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horrors of “Cousine Bette.” The volume dropped from his hand, and he

sat wearily watching Mrs. Maloney as she swept up the ashes on the

hearth, replenished the fire, drew the dark damask curtains, supplied

the simple wants of the canaries, and put on her bonnet in the disused

clerk’s office, prior to bidding her employer good-night. As the door

closed upon the Irishwoman, he arose impatiently from his chair, and

paced up and down the room.

 

“Why do I go on with this,” he said, “when I know that it is leading me,

step by step, day by day, hour by hour, nearer to that conclusion which,

of all others, I should avoid? Am I tied to a wheel, and must I go with

its every revolution, let it take me where it will? Or can I sit down

here tonight and say I have done my duty to my missing friend, I have

searched for him patiently, but I have searched in vain? Should I be

justified in doing this? Should I be justified in letting the chain

which I have slowly put together, link by link, drop at this point, or

must I go on adding fresh links to that fatal chain until the last rivet

drops into its place and the circle is complete? I think, and I believe,

that I shall never see my friend’s face again; and that no exertion of

mine can ever be of any benefit to him. In plainer, crueler words I

believe him to be dead. Am I bound to discover how and where he died? or

being, as I think, on the road to that discovery, shall I do a wrong to

the memory of George Talboys by turning back or stopping still? What am

I to do?—what am I to do?”

 

He rested his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. The

one purpose which had slowly grown up in his careless nature until it

had become powerful enough to work a change in that very nature, made

him what he had never been before—a Christian; conscious of his own

weakness; anxious to keep to the strict line of duty; fearful to swerve

from the conscientious discharge of the strange task that had been

forced upon him; and reliant on a stronger hand than his own to point

the way which he was to go. Perhaps he uttered his first earnest prayer

that night, seated by his lonely fireside, thinking of George Talboys.

When he raised his head from that long and silent revery, his eyes had a

bright, determined glance, and every feature in his face seemed to wear

a new expression.

 

“Justice to the dead first,” he said; “mercy to the living afterward.”

 

He wheeled his easy-chair to the table, trimmed the lamp, and settled

himself to the examination of the books.

 

He took them up, one by one, and looked carefully through them, first

looking at the page on which the name of the owner is ordinarily

written, and then searching for any scrap of paper which might have been

left within the leaves. On the first page of the Eton Latin Grammar the

name of Master Talboys was written in a prim, scholastic hand; the

French pamphlet had a careless G.T. scrawled on the cover in pencil, in

George’s big, slovenly calligraphy: the Tom Jones had evidently been

bought at a book-stall, and bore an inscription, dated March 14th, 1788,

setting forth that the book was a tribute of respect to Mr. Thos.

Scrowton, from his obedient servant, James Anderley; the Don Juan and

the Testament were blank. Robert Audley breathed more freely; he had

arrived at the last but one of the books without any result whatever,

and there only remained the fat gilt-and-crimson-bound volume to be

examined before his task was finished.

 

It was an annual of the year 1845. The copper-plate engravings of lovely

ladies, who had flourished in that day, were yellow and spotted with

mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties

faded and commonplace. Even the little clusters of verses (in which the

poet’s feeble candle shed its sickly light upon the obscurities of the

artist’s meaning) had an old-fashioned twang; like music on a lyre,

whose strings are slackened by the damps of time. Robert Audley did not

stop to read any of the mild productions. He ran rapidly through the

leaves, looking for any scrap of writing or fragment of a letter which

might have been used to mark a place. He found nothing but a bright ring

of golden hair, of that glittering hue which is so rarely seen except

upon the head of a child—a sunny lock, which curled as naturally as the

tendril of a vine; and was very opposite in texture, if not different in

hue, to the soft, smooth tresses which the landlady at Ventnor had given

to George Talboys after his wife’s death. Robert Audley suspended his

examination of the book, and folded this yellow lock in a sheet of

letter paper, which he sealed with his signet-ring, and laid aside, with

the memorandum about George Talboys and Alicia’s letter, in the

pigeon-hole marked important. He was going to replace the fat annual

among the other books, when he discovered that the two blank leaves at

the beginning were stuck together. He was so determined to prosecute his

search to the very uttermost, that he took the trouble to part these

leaves with the sharp end of his paper-knife, and he was rewarded for

his perseverance by finding an inscription upon one of them. This

inscription was in three parts, and in three different hands. The first

paragraph was dated as far back as the year in which the annual had been

published, and set forth that the book was the property of a certain

Miss Elizabeth Ann Bince, who had obtained the precious volume as a

reward for habits of order, and for obedience to the authorities of

Camford House Seminary, Torquay. The second paragraph was dated five

years later, and was in the handwriting of Miss Bince herself, who

presented the book, as a mark of undying affection and unfading esteem

(Miss Bince was evidently of a romantic temperament) to her beloved

friend, Helen Maldon. The third paragraph was dated September, 1853, and

was in the hand of Helen Maldon, who gave the annual to George Talboys;

and it was at the sight of this third paragraph that Mr. Robert Audley’s

face changed from its natural hue to a sickly, leaden pallor.

 

“I thought it would be so,” said the young man, shutting the book with a

weary sigh. “God knows I was prepared for the worst, and the worst has

come. I can understand all now. My next visit must be to Southampton. I

must place the boy in better hands.”

CHAPTER XX

MRS. PLOWSON

 

Among the packet of letters which Robert Audley had found in George’s

trunk, there was one labeled with the name of the missing man’s

father—the father, who had never been too indulgent a friend to his

younger son, and who had gladly availed himself of the excuse afforded

by George’s imprudent marriage to abandon the young man to his own

resources. Robert Audley had never seen Mr. Harcourt Talboys; but

George’s careless talk of his father had given his friend some notion of

that gentleman’s character. He had written to Mr. Talboys immediately

after the disappearance of George, carefully wording his letter, which

vaguely hinted at the writer’s fear of some foul play in the mysterious

business; and, after the lapse of several weeks, he had received a

formal epistle, in which Mr. Harcourt Talboys expressly declared that he

had washed his hands of all responsibility in his son George’s affairs

upon the young man’s wedding-day; and that his absurd disappearance was

only in character with his preposterous marriage. The writer of this

fatherly letter added in a postscript that if George Talboys had any low

design of alarming his friends by this pretended disappearance, and

thereby playing on their feelings with a view to pecuniary advantage, he

was most egregiously deceived in the character of those persons with

whom he had to deal.

 

Robert Audley had answered this letter by a few indignant lines,

informing Mr. Talboys that his son was scarcely likely to hide himself

for the furtherance of any deep-laid design on the pockets of his

relatives, as he had left twenty thousand pounds in his bankers’ hands

at the time of his disappearance. After dispatching this letter, Robert

had abandoned all thought of assistance from the man who, in the natural

course of things, should have been most interested in George’s fate; but

now that he found himself advancing every day some step nearer to the

end that lay so darkly before him, his mind reverted to this heartlessly

indifferent Mr. Harcourt Talboys.

 

“I will run into Dorsetshire after I leave Southampton,” he said, “and

see this man. If he is content to let his son’s fate rest a dark and

cruel mystery to all who knew him—if he is content to go down to his

grave uncertain to the last of this poor fellow’s end—why should I try

to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle,

and gather together the stray fragments which, when collected, may make

such a hideous whole? I will go to him and lay my darkest doubts freely

before him. It will be for him to say what I am to do.”

 

Robert Audley started by an early express for Southampton. The snow lay

thick and white upon the pleasant country through which he went; and the

young barrister had wrapped himself in so many comforters and railway

rugs as to appear a perambulating mass of woollen goods, rather than a

living member of a learned profession. He looked gloomily out of the

misty window, opaque with the breath of himself and an elderly Indian

officer, who was his only companion, and watched the fleeting landscape,

which had a certain phantom-like appearance in its shroud of snow. He

wrapped himself in the vast folds of his railway rug, with a peevish

shiver, and felt inclined to quarrel with the destiny which compelled

him to travel by an early train upon a pitiless winter’s day.

 

“Who would have thought that I could have grown so fond of the fellow,”

he muttered, “or feel so lonely without him? I’ve a comfortable little

fortune in the three per cents.; I’m heir presumptive to my uncle’s

title; and I know of a certain dear little girl who, as I think, would

do her best to make me happy; but I declare that I would freely give up

all, and stand penniless in the world tomorrow, if this mystery could

be satisfactorily cleared away, and George Talboys could stand by my

side.”

 

He reached Southampton between eleven and twelve o’clock, and walked

across the platform, with the snow drifting in his face, toward the pier

and the lower end of the town. The clock of St. Michael’s Church was

striking twelve as he crossed the quaint old square in which that

edifice stands, and groped his way through the narrow streets leading

down to the water.

 

Mr. Maldon had established his slovenly household gods in one of those

dreary thoroughfares which speculative builders love to raise upon some

miserable fragment of waste ground hanging to the skirts of a prosperous

town. Brigsome’s Terrace was, perhaps, one of the most dismal blocks of

building that was ever composed of brick and mortar since the first

mason plied his trowel and the first architect drew his plan. The

builder who had speculated in the ten dreary eight-roomed prison-houses

had hung himself behind the parlor door of an adjacent tavern while

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