"You spoke of a lady--Lady Western, I think. As it was you yourself who sought this interview, I may be pardoned if I stumble on a painful subject," he said, with some bitterness. "I presume you know that lady by your tone--was it she who sent you to me? No? Then I confess your appeal to a total stranger seems to me singular, to say the least of it.
Where is your proof that Colonel Mildmay has used my name?"
"Proof is unnecessary," said Vincent, firing with kindred resentment; "I have told you the fact, but I do not press my appeal, though it was made to your honour. Pardon me for intruding on you so long. I have now no time to lose."
He turned away, stung in his hasty youthfulness by the appearance of contempt. He would condescend to ask no farther. When he was once more outside the parlour, he held up the half-sovereign, which he had kept ready in his hand, to the slovenly fellow in the striped jacket. "Twice as much if you will tell where Colonel Mildmay is gone," he said, hurriedly. The man winked and nodded and pointed outside, but before Vincent could leave the room a hasty summons came from the parlour which he had just left. Then Mr. Fordham appeared at the door.
"If you will wait I will make what inquiries I can," said the stranger, with distant courtesy and seriousness. "Excuse me--I was taken by surprise: but if you have suffered injury under my name, it is my business to vindicate myself. Come in. If you will take my advice, you will rest and refresh yourself before you pursue a man with all his wits about him. Wait for me here and I will bring you what information I can.
You don"t suppose I mean to play you false?" he added, with prompt irritation, seeing that Vincent hesitated and did not at once return to the room. It was no relenting of heart that moved him to make this offer. It was with no softening of feeling that the young Nonconformist went back again and accepted it. They met like enemies, each on his honour. Mr. Fordham hastened out to acquit himself of that obligation.
Vincent threw himself into a chair, and waited for the result.
It was the first moment of rest and quiet he had known since the morning of the previous day, when he and his mother, alarmed but comparatively calm, had gone to see Mrs. Hilyard, who was now, like himself, wandering, with superior knowledge and more desperate pa.s.sion, on the same track. To sit in this house in the suspicious silence, hearing the distant thrill of voices which might guide or foil him in his search; to think who it was whom he had engaged to help him in his terrible mission; to go over again in distracted gleams and s.n.a.t.c.hes the brief little circle of time which had brought all this about, the group of figures into which his life had been absorbed,--rapt the young man into a maze of excited musing, which his exhausted frame at once dulled and intensified. They seemed to stand round him, with their faces so new, yet so familiar--that needle-woman with her emphatic mouth--Mildmay--Lady Western--last of all, this man, who was not Susan"s lover--not Susan"s destroyer--but a man to be trusted "with life--to death!" Vincent put up his hands to put away from him that wonderful circle of strangers who shut out everything else in the world--even his own life--from his eyes. What were they to him? he asked, with an unspeakable bitterness in his heart. Heaven help him! they were the real creatures for whom life and the world were made--he and his poor Susan the shadows to be absorbed into, and under them; and then, with a wild, bitter, hopeless rivalry, the mind of the poor Dissenting minister came round once more to the immediate contact in which he stood--to Fordham, in whose name his sister"s life had been shipwrecked, and by whom, as he divined with cruel foresight, his own hopeless love and dreams were to be made an end of. Well! what better could they come to? but it was hard to think of him, with his patrician looks, his negligent grace, his conscious superiority, and to submit to accept a.s.sistance from him even in his sorest need. These thoughts were in his mind when Mr. Fordham hastily re-entered the room. A thrill of excitement now was in the long, lightly-falling step, which already Vincent, with the keen ear of rivalry almost as quick as that of love, could recognise as it approached. The stranger was disturbed out of his composure. He shut the door and came up to the young man, who rose to meet him, with a certain excited repugnance and attraction much like Vincent"s own feelings.
"You are quite right," he said, hastily; "I find letters have been coming here for some months, addressed as if to me, which Mildmay has had. The man of the house is absent, or I should never have heard of it.
I don"t know what injury he may have done _you_; but this is an insult I don"t forgive. Stop! I have every reason to believe that he has gone,"
said Fordham, growing darkly red, "to a house of mine, to confirm this slander upon me. To prove that I am innocent of all share of it--I don"t mean to you--you believe me, I presume?" he said, with a haughty sudden pause, looking straight in Vincent"s face--"I will go----" Here Mr.
Fordham stopped again, and once more looked at Vincent with that indescribable mixture of curiosity, dislike, resentment, and interest, which the eyes of the young Nonconformist repaid him fully,--"with you--if you choose. At all events, I will go to-night--to Fordham, where the scoundrel is. I cannot permit it to be believed for an hour that it is I who have done this villany. The lady you mentioned, I presume, knows?"--he added, sharply--"knows what has happened, and whom you suspect? This must be set right at once. If you choose, we can go together."
"Where is the place?" asked Vincent, without any answer to this proposition.
Fordham looked at him with a certain haughty offence: he had made the offer as though it were a very disagreeable expedient, but resented instantly the tacit neglect of it shown by his companion.
"In Northumberland--seven miles from the railway," he said, with a kind of gratification. "Once more, I say, you can go with me if you will, which may serve us both. I don"t pretend to be disinterested. My object is to have my reputation clear of this, at all events. Your object, I presume, is to get to your journey"s end as early as may be. Choose for yourself. Fordham is between Durham and Morpeth--seven miles from Lamington station. You will find difficulty in getting there by yourself, and still greater difficulty in getting admission; and I repeat, if you choose it, you can go with me--or I will accompany you, if that pleases you better. Either way, there is little time to consider. The train goes at eight or nine o"clock--I forget which. I have not dined. What shall you do?"
"Thank you," said Vincent. It was perhaps a greater effort to him to overcome his involuntary repugnance than it was to the stranger beside him, who had all the superior ease of superior rank and age. The Nonconformist turned away his eyes from his new companion, and made a pretence of consulting his watch. "I will take advantage of your offer,"
he said, coldly, withdrawing a step with instinctive reserve. On these diplomatic terms their engagement was made. Vincent declined to share the dinner which the other offered him, as one duellist might offer hospitality to another. He drove away in his hansom, with a restrained gravity of excitement, intent upon the hour"s rest and the meal which were essential to make him anything like a match for this unexpected travelling companion. Every morsel he attempted to swallow when in Carlingford under his mother"s anxious eyes, choked the excited young man, but now he ate with a certain stern appet.i.te, and even s.n.a.t.c.hed an hour"s sleep and changed his dress, under this novel stimulant. Poor Susan, for whom her mother sat hopelessly watching with many a thrill of agony at home! Poor lost one, far away in the depths of the strange country in the night and darkness! Whether despair and horror enveloped her, or delirious false happiness and delusion, again she stood secondary even in her brother"s thoughts. He tried to imagine it was she who occupied his mind, and wrote a hurried note to his mother to that purport; but with guilt and self-disgust, knew in his own mind how often another shadow stood between him and his lost sister--a shadow bitterly veiled from him, turning its sweetness and its smiles upon the man who was about to help him, against whom he gnashed his teeth in the anguish of his heart.
CHAPTER XX.
They were but these two in the railway-carriage; no other pa.s.senger broke the silent conflict of their companionship. They sat in opposite corners, as far apart as their s.p.a.ce would permit, but on opposite sides of the carriage as well, so that one could not move without betraying his every movement to the other"s keen observation. Each of them kept possession of a window, out of which he gazed into the visible blackness of the winter night. Two or three times in the course of the long darksome chilly journey, a laconic remark was made by one or the other with a deadly steadiness, and gravity, and facing of each other, as they spoke; but no further intercourse took place between them. When they first met, Fordham had made an attempt to draw his fellow-traveller into some repet.i.tion of that first pa.s.sionate speech which had secured his own attention to Vincent; but the young Nonconformist perceived the attempt, and resented it with sullen offence and gloom. He took the stranger"s indifference to _his_ trouble, and undisguised and simple purpose of acquitting himself, as somehow an affront, though he could not have explained how it was so; and this notwithstanding his own consciousness of realising this silent conflict and rivalry with Fordham, even more deeply in his own person than he did the special misery which had befallen his house. Through the sullen silent midnight the train dashed on, the faint light flickering in the unsteady carriage, the two speechless figures, with eyes averted, watching each other through all the ice-cold hours. It was morning when they got out, cramped and frozen, at the little station, round which miles and miles of darkness, a black unfathomable ocean, seemed to lie--and which shone there with its little red sparkle of light among its wild waste of moors like the one touch of human life in a desert. They had a dreary hour to wait in the little wooden room by the stifling fire, divided between the smothering atmosphere within and the thrilling cold without, before a conveyance could be procured for them, in which they set out shivering over the seven darkling miles between them and Fordham. Vincent stood apart in elaborate indifference and carelessness, when the squire was recognised and done homage to; and Fordham"s eye, even while lighted up by the astonished delight of the welcome given him by the driver of the vehicle who first found him out, turned instinctively to the Mordecai in the corner who took no heed. No conversation between them diversified the black road along which they drove. Mr. Fordham took refuge in the driver, whom he asked all those questions about the people of the neighbourhood which are so interesting to the inhabitants of a district and so wearisome to strangers. Vincent, who sat in the dog-cart with his face turned the other way, suffered himself to be carried through the darkness by the powerful horse, which made his own seat a somewhat perilous one, with nothing so decided in his thoughts as a dumb sense of opposition and resistance. The general misery of his mind and body--the sense that all the firmament around him was black as this sky--the restless wretchedness that oppressed his heart--all concentrated into conscious rebellion and enmity. He seemed to himself at war, not only with Mr. Fordham who was helping him, but with G.o.d and life.
Morning was breaking when they reached the house. The previous day, as it dawned chilly over the world, had revealed his mother"s ashy face to Vincent as they came up from Lonsdale with sickening thrills of hope that Susan might still be found unharmed. Here was another horror of a new day rising, the third since Susan disappeared into that darkness which was now lifting in shuddering mists from the bleak country round.
Was she here in her shame, the lost creature? As he began to ask himself that question, what cruel spirit was it that drew aside a veil of years, and showed to the unhappy brother that prettiest dancing figure, all smiles and sunshine, sweet honour and hope? Poor lost child! what sweet eyes, lost in an unfathomable light of joy and confidence--what truthful looks, which feared no evil! Just as they came in sight of that hidden house, where perhaps the hidden, stolen creature lay in the darkness, the brightest picture flashed back upon Vincent"s eyes with an indescribably subtle anguish of contrast; how he had come up to her once--the frank, fair Saxon girl--in the midst of a group of gypsies--how he found she had done a service to one of them, and the whole tribe did homage--how he had asked, "Were you not afraid, Susan?"
and how the girl had looked up at him with undoubting eyes, and answered, "Afraid, Arthur?--yes, of wild beasts if I saw them, not of men and women." Oh Heaven!--and here he was going to find her in shame and ruin, hidden away in this secret place! He sprang to the ground before the vehicle had stopped, jarring his frozen limbs. He could not bear to be second now, and follow to the dread discovery which should be his alone. He rushed through the shrubbery without asking any question, and began to knock violently at the door. What did it matter to him though its master was there, looking on with folded arms and unsympathetic face? Natural love rushed back upon the young man"s heart.
He settled with himself, as he stood waiting, how he would wrap her in his coat, and hurry her away without letting any cold eye fall upon the lost creature. Oh, hard and cruel fate! oh, wonderful heart-breaking indifference of Heaven! The Innocents are murdered, and G.o.d looks on like a man, and does not interfere. Such were the broken thoughts of misery--half-thought, half-recollection--that ran through Vincent"s mind as he knocked at the echoing door.
"Eugh! you may knock, and better knock, and I"se undertake none comes at the ca"," said the driver, not without a little complacence. "I tell the Squire, as there han"t been man nor woman here for ages; but he don"t believe me. She"s deaf as a post, is the housekeeper; and her daughter, she"s more to do nor hear when folks is wanting in--and this hour in the morning! But canny, canny, man! he"ll have the door staved in if we all stand by and the Squire don"t interfere."
Vincent paid no attention to the remonstrance--which, indeed, he only remembered afterwards, and did not hear at the moment. The house was closely shut in with trees, which made the gloom of morning darker here than in the open road, and increased the aspect of secrecy which had impressed the young man"s excited imagination. While he went on knocking, Fordham alighted and went round to another entrance, where he too began to knock, calling at the same time to the unseen keepers of the place. After a while some answering sounds became audible--first the feeble yelping of an asthmatic dog, then a commotion up-stairs, and at last a window was thrown up, and a female head enveloped in a shawl looked out. "Eh, whae are ye? vagabond villains,--and this a gentleman"s house," cried a cracked voice. "I"ll let the Squire know--I"ll rouse the man-servants. Tramps! what are you wanting here?" The driver of the dog-cart took up the response well pleased. He announced the arrival of the Squire, to the profound agitation of the house, which showed itself in a variety of scuffling sounds and the wildest exclamations of wonder.
Vincent leaned his throbbing head against the door, and waited in a dull fever of impatience and excitement, as these noises gradually came nearer. When the door itself was reached and hasty hands began to unfasten its bolts, Susan"s brother pressed alone upon the threshold, forgetful and indifferent that the master of the house stood behind, watching him with close and keen observation. He forgot whose house it was, and all about his companion. What were such circ.u.mstances to him, as he approached the conclusion of his search, and thought every moment to hear poor Susan"s cry of shame and terror? He made one hasty stride into the hall when the door was open, and looked round him with burning eyes. The wonder with which the women inside looked at him, their outcry of disappointment and anger when they found him a stranger, coming first as he did, and throwing the Squire entirely into the shade, had no effect upon the young man, who was by this time half frantic. He went up to the elder woman and grasped her by the arm. "Where is she? show me the way!" he said, hoa.r.s.ely, unable to utter an unnecessary word. He held the terrified woman fast, and thrust her before him, he could not tell where, into the unknown house, all dark and miserable in the wretchedness of the dawn. "Show me the way!" he cried, with his broken hoa.r.s.e voice. A confused and inarticulate scene ensued, which Vincent remembered afterwards only like a dream; the woman"s scream--the interference of Fordham, upon whom his fellow-traveller turned with sudden fury--the explanation to which he listened without understanding it, and which at first roused him to wild rage as a pretence and falsehood. But even Vincent at last, struggling into soberer consciousness as the day broadened ever chiller and more grey over the little group of strange faces round him, came to understand and make out that both Fordham and he had been deceived. n.o.body had been there--letters addressed both to Fordham himself, and to Colonel Mildmay, had been for some days received; but these, it appeared, were only a snare laid to withdraw the pursuers from the right scent. Not to be convinced, in the sullen stupor of his excitement, Vincent followed Fordham into all the gloomy corners of the neglected house--seeing everything without knowing what he saw. But one thing was plain beyond the possibility of doubt, that Susan was not there.
"I am to blame for this fruitless journey," said Fordham, with a touch of sympathy more than he had yet exhibited; "perhaps personal feeling had too much share in it; now I trust you will have some breakfast before you set out again. So far as my a.s.sistance can be of any use to you----"
"I thank you," said Vincent, coldly; "it is a business in which a stranger can have no interest. You have done all you cared to do,"
continued the young man, hastily gathering up the overcoat which he had thrown down on entering; "you have vindicated yourself--I will trouble you no further. If I encounter any one interested in Mr. Fordham," he concluded, with difficulty and bitterness, but with a natural generosity which, even in his despair, he could not belie, "I will do him justice."
He made an abrupt end, and turned away, not another word being possible to him. Fordham, not without a sentiment of sympathy, followed him to the door, urging refreshment, rest, even his own society, upon his companion of the night. Vincent"s face, more and more haggard--his exhausted excited air--the poignant wretchedness of his youth, on which the older man looked, not without reminiscences, awoke the sympathy and compa.s.sion of the looker-on, even in the midst of less kindly emotions.
But Fordham"s sympathy was intolerable to poor Vincent. He took his seat with a sullen weariness once more by the talkative driver, who gave him an unheeded history of all the Fordhams. As they drove along the bleak moorland road, an early church-bell tingled into the silence, and struck, with horrible iron echoes, upon the heart of the minister of Salem. Sunday morning! Life all disordered, incoherent, desperate--all its usages set at nought and duties left behind. Nothing could have added the final touch of conscious derangement and desperation like the sound of that bell; all his existence and its surroundings floated about him in feverish clouds, as it came to his mind that this wild morning, hysterical with fatigue and excitement, was the Sunday--the day of his special labours--the central point of all his former life. Chaos gloomed around the poor minister, who, in his misery, was human enough to remember Beecher"s smile and Phoebe Tozer"s invitation, and to realise how all the "Chapel folks" would compare notes, and contrast their own pastor, to whom they had become accustomed, with the new voice from Homerton, which, half in pride and half in disgust, Vincent acknowledged to be more in their way. He fancied he could see them all collecting into their mean pews, prepared to inaugurate the "coorse" for which Tozer had struggled, and the offence upon their faces when the minister"s absence was known, and the sharp stimulus which that offence would give to their appreciation of the new preacher--all this, while he was driving over the bleak Northumberland wilds, with the cutting wind from the hills in his face, and the church-bell in his distracted ear, breaking the Sunday! Not a bright spot, so far as he could perceive, was anywhere around him, in earth, or sky, or sea.
Sunday night!--once more the church-bells, the church-going groups, the floating world, which he had many a time upbraided from the pulpit seeking its pleasure. But it was in London now, where he stood in utter exhaustion, but incapable of rest, not knowing where to turn. Then the thought occurred to him that something might be learned at the railway stations of a party which few people could see without remarking it. He waited till the bustle of arrival was over, and then began to question the porters. One after another shook his head, and had nothing to say.
But the men were interested, and gathered in a little knot round him, trying what they could recollect, with the ready humanity of their cla.s.s. "I"d speak to the detective police, sir, if I was you," suggested one; "it"s them as finds out all that happens nowadays." Then a little gleam of light penetrated the darkness. One man began to recall a light-haired gentleman with a mustache, and two ladies, who "went off sudden in a cab, with no luggage." "An uncommon swell he did look," said the porter, instinctively touching his cap to Vincent, on the strength of the connection; "and, my eyes! she was a beauty, that one in the blue veil. It was--let me see--Wednesday night; no--not Wednesday--that day as the up-train was an hour late--Friday afternoon, to be sure. It was me as called the cab, and I won"t deny as the gen"leman _was_ a gen"leman. Went to the London Bridge station, sir; Dover line; no luggage; I took particular notice at the time, though it went out o" my head first minute as you asked me.--Cab, sir? Yes. Here you are--here"s the last on the stand.--London Bridge Station, Dover line."
Vincent took no time to inquire further. In the impatience of his utter weariness and wretchedness, he seized on this slight clue, and went off at once to follow it out. London Bridge station!--what a world swarmed in those streets through which the anxious minister took his way, far too deeply absorbed in himself to think of the flood of souls that poured past him. The station was in wild bustle and commotion; a train just on the eve of starting, and late pa.s.sengers dashing towards it with nervous speed. Vincent followed the tide instinctively, and stood aside to watch the long line of carriages set in motion. He was not thinking of what he saw; his whole mind was set upon the inquiry, which, as soon as that object of universal interest was gone, he could set on foot among the officials who were clanging the doors, and uttering all the final shrieks of departure. Now the tedious line glides into gradual motion. Good Heaven! what was that? the flash of a match, a sudden gleam upon vacant cushions, the profile of a face, high-featured, with the thin light locks and shadowy mustache he knew so well, standing out for a moment in aquiline distinctness against the moving s.p.a.ce. Vincent rushed forward with a hoa.r.s.e shout, which scared the crowd around him.
He threw himself upon the moving train with a desperate attempt to seize and stop it; but only to be himself seized by the frantic attendants, who caught him with a dozen hands. The travellers in the later carriages were startled by the commotion. Some of them rose and looked out with surprised looks; he saw them all as they glided past, though the pa.s.sage was instantaneous. Saw them all! Yes; who was that, last of all, at the narrow window of a second-cla.s.s carriage, who looked out with no surprise, but with a horrible composure in her white face, and recognised him with a look which chilled him to stone. He stood pa.s.sive in the hands of the men, who had been struggling to hold him, after he encountered those eyes; he shuddered with a sudden horror, which made the crowd gather closer, believing him a maniac. Now it was gone into the black night, into the chill s.p.a.ce, carrying a hundred innocent souls and light hearts, and among them deadly crime and vengeance--the doomed man and his executioner. His very heart shuddered in his breast as he made a faltering effort to explain himself, and get free from the crowd which thought him mad. That sight quenched the curses on his own lips, paled the fire in his heart. To see her d.o.g.g.i.ng his steps, with her dreadful relentless promise in her eyes, overwhelmed Vincent, who a moment before had thrilled with all the rage of a man upon whom this villain had brought the direst shame and calamity. He could have dashed him under those wheels, plunged him into any mad destruction, in the first pa.s.sionate whirl of this thoughts on seeing him again; but to see Her behind following after--pale with her horrible composure, a conscious Death tracking his very steps--drove Vincent back with a sudden paralysing touch. He stood chilled and horror-stricken in the crowd, which watched and wondered at him: he drew himself feebly out of their detaining circle, and went and sat down on the nearest seat he could find, like a man who had been stunned by some unexpected blow. He was not impatient when he heard how long he must wait before he could follow them. It was a relief to wait, to recover his breath, to realise his own position once more. That dreadful sight, diabolical and out of nature, had driven the very life-blood out of his heart.
As he sat, flung upon his bench in utter exhaustion and feebleness, stunned and stupified, leaning his aching head in his hands, and with many curious glances thrown at him by the bystanders, some of whom were not sure that he ought to be suffered to go at large, Vincent became sensible that some one was plucking at his sleeve, and sobbing his name.
It was some time before he became aware that those weeping accents were addressed to him; some time longer before he began to think he had heard the voice before, and was so far moved as to look up. When he did raise his head it was with a violent start that he saw a little rustic figure, energetically, but with tears, appealing to him, whom his bewildered faculties slowly made out to be Mary, his mother"s maid, whom Susan had taken with her when she left Lonsdale. As soon as he recognised her he sprang up, restored to himself with the first gleam of real hope which had yet visited him. "My sister is here!" he cried, almost with joy. Mary made no answer but by a despairing outbreak of tears.
"Oh no, Mr. Arthur; no--oh no, no! never no more!" cried poor Mary, when she found her voice. "It"s all been deceitfulness and lyin" and falsehood, and it ain"t none o" her doing--oh no, no, Mr. Arthur, no!--but now she"s got n.o.body to stand by her, for he took and brought me up this very day; oh, don"t lose no time!--he took and brought me up, pretending it was to show me the way, and he sent me right off, Mr.
Arthur, and she don"t know no more nor a baby, and he"ll take her off over the seas this very night--he will; for I had it of his own man.
She"s written letters to her Ma, Mr. Arthur, but I don"t think as they were ever took to the post; and he makes believe they"re a-going to be married, and he"ll have her off to France to-night. Oh, Mr. Arthur, Mr.
Arthur, don"t lose no time. They"re at a "otel. Look you here--here"s the name as I wrote down on a bit o" paper to make sure; and oh, Mr.
Arthur, mind what I say, and don"t lose no time!"
"But Susan--Susan--what of her?" cried her brother, unconsciously clutching at the girl"s arm.
Mary burst into another flood of tears. She hid her face, and cried with storms of suppressed sobs. The young man rose up pale and stern from his seat, without asking another question. He took the crumpled paper out of her hand, put some money into it, and in few words directed her to go to his mother at Carlingford. What though the sight of her would break his mother"s heart--what did it matter? Hearts were made to be broken, trodden on, killed--so be it! Pale and fierce, with eyes burning red in his throbbing head, he too went on, a second Murder, after the first which had preceded him in the shape of the Carlingford needlewoman. The criminal who escaped two such avengers must bear a charmed life.
END OF VOL. I.