NORTHWARD.
THE travellers had not left Greenlands two days when Eustace Thorburn
arrived there. He had finished his work in Paris a month sooner than
he had expected to do so, and had been glad to hurry home, in order to
complete his arrangements with an eminent publishing firm, who, after
considerable hesitation, had agreed to publish his poem without hazard
of capital on his part, though not without foreboding of loss on theirs.
M. de Bergerac had not forgotten to write to his secretary, announcing
the Scottish expedition; but he had only written an hour before
starting, and the letter and the secretary had crossed each other
between Dover and Calais. Eustace came to Greenlands full of hopeful
agitation. He had not forgotten the promise made his uncle. He had not
forgotten that he was pledged to make a full confession to his kind
patron, and to accept his banishment, if need were. His Parisian exile
had only deferred the evil hour; it must come now, and speedily; and
the decree would be spoken, and he and Helen must in all likelihood
part for ever. But in the meantime he would see her once more, and it
was for this unspeakable blessing he languished. For the last night of
his sojourn in Paris sleep had been impossible. He could think only
of the delight to which he was hastening--to see her once again! His
love had grown day by day, hour by hour, during these long months of
absence. As the train ploughed onwards through dusty flats, as the
steamer danced across the sunlit waters, this one traveller counted the
miles, and calculated the moments until he should near the beloved spot
where his idol dwelt.
He knew that his Uncle Dan would have been glad to see him, even for
a brief exchange of greetings and shaking of hands; but he could not
bring himself to spend the half-hour that it must have cost him to call
in Great Ormond-street. Swift as a hack-cab could take him, he rushed
from station to station, was so lucky as to catch a fast train for
Windsor, and entered the shady avenues of Greenlands within fourteen
hours of his departure from Paris.
How fresh and verdant the spring landscape seemed to him!--the cowslips
and bluebells, the hawthorn buds just beginning to whiten the old
rugged trees, gummy chestnut husks scattering the ground, and from afar
the rich odour of newly-opened lilacs.
“And to think that for its master this place has no charm!” he said to
himself, wonderingly.
His heart beat fast as he opened the gate of the bailiff’s garden.
Here all things looked their brightest and prettiest. The birds were
singing gaily in the porch. The deep voice of Hephæstus boomed from the
hall, and the dog ran out to repel the intruder, but changed his bass
growl of menace into a noisy demonstration of delight at sight of the
traveller.
Even this welcome Eustace was glad to receive. It seemed a good omen.
The door stood wide open; he went into the hall, with the dog leaping
and bounding about him as he went. No one appeared. There was no sound
of voices in any of the rooms. He opened the drawing-room door softly,
and went in, prepared to see Helen bending over her books at a table
in the window. But Helen was not there, and the room looked cold and
dreary. Never had he seen the books so primly arranged, the piano so
carefully closed. No cheery blaze brightened the hearth, no flowers
perfumed the atmosphere. His instinct told him that a change had fallen
upon the pleasant home. He rang the bell, and a fresh country housemaid
answered his summons.
“Lor’ a mercy, sir, how you did startle me!” she said. “I a’most
thought it was ghostes, which they do begin sometimes with ringin’ o’
the bells.”
“Is your mistress away from home?” asked Eustace.
“Yes, sir, and master, too. They both be gone to Scotland for a month,
or more. Didn’t you get the letter as master sent you, sir? I heard him
say as he’d wrote to tell you they was gone.”
They had gone to Scotland! To find them absent from Greenlands was in
itself a wonder to him; but it seemed to him a kind of miracle that
they should have gone to Scotland, that country which he was bent upon
exploring in his search for the scene of his mother’s sorrows.
“What part of Scotland has your master gone to, Martha?” he asked the
housemaid.
The girl shook her head despondently, and replied that she had not
“heard tell.” They were to travel with Mr. Jerningham, she believed.
That gentleman had come into property in Scotland, and they were going
to see it. This was the utmost she had “heard tell on.”
With Mr. Jerningham! What should make that gentleman Helen’s
travelling companion? A sudden pang of jealousy rent Eustace Thorburn’s
heart as he thought of such a companionship. What could have brought
about this Scottish journey? Having possessed himself of Martha’s
slender stock of information on this point, Eustace went to the kitchen
to question Nanon; but with little more success. The Frenchwoman was
voluble, but she could tell him scarcely anything.
They were to visit many places, she said, but she knew not where. The
names of those barbarous countries had slipped from her memory. It
was far, very far; and they were to be absent a month. Oh, but it was
dismal without that sweet young lady! Nanon had nursed her as a baby,
and never before had they been so long asunder.
“For a month! It is frightful to think of it,” shrieked Nanon. She
invited Mr. Thorburn to rest and refresh himself--to dine, to sleep,
to make the place his home as long as he pleased. M. de Bergerac had
left instructions to that effect. But the disappointment had been
too bitter. Eustace could not endure to remain an hour in the house
which had been so dear to him, now that the goddess who had glorified
it dwelt there no longer. He declared that he had particular business
to do in London, and must return thither immediately. He was eager to
arrange for the Scottish expedition which had been planned by himself
and his uncle--eager to start for the country to which Helen was gone,
as if he would thereby be nearer her.
Before bidding old Nanon good-day, he made a final effort to extort
from her some information.
“Surely M. de Bergerac must have left you some written address,” he
said, “in the event of your having occasion to write to him?”
“No, sir; if I wanted to write, I was to give my letter to Mr.
Jerningham’s steward; that was all. They will be going from place to
place, you see, sir. It is not one place they go to see, but many.”
With this answer Eustace was compelled to be satisfied. He could not
push his curiosity so far as to go to Mr. Jerningham’s steward, and ask
him for his master’s whereabouts. And again, what benefit could it have
been to him to know where Helen had gone? He had no right to follow her.
He hastened back to London, and to Great Ormond Street, where he was
doomed to wait three dreary hours, turning over his Uncle Dan’s books,
before that individual made his appearance, somewhat flushed from
dining, and jovial of manner, but in nowise the worse for his dinner
and wine.
“I have been dining in St. James’s Street, with Joyce of the
_Hermes_, and Farquhar of the _Zeus_,” he said. “A thousand
welcomes, dearest boy! And so you come straight from the station to
find your faithful old Daniel? Such a token of affection touches this
tough old heart.”
“Not straight from the station, Uncle Dan,” the young man answered,
with a guilty air. “I have been down to Berkshire. M. de Bergerac and
his daughter have started for Scotland with Mr. Jerningham.”
“What takes them to Scotland in such company?”
“Mr. Jerningham has just succeeded to an estate in the north; that is
all I could discover from the servants at the cottage. This Scottish
expedition must be quite a new idea, for there was no allusion to it in
M. de Bergerac’s last letter to me.”
“Strange!”
“And now, Uncle Dan, I want you to keep your promise, and start for
your Highland holiday with me.”
“What! we are to rush post-haste for the Highlands, in search of your
Helen?”
“No; on a more solemn search than that.”
“Alas, poor lad! On that one subject you are madder than Prince Hamlet.
Every one has his craze. But I pledged myself to be your companion, and
I must keep my promise. You are really bent upon going over the ground
on which that sad drama was enacted?”
“Fixed as fate, Uncle Dan.”
“So be it. Your faithful kinsman has been at work in your absence, and
has made things smooth for you.”
“Is it possible, dear friend?”
“There’s nothing a man of the world can’t do when he’s put to it. A
reperusal of Dion’s autobiography enabled me to identify the divine
Carlitz of that narrative with a lady who took the town by storm when
I was a young man, and who afterwards married a nobleman of eccentric
repute. Once possessed of this clue, it was easy for me to identify
her _fidus Achates_, the amiable H., as Mr. Elderton Hollis, a
gentleman connected with dramatic affairs for the last quarter of a
century, and still floating, gay and _débonnaire_, upon the border
land of the theatrical world,--a gentleman with whom I myself have some
acquaintance. To make a long story short, I contrived to throw myself
in Hollis’s way at the Quin Club; and after a glance at the theatrical
horizon of to-day, drifted into the usual commonplaces about the decay
of dramatic talent. ‘Where are our Fawcetts, our Nisbetts, our Keeleys,
our Carlitzes?’ I sighed; and at the last familiar name, the old fellow
pricked up his ears, like a hound at the huntsman’s ‘Hark forward!’”
“‘Ah, my dear Mayfield, that _was_ a woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘You
are, of course, aware that I was her secretary, her adviser, her
treasurer,--I may say, her guardian angel,--before her brilliant
marriage; and now, sir, she cuts me, though I give you my word of
honour that marriage could never have taken place but for my management
of her affairs.”
“This bears out the autobiography,” cried Eustace, eagerly.
“To the letter. I first sympathized with Mr. Hollis, and then pumped
him. I found him somewhat reserved upon the subject of that northern
expedition; but after some beating about the bush, I got from him the
admission that the lady whom we will still call Carlitz was in Scotland
just before her marriage with Lord V.; and by and by he let slip that
the spot was in the extreme north of Aberdeen. This much, and no more,
could I obtain. Examination of a tourist’s map showed me a headland
called Halko’s Head, in the north of Aberdeenshire. This is likely to
be the H. H. of Dion’s book, and thither we must direct our steps.”
“My dear uncle, you have done wonders!”
“And when you find the place, what then?”
“I shall discover the name of the man.”
“Who knows? The chase of the wild-goose is a sport congenial to youth;
but April is a cold month in Scotland, and I wish the expedition could
have been contrived later.”
Eustace would fain have started next morning, had it been possible; but
two days were necessary for Mr. Mayfield’s literary affairs, and the
agreement with the editors as to what contributions he was to send to
the _Areopagus_ and another journal during his absence, and so on.
“I must scribble _en route_, you see, Eustace,” he said; “the mill
will not stop because I want a holiday.”