SUSPENSE.
In the mean time, immediate interest in their own occupations had pretty
nearly departed from the inhabitants of the Old Wood Lodge. Agnes went
on with her writing, Mamma with her work-basket, Marian with her dreams;
but desk, and needle, and meditations were all alike abandoned in
prospect of the postman, who was to be seen making his approach for a
very long way, and was watched every day with universal anxiety. What
Louis was doing, what Charlie was doing, the progress of the lawsuit,
and the plans of Miss Anastasia, continually drew the thoughts of the
household away from themselves. Even Rachel’s constant report of the
unseen invalid, Miss Lucy, added to the general withdrawal of interest
from the world within to the world without. They seemed to have nothing
to do themselves in their feminine quietness. Mamma sat pondering over
her work--about her husband, who was alone, and did not like his
solitude--about Charlie, who was intrusted with so great a
commission--about “all the children”--every one of whom seemed to be
getting afloat on a separate current of life. Agnes mused over her
business with impatient thoughts about the Rector, with visions of
Rachel and Miss Lucy in the invalid chamber, and vain attempts to look
into the future and see what was to come. As for Marian, the charmed
tenor of her fancies knew no alteration; she floated on, without
interruption, in a sweet vision, full of a thousand consistencies, and
wilder than any romance. Their conversation ran no longer in the ancient
household channel, and was no more about their own daily occupations;
they were spectators eagerly looking from the windows at nearly a dozen
different conflicts, earnestly concerned, and deeply sympathetic, but
not in the strife themselves.
Louis had entered Mr Foggo’s office; it seemed a strange destination for
the young man. He did not tell any one how small a remuneration he
received for his labours, nor how he contrived to live in the little
room, in the second floor of one of those Islington houses. He succeeded
in existing--that was enough; and Louis did not chafe at his restrained
and narrow life, by reason of having all his faculties engaged and
urgent in a somewhat fanciful mode, of securing the knowledge which he
longed for concerning his own birth and derivation. He had ascertained
from Mr Atheling every particular concerning the Rivers family which
_he_ knew. He had even managed to seek out some old servants once at the
Hall, and with a keen and intense patience had listened to every word of
a hundred aimless and inconclusive stories from these respectable
authorities. He was compiling, indeed, neither more nor less than a
_life_ of Lord Winterbourne--a history which he endeavoured to verify in
every particular as he went on, and which was written with the sternest
impartiality--a plain and clear record of events. Perhaps a more
remarkable manuscript than that of Louis never existed; and he pursued
his tale with all the zest, and much more than the excitement, of a
romancer. It was a true story, of which he laboured to find out every
episode; and there was a powerful unity and constructive force in the
one sole unvarying interest of the tale. Mr Atheling had been moved to
tell the eager youth _all_ the particulars of his early acquaintance
with Lord Winterbourne--and still the story grew--the object of the
whole being to discover, as Louis himself said, “what child there was
whom it was his interest to disgrace and defame.” The young man followed
hotly upon this clue. His thoughts had not been directed yet to anything
resembling the discovery of Miss Anastasia; it had never occurred to
him that his disinheritance might be absolutely the foundation of all
Lord Winterbourne’s greatness; but he hovered about the question with a
singular pertinacity, and gave his full attention to it. Inspired by
this, he did not consider his meagre meal, his means so narrow that it
was the hardest matter in the world to eat daily bread. He pursued his
story with a concentration of purpose which the greatest poet in
existence might have envied. He was a great deal too much in earnest to
think about the sentences in which he recorded what he learnt. The
consequence was, that this memoir of Lord Winterbourne was a model of
terse and pithy English--an unexampled piece of biography. Louis did not
say a word about it to any one, but pursued his labour and his inquiry
together, vainly endeavouring to find out a trace of some one whom he
could identify with himself.
Meanwhile, Papa began to complain grievously of his long abandonment,
and moved by Louis on one side, and by his own discomfort on the other,
became very decided in his conviction that there was no due occasion for
the absence of his family. There was great discontent in Number Ten,
Bellevue, and there was an equal discontent, rather more overpowering,
and quite as genuine, in the Old Wood Lodge, where Mamma and Marian vied
with each other in anxiety, and thought no cause sufficiently important
to keep them any longer from home. Agnes expressed no opinion either on
one side or the other; she was herself somewhat disturbed and unsettled,
thinking a great deal more about the Rector than was at all convenient,
or to her advantage. After that piece of controversy, the Rector began
to come rather often to the Lodge. He never said a word again touching
that one brief breath of warfare, yet they eyed each other
distrustfully, with a mutual consciousness of what had occurred, and
might occur again. It was not a very lover-like point of union, yet it
was a secret link of which no one else knew. Unconsciously it drew Agnes
into inferences and implications, which were spoken at the Rector; and
unconsciously it drew him to more sympathy with common trials, and a
singular inclination to experiment, as Agnes had bidden him, with her
sublime talisman--that sole Name given under heaven, which has power to
touch into universal brotherhood the whole universal heart of man.