"Can you tell me where Miss Graham came from when she entered your household?" Robert inquired.
"Not very precisely," answered Mrs. Vincent. "I have a vague notion that Miss Graham said something about coming from the seaside, but she didn"t say where, or if she did I have forgotten it. Tonks, did Miss Graham tell you where she came from?"
"Oh, no!" replied Miss Tonks, shaking her grim little head significantly. "Miss Graham told me nothing; she was too clever for that. She knows how to keep her own secrets, in spite of her innocent ways and her curly hair," Miss Tonks added, spitefully.
"You think she had secrets?" Robert asked, rather eagerly.
"I know she had," replied Miss Tonks, with frosty decision; "all manner of secrets. I wouldn"t have engaged such a person as junior teacher in a respectable school, without so much as one word of recommendation from any living creature."
"You had no reference, then, from Miss Graham?" asked Robert, addressing Mrs. Vincent.
"No," the lady answered, with some little embarra.s.sment; "I waived that.
Miss Graham waived the question of salary; I could not do less than waive the question of reference. She quarreled with her papa, she told me, and she wanted to find a home away from all the people she had ever known. She wished to keep herself quite separate from these people. She had endured so much, she said, young as she was, and she wanted to escape from her troubles. How could I press her for a reference under these circ.u.mstances, especially when I saw that she was a perfect lady.
You know that Lucy Graham was a perfect lady, Tonks, and it is very unkind for you to say such cruel things about my taking her without a reference."
"When people make favorites, they are apt to be deceived in them," Miss Tonks answered, with icy sententiousness, and with no very perceptible relevance to the point in discussion.
"I never made her a favorite, you jealous Tonks," Mrs. Vincent answered, reproachfully. "I never said she was as useful as you, dear. You know I never did."
"Oh, no!" replied Miss Tonks, with a chilling accent, "you never said she was useful. She was only ornamental; a person to be shown off to visitors, and to play fantasias on the drawing-room piano."
"Then you can give me no clew to Miss Graham"s previous history?" Robert asked, looking from the schoolmistress to her teacher. He saw very clearly that Miss Tonks bore an envious grudge against Lucy Graham--a grudge which even the lapse of time had not healed.
"If this woman knows anything to my lady"s detriment, she will tell it,"
he thought. "She will tell it only too willingly."
But Miss Tonks appeared to know nothing whatever; except that Miss Graham had sometimes declared herself an ill-used creature, deceived by the baseness of mankind, and the victim of unmerited sufferings, in the way of poverty and deprivation. Beyond this, Miss Tonks could tell nothing; and although she made the most of what she did know, Robert soon sounded the depth of her small stock of information.
"I have only one more question to ask," he said at last. "It is this: Did Miss Graham leave any books or knick-knacks, or any other kind of property whatever, behind her, when she left your establishment?"
"Not to my knowledge," Mrs. Vincent replied.
"Yes," cried Miss Tonks, sharply. "She did leave something. She left a box. It"s up-stairs in my room. I"ve got an old bonnet in it. Would you like to see the box?" she asked, addressing Robert.
"If you will be so good as to allow me," he answered, "I should very much like to see it."
"I"ll fetch it down," said Miss Tonks. "It"s not very big."
She ran out of the room before Mr. Audley had time to utter any polite remonstrance.
"How pitiless these women are to each other," he thought, while the teacher was absent. "This one knows intuitively that there is some danger to the other lurking beneath my questions. She sniffs the coming trouble to her fellow female creature, and rejoices in it, and would take any pains to help me. What a world it is, and how these women take life out of her hands. Helen Maldon, Lady Audley, Clara Talboys, and now Miss Tonks--all womankind from beginning to end."
Miss Tonks re-entered while the young barrister was meditating upon the infamy of her s.e.x. She carried a dilapidated paper-covered bonnet-box, which she submitted to Robert"s inspection.
Mr. Audley knelt down to examine the sc.r.a.ps of railway labels and addresses which were pasted here and there upon the box. It had been battered upon a great many different lines of railway, and had evidently traveled considerably. Many of the labels had been torn off, but fragments of some of them remained, and upon one yellow sc.r.a.p of paper Robert read the letters, TURI.
"The box has been to Italy," he thought. "Those are the first four letters of the word Turin, and the label is a foreign one."
The only direction which had not been either defaced or torn away was the last, which bore the name of Miss Graham, pa.s.senger to London.
Looking very closely at this label, Mr. Audley discovered that it had been pasted over another.
"Will you be so good as to let me have a little water and a piece of sponge?" he said. "I want to get off this upper label. Believe me that I am justified in what I am doing."
Miss Tonks ran out of the room and returned immediately with a basin of water and a sponge.
"Shall I take off the label?" she asked.
"No, thank you," Robert answered, coldly. "I can do it very well myself."
He damped the upper label several times before he could loosen the edges of the paper; but after two or three careful attempts the moistened surface peeled off, without injury to the underneath address.
Miss Tonks could not contrive to read this address across Robert"s shoulder, though she exhibited considerable dexterity in her endeavors to accomplish that object.
Mr. Audley repeated his operations upon the lower label, which he removed from the box, and placed very carefully between two blank leaves of his pocket-book.
"I need intrude upon you no longer, ladies," he said, when he had done this. "I am extremely obliged to you for having afforded me all the information in your power. I wish you good-morning."
Mrs. Vincent smiled and bowed, murmuring some complacent conventionality about the delight she had felt in Mr. Audley"s visit. Miss Tonks, more observant, stared at the white change, which had come over the young man"s face since he had removed the upper label from the box.
Robert walked slowly away from Acacia Cottage. "If that which I have found to-day is no evidence for a jury," he thought, "it is surely enough to convince my uncle that he has married a designing and infamous woman."
CHAPTER XXVII.
BEGINNING AT THE OTHER END.
Robert Audley walked slowly through the leafless grove, under the bare and shadowless trees in the gray February atmosphere, thinking as he went of the discovery he had just made.
"I have that in my pocket-book," he pondered, "which forms the connecting link between the woman whose death George Talboys read of in the _Times_ newspaper and the woman who rules in my uncle"s house. The history of Lucy Graham ends abruptly on the threshold of Mrs. Vincent"s school. She entered that establishment in August, 1854. The schoolmistress and her a.s.sistant can tell me this but they cannot tell me whence she came. They cannot give me one clew to the secrets of her life from the day of her birth until the day she entered that house. I can go no further in this backward investigation of my lady"s antecedents. What am I to do, then, if I mean to keep my promise to Clara Talboys?"
He walked on for a few paces revolving this question in his mind, with a darker shadow than the shadows of the gathering winter twilight on his face, and a heavy oppression of mingled sorrow and dread weighing down his heart.
"My duty is clear enough," he thought--"not the less clear because it leads me step by step, carrying ruin and desolation with me, to the home I love. I must begin at the other end--I must begin at the other end, and discover the history of Helen Talboys from the hour of George"s departure until the day of the funeral in the churchyard at Ventnor."
Mr. Audley hailed a pa.s.sing hansom, and drove back to his chambers.
He reached Figtree Court in time to write a few lines to Miss Talboys, and to post his letter at St. Martin"s-le-Grand off before six o"clock.
"It will save me a day," he thought, as he drove to the General Post Office with this brief epistle.
He had written to Clara Talboys to inquire the name of the little seaport town in which George had met Captain Maldon and his daughter: for in spite of the intimacy between the two young men, Robert Audley knew very few particulars of his friend"s brief married life.
From the hour in which George Talboys had read the announcement of his wife"s death in the columns of the _Times_, he had avoided all mention of the tender history which had been so cruelly broken, the familiar record which had been so darkly blotted out.
There was so much that was painful in that brief story! There was such bitter self-reproach involved in the recollection of that desertion which must have seemed so cruel to her who waited and watched at home!
Robert Audley comprehended this, and he did not wonder at his friend"s silence. The sorrowful story had been tacitly avoided by both, and Robert was as ignorant of the unhappy history of this one year in his schoolfellow"s life as if they had never lived together in friendly companionship in those snug Temple chambers.