Vincent had shaken hands with his friend at the door, and hurried past,
saying something about losing the train, in order to escape
conversation; but, with the vivid perceptions of excitement, he heard
the delivery of Phoebe's message, and saw the complacence with which
the Homerton man regarded the invitation which had anticipated his
arrival. The young Nonconformist had enough to think of as he took his
way once more to the railway, and tea at Mrs. Tozer's was anything but
attractive to his own fancy; yet in the midst of his wretchedness he
could not overcome the personal sense of annoyance which this trifling
incident produced. It came like a prick of irritating pain, to aggravate
the dull horror which throbbed through him. He despised himself for
being able to think of it at all, but at the same time it came back to
him, darting unawares again and again into his thoughts. Little as he
cared for the entertainments and attention of his flock, he was
conscious of a certain exasperation in discovering their eagerness to
entertain another. He was disgusted with Phoebe for bringing the
message, and disgusted with Beecher for looking pleased to receive it.
"Probably he thinks he will supersede me," Vincent thought, in sudden
gusts of disdain now and then, with a sardonic smile on his lip, waking
up afterwards with a thrill of deeper self-disgust, to think that
anything so insignificant had power to move him. When he plunged off
from Carlingford at last, in the early falling darkness of the winter
afternoon, and looked back upon the few lights struggling red through
the evening mists, it was with a sense of belonging to the place where
he had left an interloper who might take his post over his head, which,
perhaps, no other possible stimulant could have given him. He thought
with a certain pang of Salem, and that pulpit which was his own, but in
which another man should stand to-morrow, with a quickened thrill of
something that was almost jealousy; he wondered what might be the
sentiments of the connection about his deputy--perhaps Brown and Pigeon
would prefer that florid voice to his own--perhaps Phoebe might find
the substitute more practicable than the incumbent. Nothing before had
ever made Salem so interesting to the young pastor as Beecher's
complacence over that invitation to tea.
But he had much more serious matters to consider in his rapid journey.
Vincent was but a man, though he was Susan's brother. He did not share
those desperate hopes which afforded a kind of forlorn comfort and agony
of expectation to his mother's heart. No thought that Susan would come
home either to Carlingford or Lonsdale was in his mind. In what way
soever the accursed villain, whom his face blanched with deadly rage to
think of, had managed to get her in his power, Susan's sweet life was
lost, her brother knew. He gave her up with unspeakable anguish and
pity; but he did give her up, and hoped for no deliverance. Shame had
taken possession of that image which fancy kept presenting in double
tenderness and brightness to him as his heart burned in the darkness. He
might find her indeed; he might snatch her out of these polluting arms,
and bring home the sullied lily to her mother, but never henceforward
could hope or honour blossom about his sister's name. He made up his
mind to this in grim misery, with his teeth clenched, and a desperation
of rage and horror in his heart. But in proportion to his conviction
that Susan would not return, was his eagerness to find her, and snatch
her away. To think of her in horror and despair was easier than to think
of her deluded and happy, as might be--as most probably was the case.
This latter possibility made Vincent frantic. He could scarcely endure
the slowness of the motion which was the highest pitch of speed that
skill and steam had yet made possible. No express train could travel so
fast as the thoughts which went before him, dismal pioneers penetrating
the most dread abysses. To think of Susan happy in her horrible downfall
and ruin was more than flesh or blood could bear.
When Vincent reached town, he took his way without a moment's hesitation
to the street in Piccadilly where he had once sought Mr. Fordham. He
approached the place now with no precautions; he had his cab driven up
to the door, and boldly entered as soon as it was opened. The house was
dark and silent but for the light in the narrow hall; nobody there at
that dead hour, while it was still too early for dinner. And it was not
the vigilant owner of the place, but a drowsy helper in a striped jacket
who presented himself at the door, and replied to Vincent's inquiry for
Colonel Mildmay, that the Colonel was not at home--never was at home at
that hour--but was not unwilling to inquire, if the gentleman would
wait. Vincent put up the collar of his coat about his ears, and stood
back with eager attention, intently alive to everything. Evidently the
ruler of the house was absent as well as the Colonel. The man lounged to
the staircase and shouted down, leaning upon the bannisters. No aside or
concealment was possible in this perfectly easy method of communication.
With an anxiety strongly at variance with the colloquy thus going on,
and an intensification of all his faculties which only the height of
excitement could give, Vincent stood back and listened. He heard every
step that passed outside; the pawing of the horse in the cab that waited
for him, the chance voices of the passengers, all chimed in, without
interrupting the conversation between the man who admitted him and his
fellow-servant down-stairs.
"Jim, is the Colonel at home?--he ain't, to be sure, but we wants to
know particklar. Here," in a slightly lowered voice, "his mother's been
took bad, and the parson's sent for him. When is he agoing to be in to
dinner? Ask Cookie; she'll be sure to know."
"The Colonel ain't coming in to dinner, stoopid," answered the unseen
interlocutor; "he ain't been here all day. Out o' town. Couldn't you say
so, instead of jabbering? Out o' town. It's allays safe to say, and
this time it's true."
"What's he adoing of, in case the gen'leman should want to know?" said
the fellow at the head of the stair.
"After mischief," was the brief and emphatic answer. "You come along
down to your work, and let the Colonel alone."
"Any mischief in particklar?" continued the man, tossing a dirty napkin
in his hand, and standing in careless contempt, with his back to the
minister. "It's a pleasant way the Colonel's got, that is: any more
particklars, Jim?--the gen'leman 'll stand something if you'll let him
know."
"Hold your noise, stoopid--it ain't no concern o' yours--my master's my
master, and I ain't agoing to tell his secrets," said the voice below.
Vincent had made a step forward, divided between his impulse to kick the
impertinent fellow who had admitted him down-stairs, and the equally
strong impulse which prompted him to offer any bribe to the witness who
knew his master's secrets; but he was suddenly arrested in both by a
step on the street outside, and the grating of a latch-key in the door.
A long light step, firm and steady, with a certain sentiment of rapid
silent progress in it. Vincent could not tell what strange fascination
it was that made him turn round to watch this new-comer. The stranger's
approach thrilled him vaguely, he could not tell how. Then the door
opened, and a man appeared like the footstep--a very tall slight figure,
stooping forward a little; a pale oval face, too long to be handsome,
adorned with a long brown beard; thoughtful eyes, with a distant gleam
in them, now and then flashing into sudden penetrating glances--a loose
dress too light for the season, which somehow carried out all the
peculiarities of the long light step, the thin sinewy form, the
thoughtful softness and keenness of the eye. Even in the height of his
own suspense and excitement, Vincent paused to ask himself who this
could be. He came in with one sudden glance at the stranger in the hall,
passed him, and calling to the man, who became on the moment respectful
and attentive, asked if there were any letters. "What name, sir?--beg
your pardon--my place ain't up-stairs," said the fellow. What was the
name? Vincent rushed forward when he heard it, and seized the new-comer
by the shoulder with the fierceness of a tiger. "Fordham!" cried the
young man, with boiling rage and hatred. Next moment he had let go his
grasp, and was gazing bewildered upon the calm stranger, who looked at
him with merely a thoughtful inquiry in his eyes. "Fordham--at your
service--do you want anything with me?" he asked, meeting with
undiminished calm the young man's excited looks. This composure put a
sudden curb on Vincent's passion.
"My name is Vincent," he said, restraining himself with an effort; "do
you know now what I want with you? No? Am I to believe your looks or
your name? If you are the man," cried the young Nonconformist, with a
groan out of his distracted heart, "whom Lady Western could trust with
life, to death--or if you are a fiend incarnate, making misery and
ruin, you shall not escape me till I know the truth. Where is Susan?
Here is where her innocent letters came--they were addressed to your
name. Where is she now? Answer me! For you, as well as the rest of us,
it is life or death."
"You are raving," said the stranger, keeping his awakened eyes fixed
upon Vincent; "but this is easily settled. I returned from the East only
yesterday. I don't know you. What was that you said about
Lady--Lady--what lady? Come in: and my name?--my name has been unheard
in this country, so far as I know, for ten years. Lady----?--come in and
explain what you mean."
The two stood together confronting each other in the little parlour of
the house, where the striped jacket quickly and humbly lighted the gas.
Vincent's face, haggard with misery and want of rest, looked wild in
that sudden light. The stranger stood opposite him, leaning forward with
a strange eagerness and inquiry. He did not care for Vincent's anxiety,
who was a stranger to him; he cared only to hear again that
name--Lady----? He had heard it already, or he would have been less
curious; he wanted to understand this wonderful message wafted to him
out of his old life. What did it matter to Herbert Fordham, used to the
danger of the deserts and mountains, whether it was a maniac who brought
this chance seed of a new existence to his wondering heart?
"A man called Fordham has gone into my mother's house," said Vincent,
fixing his eyes upon those keen but visionary orbs which were fixed on
him--"and won the love of my sister. She wrote to him here--to this
house; yesterday he carried her away, to her shame and destruction.
Answer me," cried the young man, making another fierce step forward,
growing hoarse with passion, and clenching his hands in involuntary
rage--"was it you?"
"There are other men called Fordham in existence besides me," cried the
stranger, with a little irritation; then seizing his loose coat by its
pockets, he shook out, with a sudden impatient motion, a cloud of
letters from these receptacles. "Because you seem in great excitement
and distress, and yet are not, as far as I can judge," said Mr. Fordham,
with another glance at Vincent, "mad, I will take pains to satisfy you.
Look at my letters; their dates and post-marks will convince you that
what you say is simply impossible, for that I was not here."
Vincent clutched and took them up with a certain blind eagerness, not
knowing what he did. He did not look at them to satisfy himself that
what Fordham said was true. A wild, half-conscious idea that there must
be something in them about Susan possessed him; he saw neither dates nor
post-mark, though he held them up to the light, as if they were proofs
of something. "No," he said at last, "it was not you--it was that fiend
Mildmay, Rachel Russell's husband. Where is he? he has taken your name,
and made you responsible for his devilish deeds. Help me, if you are a
Christian! My sister is in his hands, curse him! Help me, for the sake
of your name, to find them out. I am a stranger, and they will give me
no information; but they will tell you. For God's sake, ask and let me
go after them. If ever you were beholden to the help of Christian men,
help me! for it is life and death!"
"Mildmay! Rachel Russell's husband? under my name?" said Mr. Fordham,
slowly. "I _have_ been beholden to Christian men, and that for very
life. You make a strong appeal: who are you that are so desperate? and
what was that you said?"
"I am Susan Vincent's brother," said the young Nonconformist; "that is
enough. This devil has taken your name; help me, for heaven's sake, to
find him out!"
"Mildmay?--devil? yes, he is a devil! you are right enough: I owe him no
love," said Fordham; then he paused and turned away, as if in momentary
perplexity. "To help that villain to his reward would be a man's duty;
but," said the stranger, with a heavy sigh, upon which his words came
involuntarily, spoken to himself, breathing out of his heart--"he is
_her_ brother, devil though he is!"
"Yes!" cried Vincent, with passion, "he is _her_ brother." When he had
said the words, the young man groaned aloud. Partly he forgot that this
man, who looked upon him with so much curiosity, was the man who had
brought tears and trembling to Her; partly he remembered it, and forgot
his jealousy for the moment in a bitter sense of fellow-feeling. In his
heart he could see her, waving her hand to him out of her passing
carriage, with that smile for which he would have risked his life. Oh,
hideous fate! it was _her_ brother whom he was bound to pursue to the
end of the world. He buried his face in his hands, in a momentary
madness of anguish and passion. Susan floated away like a mist from that
burning personal horizon. The love and the despair were too much for
Vincent. The hope that had always been impossible was frantic now. When
he recovered himself, the stranger whom he had thus unawares taken into
his confidence was regarding him haughtily from the other side of the
table, with a fiery light in his thoughtful eyes. Suspicion, jealousy,
resentment, had begun to sparkle in those orbs, which in repose looked
so far away and lay so calm. Mr. Fordham measured the haggard and
worn-out young man with a look of rising dislike and animosity. He was
at least ten years older than the young Nonconformist, who stood there
in his wretchedness and exhaustion entirely at disadvantage, looking, in
his half-clerical dress, which he had not changed for four-and-twenty
hours, as different as can be conceived from the scrupulously dressed
gentleman in his easy morning habiliments, which would not have been out
of place in the rudest scene, yet spoke of personal nicety and
high-breeding in every easy fold. Vincent himself felt the contrast with
an instant flush of answering jealousy and passion. For a moment the two
glanced at each other, conscious rivals, though not a word of
explanation had been spoken. It was Mr. Fordham who spoke first, and in
a somewhat hasty and imperious tone.
"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 passion, 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 snatches 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 assistance 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 appetite, and even snatched 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.