BEING BUT ONE OF THE CONSIDERATE PAUSES IN A LONG JOURNEY,
CHARITABLY AFFORDED TO THE READER.
Colonel Morley found Mr. Poole at home, just returned from his office;
he stayed with that gentleman nearly an hour, and then went straight to
Darrell. As the time appointed to meet the French acquaintance, who
depended on his hospitalities for a dinner, was now nearly arrived,
Alban's conference with his English friend was necessarily brief and
hurried, though long enough to confirm one fact in Mr. Poole's statement,
which had been unknown to the Colonel before that day, and the admission
of which inflicted on Guy Darrell a pang as sharp as ever wrenched
confession from the lips of a prisoner in the cells of the Inquisition.
On returning from Greenwich, and depositing his Frenchman in some
melancholy theatre, time enough for that resentful foreigner to witness
theft and murder committed upon an injured countryman's vaudeville, Alban
hastened again to Carlton Gardens. He found Darrell alone, pacing his
floor to and fro, in the habit he had acquired in earlier life, perhaps
when meditating some complicated law case, or wrestling with himself
against some secret sorrow. There are men of quick nerves who require a
certain action of the body for the better composure of the mind; Darrell
was one of them.
During these restless movements, alternated by abrupt pauses, equally
inharmonious to the supreme quiet which characterised his listener's
tastes and habits, the haughty gentleman disburdened himself of at least
one of the secrets which he had hitherto guarded from his early friend.
But as that secret connects itself with the history of a Person about
whom it is well that the reader should now learn more than was known to
Darrell himself, we will assume our privilege to be ourselves the
narrator, and at the cost of such dramatic vivacity as may belong to
dialogue, but with the gain to the reader of clearer insight into those
portions of the past which the occasion permits us to reveal--we will
weave into something like method the more imperfect and desultory
communications by which Guy Darrell added to Alban Morley's distasteful
catalogue of painful subjects. The reader will allow, perhaps, that we
thus evince a desire to gratify his curiosity, when we state that of
Arabella Crane Darrell spoke but in one brief and angry sentence, and
that not by the name in which the reader as yet alone knows her; and it
is with the antecedents of Arabella Crane that our explanation will
tranquilly commence.