor’s dilated eyes looked. She could see the outline of the paper on the chair; she could see the other paper on the floor, faint and grey in the dim glimmer from the distant candles.

She snatched the will from the chair, and thrust it into the pocket of her dress; she picked up the other paper from the floor, and placed it on the chair. Then, with her face and figure obscured in the loose cloak that shrouded her, she went back into the garden.

As she drew back into the shelter of the laurels she felt a man’s garments brushing against her own, and a man’s hot breath upon her cheek. The Frenchman had passed her so closely that it was almost impossible he could have failed to perceive her presence: and yet he had seemed utterly unconscious of it.

Launcelot Darrell came back to the study almost the moment after Eleanor had left it. He was breathing quickly, and stopped to wipe his forehead once more with his handkerchief.

“Bourdon!” he exclaimed, in a loud whisper, “Bourdon, where are you?”

The Frenchman crossed the threshold of the window as the young man called to him.

“I have been on the look-out for spies,” he said.

“Have you seen any one?”

“No; I fancy it was a false alarm.”

“Come, then,” said Launcelot Darrell, “we have been luckier than I thought we should be.”

“Hadn’t you better unlock that door before we leave?” asked Monsieur Bourdon, pointing to the door which communicated with the other part of the house. Launcelot had locked it on first entering the study, and had thus secured himself from any surprise in that direction. The two men were going away when Monsieur Bourdon stopped suddenly.

“You’ve forgotten something, my friend,” he whispered, laying his hand on Launcelot’s shoulder.

“What?”

“The will, the genuine will,” answered the Frenchman, pointing to the chair. “It would be a clever thing to leave that behind, eh!”

Launcelot started, and put his hand to his forehead.

“I must be mad,” he muttered; “this business is too much for my brain. Why did you lead me into it, Bourdon? Are you the Devil, that you must always prompt me to some new mischief?”

“You shall ask me that next week, my friend, when you are the master of this house. Get that paper there, and come away: unless you want to stop till your maiden aunts make their appearance.”

Launcelot Darrell snatched up the paper which Eleanor had put upon the chair by the cabinet. He was going to thrust it into his breast-pocket, when the Frenchman took it away from him.

“You don’t particularly want to keep that document; or to drop it anywhere about the garden; do you? We’ll burn it, if it’s all the same to you, and save them all trouble at—what you call your law court,—Common doctors, Proctor’s Commons, eh?”

Monsieur Bourdon had put his bull’s-eye lantern in his coat-pocket, after looking for spies amongst the evergreens. He now produced a box of fusees, and setting one of them alight, watched it fizz and sparkle for a moment, and then held it beneath the corner of the document in his left hand.

The paper was slow to catch fire, and Monsieur Bourdon had occasion to light another fusee before he succeeded in doing more than scorching it. But it blazed up by-and-by, and by the light of the blaze Eleanor Monckton saw the eager faces of the two men. Launcelot Darrell’s livid countenance was almost like that of a man who looks on at an assassination. The commercial traveller watched the slow burning of the document with a smile upon his face—a smile of triumph, as it seemed to Eleanor Monckton.

“V’là!” he exclaimed, as the paper dropped, a frail sheet of tinder, from his hand, and fluttered slowly to the ground. “V’là!” he cried, stamping upon the feathery gray ashes; “so much for that; and now our little scheme of to-night is safe, I fancy, my friend.”

Launcelot Darrell drew a long breath.

“Thank God it’s over,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t go through this business again for twenty fortunes.”

Eleanor, still crouching upon the damp grass close against the wall, waited for the two men to