Woman-like, Miss Avondale looked at the picture first. If she experienced any surprise, she repressed it. “It is LIKE Bobby,” she said meditatively, “but he was stouter then; and he's changed sadly since he has been in this climate. I don't wonder you didn't recognize him. His father may have had it taken some day when they were alone together. I didn't know of it, though I know the photographer.” She then looked at the letter, knit her pretty brows, and with an abstracted air sat down on the edge of Randolph's bed, crossed her little feet, and looked puzzled. But he was unable to detect the least emotion.
“You see,” she said, “the handwriting of most children who are learning to write is very much alike, for this is the stage of development when they 'print.' And their composition is the same: they talk only of things that interest all children—pets, toys, and their games. This is only ANY child's letter to ANY father. I couldn't really say it WAS Bobby's. As to the photograph, they have an odd way in South America of selling photographs of anybody, principally of pretty women, by the packet, to any one who wants them. So that it does not follow that the owner of this photograph had any personal interest in it. Now, as to your mysterious patron himself, can you describe him?” She looked at Randolph with a certain feline intensity.
He became embarrassed. “You know I only saw him once, under a street lamp”—he began.
“And I have only seen Captain Dornton—if it were he—twice in three years,” she said. “But go on.”
Again Randolph was unpleasantly impressed with her cold, dryly practical manner. He had never seen his benefactor but once, but he could not speak of him in that way.
“I think,” he went on hesitatingly, “that he had dark, pleasant eyes, a thick beard, and the look of a sailor.”
“And there were no other papers in the portmanteau?” she said, with the same intense look.
“None.”
“These are mere coincidences,” said Miss Avondale, after a pause, “and, after all, they are not as strange as the alternative. For we would have to believe that Captain Dornton arrived here—where he knew his son and I were living—without a word of warning, came ashore for the purpose of going to a hotel and the bank also, and then unaccountably changed his mind and disappeared.”
The thought of the rotten wharf, his own escape, and the dead body were all in Randolph's mind; but his reasoning was already staggered by the girl's conclusions, and he felt that it might only pain, without convincing her. And was he convinced himself? She smiled at his blank face and rose. “Thank you all the same. And now I must go.”
Randolph rose also. “Would you like to take the photograph and letter to show your cousin?”
“Yes. But I should not place much reliance on his memory.” Nevertheless, she took up the photograph and letter, and Randolph, putting the portmanteau back in the closet, locked it, and stood ready to accompany her.
On their way to her house they talked of other things. Randolph learned something of her life in Callao: that she was an orphan like himself, and had been brought from the Eastern States when a child to live with a rich uncle in Callao who was childless; that her aunt had died and her uncle had married again; that the second wife had been at variance with his family, and that it was consequently some relief to Miss Avondale to be independent as the guardian of Bobby, whose mother was a sister of the first wife; that her uncle had objected as strongly as a brother-in-law could to his wife's sister's marriage with Captain Dornton on account of his roving life and unsettled habits, and that consequently there would be little sympathy for her or for Bobby in his mysterious disappearance. The wind blew and the rain fell upon these confidences, yet Randolph, walking again under that umbrella of felicity, parted with her at her own doorstep all too soon, although consoled with the permission to come and see her when the child returned.
He went back to his room a very hopeful, foolish, but happy youth. As he entered he seemed to feel the charm of her presence again in the humble apartment she had sanctified. The furniture she had moved with her own little hands, the bed on which she had sat for a half moment, was glorified to his youthful fancy. And even that magic portmanteau which had brought him all this happiness, that, too,—but he gave a sudden start. The closet door, which he had shut as he went out, was unlocked and open, the portmanteau—his “trust”—gone!
III
Randolph Trent's consternation at the loss of the portmanteau was partly superstitious. For, although it was easy to make up the small sum taken, and the papers were safe in Miss Avondale's possession, yet this displacement of the only link between him and his missing benefactor, and the mystery of its disappearance, raised all his old doubts and suspicions. A vague uneasiness, a still more vague sense of some remissness on his own part, possessed him.
That the portmanteau was taken from his room during his absence with Miss Avondale that afternoon was evident. The door had been opened by a skeleton key, and as the building was deserted on Sunday, there had been no chance of interference with the thief. If mere booty had been his object, the purse would have satisfied him without his burdening himself with a portmanteau which might be identified. Nothing else in the room had been disturbed. The thief must have had some cognizance of its location, and have kept some espionage over Randolph's movements—a circumstance which added to the mystery and his disquiet. He placed a description of his loss with the police authorities, but their only idea of recovering it was by leaving that description with pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, a proceeding that Randolph instinctively felt was in vain.
A singular but instinctive reluctance to inform Miss Avondale of his loss kept him from calling upon her for the first few days. When he did, she seemed concerned at the news, although far from participating in his superstition or his suspicions.
“You still have the letter and photograph—whatever they may be worth—for identification,” she said dryly, “although Bobby cannot remember about the letter. He thinks he went once with his father to a photographer and had a picture taken, but he cannot remember seeing it afterward.” She was holding them in her hand, and Randolph almost mechanically took them from her and put them in his pocket. He would not, perhaps, have noticed his own brusqueness had she not looked a little surprised, and, he thought, annoyed. “Are you quite sure you won't lose them?” she said gently. “Perhaps I had better keep them for you.”
“I shall seal them up and put them in the bank safe,” he said quickly. He could not tell whether his sudden resolution was an instinct or the obstinacy that often comes to an awkward man. “But,” he added, coloring, “I shall always regret the loss of the portmanteau, for it was the means of bringing us together.”
“I thought it was the umbrella,” said Miss Avondale dryly.
She had once before halted him on the perilous edge of sentiment by a similar cynicism, but this time it cut him deeply. For he could not be blind to the fact that she treated him like a mere boy, and in dispelling the illusions of his instincts and beliefs seemed as if intent upon dispelling his illusions of HER; and in her half-smiling abstraction he read only the well-bred toleration of one who is beginning to be bored. He made his excuses early and went home. Nevertheless, although regretting he had not left her the letter and photograph, he deposited them in the bank safe the next day, and tried to feel that he had vindicated his character for grown-up wisdom.
Then, in his conflicting emotions, he punished himself, after the fashion of youth, by avoiding the beloved one's presence for several days. He did this in the belief that it would enable him to make up his mind whether to reveal his real feelings to her, and perhaps there was the more alluring hope that his absence might provoke some manifestations of sentiment on her part. But she made no sign. And then came a reaction in his feelings, with a heightened sense of loyalty to his benefactor. For, freed of any illusion or youthful fancy now, a purely unselfish gratitude to the unknown man filled his heart. In the lapse of his sentiment he clung the more closely to this one honest romance of his life.
One afternoon, at the close of business, he was a little astonished to receive a message from Mr. Dingwall, the deputy manager, that he wished to see him in his private office. He was still more astonished when Mr. Dingwall, after offering him a chair, stood up with his hands under his coat tails before the fireplace, and, with a hesitancy half reserved, half courteous, but wholly English, said,—
“I—er—would be glad, Mr. Trent, if you would—er—give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-morrow.”
Randolph, still amazed, stammered his acceptance.
“There will be—er—a young lady in whom you were—er—interested some time ago. Er—Miss Avondale.”
Randolph, feeling he was coloring, and uncertain whether he should speak of having met her since, contented himself with expressing his delight.
“In fact,” continued Mr. Dingwall, clearing his throat as if he were also clearing his conscience of a tremendous secret, “she—er—mentioned your name. There is Sir William Dornton coming also. Sir William has recently succeeded his elder brother, who—er—it seems, was the gentleman you were inquiring about when you first came here, and who, it is now ascertained, was drowned in the bay a few months ago. In fact—er—it is probable that you were the last one who saw him alive. I thought I would tell you,” continued Mr. Dingwall, settling his chin more comfortably in his checked cravat, “in case Sir William should speak of him to you.”
Randolph was staggered. The abrupt revelation of his benefactor's name and fate, casually coupled with an invitation to dinner, shocked and confounded him. Perhaps Mr. Dingwall noticed it and misunderstood the cause, for he added in parenthetical explanation: “Yes, the man whose portmanteau you took charge of is dead; but you did your duty, Mr. Trent, in the matter, although the recovery of the portmanteau was unessential to the case.”
“Dead,” repeated Randolph, scarcely heeding him. “But is it true? Are they sure?”
Mr. Dingwall elevated his eyebrows. “The large property at stake of course rendered the most satisfactory proofs of it necessary. His father had died only a month previous, and of course they were seeking the presumptive heir, the so-called 'Captain John Dornton'—your man—when they made the discovery of his death.”
Randolph thought of the strange body at the wharf, of the coroner's vague verdict, and was unconvinced. “But,” he said impulsively, “there was a child.” He checked himself as he remembered this was one of Miss Avondale's confidences to him.
“Ah—Miss Avondale has spoken of a child?” said Mr. Dingwall dryly.
“I saw her with one which she said was Captain Dornton's, which had been left in her care after the death of his wife,” said Randolph in hurried explanation.
“John Dornton had no WIFE,” said Mr. Dingwall severely. “The boy is a natural son. Captain John lived a wild, rough, and—er—an eccentric life.”
“I thought—I understood from Miss Avondale that he was married,” stammered the young man.
“In your rather slight acquaintance with that young lady I should imagine she would have had some delicacy in telling you otherwise,” returned Mr. Dingwall primly.
Randolph felt the truth of this, and was momentarily embarrassed. Yet he lingered.
“Has Miss Avondale known of this discovery long?” he asked.
“About two weeks, I should say,” returned Mr. Dingwall. “She was of some service to Sir William in getting up certain proofs he required.”
It was three weeks since she had seen Randolph, yet it would have been easy for her to communicate the news to him. In these three weeks his romance of their common interest in his benefactor—even his own dream of ever seeing him again—had been utterly dispelled.
It was in no social humor that he reached Dingwall's house the next evening. Yet he knew the difficulty of taking an aggressive attitude toward his previous idol or of inviting a full explanation from her then.
The guests, with the exception of himself and Miss Avondale, were all English. She, self-possessed and charming in evening dress, nodded to him with her usual mature patronage, but did not evince the least desire to seek him for any confidential aside. He noticed the undoubted resemblance of Sir William Dornton to his missing benefactor, and yet it produced a singular repulsion in him, rather than any sympathetic predilection. At table he found that Miss Avondale was separated from him, being seated beside the distinguished guest, while he was placed next to the young lady he had taken down—a Miss Eversleigh, the cousin of Sir William. She was tall, and Randolph's first impression of her was that she was stiff and constrained—an impression he quickly corrected at the sound of her voice, her frank ingenuousness, and her unmistakable youth. In the habit of being crushed by Miss Avondale's unrelenting superiority, he found himself apparently growing up beside this tall English girl, who had the naivete of a child. After a few commonplaces she suddenly turned her gray eyes on his, and said,—
“Didn't you like Jack? I hope you did. Oh, say you did—do!”
“You mean Captain John Dornton?” said Randolph, a little confused.
“Yes, of course; HIS brother”—glancing toward Sir William. “We always called him Jack, though I was ever so little when he went away. No one thought of calling him anything else but Jack. Say you liked him!”
“I certainly did,” returned Randolph impulsively. Then checking himself, he added, “I only saw him once, but I liked his face and manner—and—he was very kind to me.”
“Of course he was,” said the young girl quickly. “That was only like him, and yet”—lowering her voice slightly—“would you believe that they all say he was wild and wicked and dissipated? And why? Fancy! Just because he didn't care to stay at home and shoot and hunt and race and make debts, as heirs usually do. No, he wanted to see the world and do something for himself. Why, when he was quite young, he could manage a boat like any sailor. Dornton Hall, their place, is on the coast, you know, and they say that, just for adventure's sake, after he went away, he shipped as first mate somewhere over here on the Pacific, and made two or three voyages. You know—don't you?—and how every one was shocked at such conduct in the heir.”
Her face was so girlishly animated, with such sparkle of eye and responsive color, that he could hardly reconcile it with her first restraint or with his accepted traditions of her unemotional race, or, indeed, with her relationship to the principal guest. His latent feeling of gratitude to the dead man warmed under the young girl's voice.
“It's so dreadful to think of him as drowned, you know, though even that they put against him,” she went on hurriedly, “for they say he was probably drowned in some drunken fit—fell through the wharf or something shocking and awful—worse than suicide. But”—she turned her frank young eyes upon him again—“YOU saw him on the wharf that night, and you could tell how he looked.”
“He was as sober as I was,” returned Randolph indignantly, as he recalled the incident of the flask and the dead man's caution. From recalling it to repeating it followed naturally, and he presently related the whole story of his meeting with Captain Dornton to the brightly interested eyes beside him. When he had finished, she leaned toward him in girlish confidence, and said:—
“Yes; but EVEN THAT they tell to show how intoxicated be must have been to have given up his portmanteau to an utter stranger like you.” She stopped, colored, and yet, reflecting his own half smile, she added: “You know what I mean. For they all agree how nice it was of you not to take any advantage of his condition, and Dingwall said your honesty and faithfulness struck Revelstoke so much that he made a place for you at the bank. Now I think,” she continued, with delightful naivete, “it was a proof of poor Jack's BEING PERFECTLY SOBER, that he knew whom he was trusting, and saw just what you were, at once. There! But I suppose you must not talk to me any longer, but must make yourself agreeable to some one else. But it was very nice of you to tell me all this. I wish you knew my guardian. You'd like him. Do you ever go to England? Do come and see us.”
These confidences had not been observed by the others, and Miss Avondale appeared to confine her attentions to Sir William, who seemed to be equally absorbed, except that once he lifted his eyes toward Randolph, as if in answer to some remark from her. It struck Randolph that he was the subject of their conversation, and this did not tend to allay the irritation of a mind already wounded by the contrast of HER lack of sympathy for the dead man who had befriended and trusted her to the simple faith of the girl beside him, who was still loyal to a mere childish recollection.
After the ladies had rustled away, Sir William moved his seat beside Randolph. His manner seemed to combine Mr. Dingwall's restraint with a certain assumption of the man of the world, more notable for its frankness than its tactfulness.
“Sad business this of my brother's, eh,” he said, lighting a cigar; “any way you take it, eh? You saw him last, eh?” The interrogating word, however, seemed to be only an exclamation of habit, for he seldom waited for an answer.
“I really don't know,” said Randolph, “as I saw him only ONCE, and he left me on the wharf. I know no more where he went to then than where he came from before. Of course you must know all the rest, and how he came to be drowned.”
“Yes; it really did not matter much. The whole question was identification and proof of death, you know. Beastly job, eh?”
“Was that his body YOU were helping to get ashore at the wharf one Sunday?” asked Randolph bluntly, now fully recognizing the likeness that had puzzled him in Sir William. “I didn't see any resemblance.”
“Precious few would. I didn't—though it's true I hadn't seen him for eight years. Poor old chap been knocked about so he hadn't a feature left, eh? But his shipmate knew him, and there were his traps on the ship.”
Then, for the first time, Randolph heard the grim and sordid details of John Dornton's mysterious disappearance. He had arrived the morning before that eventful day on an Australian bark as the principal passenger. The vessel itself had an evil repute, and was believed to have slipped from the hands of the police at Melbourne. John Dornton had evidently amassed a considerable fortune in Australia, although an examination of his papers and effects showed it to be in drafts and letters of credit and shares, and that he had no ready money—a fact borne out by the testimony of his shipmates. The night he arrived was spent in an orgy on board ship, which he did not leave until the early evening of the next day, although, after his erratic fashion, he had ordered a room at a hotel. That evening he took ashore a portmanteau, evidently intending to pass the night at his hotel. He was never seen again, although some of the sailors declared that they had seen him on the wharf WITHOUT THE PORTMANTEAU, and they had drunk together at a low grog shop on the street corner. He had evidently fallen through some hole in the wharf. As he was seen only with the sailors, who also knew he had no ready money on his person, there was no suspicion of foul play.
“For all that, don't you know,” continued Sir William, with a forced laugh, which struck Randolph as not only discordant, but as having an insolent significance, “it might have been a deuced bad business for YOU, eh? Last man who was with him, eh? In possession of his portmanteau, eh? Wearing his clothes, eh? Awfully clever of you to go straight to the bank with it. 'Pon my word, my legal man wanted to pounce down on you as 'accessory' until I and Dingwall called him off. But it's all right now.”
Randolph's antagonism to the man increased. “The investigation seems to have been peculiar,” he said dryly, “for, if I remember rightly, at the coroner's inquest on the body I saw you with, the verdict returned was of the death of an UNKNOWN man.”
“Yes; we hadn't clear proof of identity then,” he returned coolly, “but we had a reexamination of the body before witnesses afterward, and a verdict according to the facts. That was kept out of the papers in deference to the feelings of the family and friends. I fancy you wouldn't have liked to be cross-examined before a stupid jury about what you were doing with Jack's portmanteau, even if WE were satisfied with it.”
“I should have been glad to testify to the kindness of your brother, at any risk,” returned Randolph stoutly. “You have heard that the portmanteau was stolen from me, but the amount of money it contained has been placed in Mr. Dingwall's hands for disposal.”
“Its contents were known, and all that's been settled,” returned Sir William, rising. “But,” he continued, with his forced laugh, which to Randolph's fancy masked a certain threatening significance, “I say, it would have been a beastly business, don't you know, if you HAD been called upon to produce it again—ha, ha!—eh?”
Returning to the dining room, Randolph found Miss Avondale alone on a corner of the sofa. She swept her skirts aside as he approached, as an invitation for him to sit beside her. Still sore from his experience, he accepted only in the hope that she was about to confide to him her opinion of this strange story. But, to his chagrin, she looked at him over her fan with a mischievous tolerance. “You seemed more interested in the cousin than the brother of your patron.”
Once Randolph might have been flattered at this. But her speech seemed to him only an echo of the general heartlessness. “I found Miss Eversleigh very sympathetic over the fate of the unfortunate man, whom nobody else here seems to care for,” said Randolph coldly.
“Yes,” returned Miss Avondale composedly; “I believe she was a great friend of Captain Dornton when she was quite a child, and I don't think she can expect much from Sir William, who is very different from his brother. In fact, she was one of the relatives who came over here in quest of the captain, when it was believed he was living and the heir. He was quite a patron of hers.”
“But was he not also one of yours?” said Randolph bluntly.
“I think I told you I was the friend of the boy and of poor Paquita, the boy's mother,” said Miss Avondale quietly. “I never saw Captain Dornton but twice.”
Randolph noticed that she had not said “wife,” although in her previous confidences she had so described the mother. But, as Dingwall had said, why should she have exposed the boy's illegitimacy to a comparative stranger; and if she herself had been deceived about it, why should he expect her to tell him? And yet—he was not satisfied.
He was startled by a little laugh. “Well, I declare, you look as if you resented the fact that your benefactor had turned out to be a baronet—just as in some novel—and that you have rendered a service to the English aristocracy. If you are thinking of poor Bobby,” she continued, without the slightest show of self-consciousness, “Sir William will provide for him, and thinks of taking him to England to restore his health. Now”—with her smiling, tolerant superiority—“you must go and talk to Miss Eversleigh. I see her looking this way, and I don't think she half likes me as it is.”
Randolph, who, however, also saw that Sir William was lounging toward them, here rose formally, as if permitting the latter to take the vacated seat. This partly imposed on him the necessity of seeking Miss Eversleigh, who, having withdrawn to the other end of the room, was turning over the leaves of an album. As Randolph joined her, she said, without looking up, “Is Miss Avondale a friend of yours?”
The question was so pertinent to his reflections at the moment that he answered impulsively, “I really don't know.”
“Yes, that's the answer, I think, most of her acquaintances would give, if they were asked the same question and replied honestly,” said the young girl, as if musing.
“Even Sir William?” suggested Randolph, half smiling, yet wondering at her unlooked-for serious shrewdness as he glanced toward the sofa.
“Yes; but HE wouldn't care. You see, there would be a pair of them.” She stopped with a slight blush, as if she had gone too far, but corrected herself in her former youthful frankness: “You don't mind my saying what I did of her? You're not such a PARTICULAR friend?”
“We both owe a debt of gratitude to your cousin Jack,” said Randolph, in some embarrassment.
“Yes, but YOU feel it and she doesn't. So that doesn't make you friends.”
“But she has taken good care of Captain Dornton's child,” suggested Randolph loyally.
He stopped, however, feeling that he was on dangerous ground. But Miss Eversleigh put her own construction on his reticence, and said,—
“I don't think she cares for it much—or for ANY children.”
Randolph remembered his own impression the only time he had ever seen her with the child, and was struck with the young girl's instinct again coinciding with his own. But, possibly because he knew he could never again feel toward Miss Avondale as he had, he was the more anxious to be just, and he was about to utter a protest against this general assumption, when the voice of Sir William broke in upon them. He was taking his leave—and the opportunity of accompanying Miss Avondale to her lodgings on the way to his hotel. He lingered a moment over his handshaking with Randolph.
“Awfully glad to have met you, and I fancy you're awfully glad to get rid of what they call your 'trust.' Must have given you a beastly lot of bother, eh—might have given you more?”
He nodded familiarly to Miss Eversleigh, and turned away with Miss Avondale, who waved her usual smiling patronage to Randolph, even including his companion in that half-amused, half-superior salutation. Perhaps it was this that put a sudden hauteur into the young girl's expression as she stared at Miss Avondale's departing figure.
“If you ever come to England, Mr. Trent,” she said, with a pretty dignity in her youthful face, “I hope you will find some people not quite so rude as my cousin and”—
“Miss Avondale, you would say,” returned Randolph quietly. “As to HER, I am quite accustomed to her maturer superiority, which, I am afraid, is the effect of my own youth and inexperience; and I believe that, in course of time, your cousin's brusqueness might be as easily understood by me. I dare say,” he added, with a laugh, “that I must seem to them a very romantic visionary with my 'trust,' and the foolish importance I have put upon a very trivial occurrence.”
“I don't think so,” said the girl quickly, “and I consider Bill very rude, and,” she added, with a return of her boyish frankness, “I shall tell him so. As for Miss Avondale, she's AT LEAST thirty, I understand; perhaps she can't help showing it in that way, too.”
But here Randolph, to evade further personal allusions, continued laughingly: “And as I've LOST my 'trust,' I haven't even that to show in defense. Indeed, when you all are gone I shall have nothing to remind me of my kind benefactor. It will seem like a dream.”
Miss Eversleigh was silent for a moment, and then glanced quickly around her. The rest of the company were their elders, and, engaged in conversation at the other end of the apartment, had evidently left the young people to themselves.
“Wait a moment,” she said, with a youthful air of mystery and earnestness. Randolph saw that she had slipped an Indian bracelet, profusely hung with small trinkets, from her arm to her wrist, and was evidently selecting one. It proved to be a child's tiny ring with a small pearl setting. “This was given to me by Cousin Jack,” said Miss Eversleigh in a low voice, “when I was a child, at some frolic or festival, and I have kept it ever since. I brought it with me when we came here as a kind of memento to show him. You know that is impossible now. You say you have nothing of his to keep. Will you accept this? I know he would be glad to know you had it. You could wear it on your watch chain. Don't say no, but take it.”
Protesting, yet filled with a strange joy and pride, Randolph took it from the young girl's hand. The little color which had deepened on her cheek cleared away as he thanked her gratefully, and with a quiet dignity she arose and moved toward the others. Randolph did not linger long after this, and presently took his leave of his host and hostess.
It seemed to him that he walked home that night in the whirling clouds of his dispelled dream. The airy structure he had built up for the last three months had collapsed. The enchanted canopy under which he had stood with Miss Avondale was folded forever. The romance he had evolved from his strange fortune had come to an end, not prosaically, as such romances are apt to do, but with a dramatic termination which, however, was equally fatal to his hopes. At any other time he might have projected the wildest hopes from the fancy that he and Miss Avondale were orphaned of a common benefactor; but it was plain that her interests were apart from his. And there was an indefinable something he did not understand, and did not want to understand, in the story she had told him. How much of it she had withheld, not so much from delicacy or contempt for his understanding as a desire to mislead him, he did not know. His faith in her had gone with his romance. It was not strange that the young English girl's unsophisticated frankness and simple confidences lingered longest in his memory, and that when, a few days later, Mr. Dingwall informed him that Miss Avondale had sailed for England with the Dornton family, he was more conscious of a loss in the stranger girl's departure.
“I suppose Miss Avondale takes charge of—of the boy, sir?” he said quietly.
Mr. Dingwall gave him a quick glance. “Possibly. Sir William has behaved with great—er—consideration,” he replied briefly.
IV
Randolph's nature was too hopeful and recuperative to allow him to linger idly in the past. He threw himself into his work at the bank with his old earnestness and a certain simple conscientiousness which, while it often provoked the raillery of his fellow clerks, did not escape the eyes of his employers. He was advanced step by step, and by the end of the year was put in charge of the correspondence with banks and agencies. He had saved some money, and had made one or two profitable investments. He was enabled to take better apartments in the same building he had occupied. He had few of the temptations of youth. His fear of poverty and his natural taste kept him from the speculative and material excesses of the period. A distrust of his romantic weakness kept him from society and meaner entanglements which might have beset his good looks and good nature. He worked in his rooms at night and forbore his old evening rambles.
As the year wore on to the anniversary of his arrival, he thought much of the dead man who had inspired his fortunes, and with it a sense of his old doubts and suspicions revived. His reason had obliged him to accept the loss of the fateful portmanteau as an ordinary theft; his instinct remained unconvinced. There was no superstition connected with his loss. His own prosperity had not been impaired by it. On the contrary, he reflected bitterly that the dead man had apparently died only to benefit others. At such times he recalled, with a pleasure that he knew might become perilous, the tall English girl who had defended Dornton's memory and echoed his own sympathy. But that was all over now.
One stormy night, not unlike that eventful one of his past experience, Randolph sought his rooms in the teeth of a southwest gale. As he buffeted his way along the rain-washed pavement of Montgomery Street, it was not strange that his thoughts reverted to that night and the memory of his dead protector. But reaching his apartment, he sternly banished them with the vanished romance they revived, and lighting his lamp, laid out his papers in the prospect of an evening of uninterrupted work. He was surprised, however, after a little interval, by the sound of uncertain and shuffling steps on the half-lighted passage outside, the noise of some heavy article set down on the floor, and then a tentative knock at his door. A little impatiently he called, “Come in.”
The door opened slowly, and out of the half obscurity of the passage a thickset figure lurched toward him into the full light of the room. Randolph half rose, and then sank back into his chair, awed, spellbound, and motionless. He saw the figure standing plainly before him; he saw distinctly the familiar furniture of his room, the storm-twinkling lights in the windows opposite, the flash of passing carriage lamps in the street below. But the figure before him was none other than the dead man of whom he had just been thinking.
The figure looked at him intently, and then burst into a fit of unmistakable laughter. It was neither loud nor unpleasant, and yet it provoked a disagreeable recollection. Nevertheless, it dissipated Randolph's superstitious tremor, for he had never before heard of a ghost who laughed heartily.
“You don't remember me,” said the man. “Belay there, and I'll freshen your memory.” He stepped back to the door, opened it, put his arm out into the hall, and brought in a portmanteau, closed the door, and appeared before Randolph again with the portmanteau in his hand. It was the one that had been stolen. “There!” he said.
“Captain Dornton,” murmured Randolph.
The man laughed again and flung down the portmanteau. “You've got my name pat enough, lad, I see; but I reckoned you'd have spotted ME without that portmanteau.”
“I see you've got it back,” stammered Randolph in his embarrassment. “It was—stolen from me.”
Captain Dornton laughed again, dropped into a chair, rubbed his hands on his knees, and turned his face toward Randolph. “Yes; I stole it—or had it stolen—the same thing, for I'm responsible.”
“But I would have given it up to YOU at once,” said Randolph reproachfully, clinging to the only idea he could understand in his utter bewilderment. “I have religiously and faithfully kept it for you, with all its contents, ever since—you disappeared.”
“I know it, lad,” said Captain Dornton, rising, and extending a brown, weather-beaten hand which closed heartily on the young man's; “no need to say that. And you've kept it even better than you know. Look here!”
He lifted the portmanteau to his lap and disclosed BEHIND the usual small pouch or pocket in the lid a slit in the lining. “Between the lining and the outer leather,” he went on grimly, “I had two or three bank notes that came to about a thousand dollars, and some papers, lad, that, reckoning by and large, might be worth to me a million. When I got that portmanteau back they were all there, gummed in, just as I had left them. I didn't show up and come for them myself, for I was lying low at the time, and—no offense, lad—I didn't know how you stood with a party who was no particular friend of mine. An old shipmate whom I set to watch that party quite accidentally run across your bows in the ferry boat, and heard enough to make him follow in your wake here, where he got the portmanteau. It's all right,” he said, with a laugh, waving aside with his brown hand Randolph's protesting gesture. “The old bag's only got back to its rightful owner. It mayn't have been got in shipshape 'Frisco style, but when a man's life is at stake, at least, when it's a question of his being considered dead or alive, he's got to take things as he finds 'em, and I found 'em d—- bad.”
In a flash of recollection Randolph remembered the obtruding miner on the ferry boat, the same figure on the wharf corner, and the advantage taken of his absence with Miss Avondale. And Miss Avondale was the “party” this man's shipmate was watching! He felt his face crimsoning, yet he dared not question him further, nor yet defend her. Captain Dornton noticed it, and with a friendly tact, which Randolph had not expected of him, rising again, laid his hand gently on the young man's shoulder.
“Look here, lad,” he said, with his pleasant smile; “don't you worry your head about the ways or doings of the Dornton family, or any of their friends. They're a queer lot—including your humble servant. You've done the square thing accordin' to your lights. You've ridden straight from start to finish, with no jockeying, and I shan't forget it. There are only two men who haven't failed me when I trusted them. One was you when I gave you my portmanteau; the other was Jack Redhill when he stole it from you.”
He dropped back in his chair again, and laughed silently.
“Then you did not fall overboard as they supposed,” stammered Randolph at last.
“Not much! But the next thing to it. It wasn't the water that I took in that knocked me out, my lad, but something stronger. I was shanghaied.”
“Shanghaied?” repeated Randolph vacantly.
“Yes, shanghaied! Hocused! Drugged at that gin mill on the wharf by a lot of crimps, who, mistaking me for a better man, shoved me, blind drunk and helpless, down the steps into a boat, and out to a short-handed brig in the stream. When I came to I was outside the Heads, pointed for Guayaquil. When they found they'd captured, not a poor Jack, but a man who'd trod a quarterdeck, who knew, and was known at every port on the trading line, and who could make it hot for them, they were glad to compromise and set me ashore at Acapulco, and six weeks later I landed in 'Frisco.”
“Safe and sound, thank Heaven!” said Randolph joyously.
“Not exactly, lad,” said Captain Dornton grimly, “but dead and sat upon by the coroner, and my body comfortably boxed up and on its way to England.”
“But that was nine months ago. What have you been doing since? Why didn't you declare yourself then?” said Randolph impatiently, a little irritated by the man's extreme indifference. He really talked like an amused spectator of his own misfortunes.
“Steady, lad. I know what you're going to say. I know all that happened. But the first thing I found when I got back was that the shanghai business had saved my life; that but for that I would have really been occupying that box on its way to England, instead of the poor devil who was taken for me.”
A cold tremor passed over Randolph. Captain Dornton, however, was tolerantly smiling.
“I don't understand,” said Randolph breathlessly.
Captain Dornton rose and, walking to the door, looked out into the passage; then he shut the door carefully and returned, glancing about the room and at the storm-washed windows. “I thought I heard some one outside. I'm lying low just now, and only go out at night, for I don't want this thing blown before I'm ready. Got anything to drink here?”
Randolph replied by taking a decanter of whiskey and glasses from a cupboard. The captain filled his glass, and continued with the same gentle but exasperating nonchalance, “Mind my smoking?”
“Not at all,” said Randolph, pushing a cigar toward him. But the captain put it aside, drew from his pocket a short black clay pipe, stuffed it with black “Cavendish plug,” which he had first chipped off in the palm of his hand with a large clasp knife, lighted it, and took a few meditative whiffs. Then, glancing at Randolph's papers, he said, “I'm not keeping you from your work, lad?” and receiving a reply in the negative, puffed at his pipe and once more settled himself comfortably in his chair, with his dark, bearded profile toward Randolph.
“You were saying just now you didn't understand,” he went on slowly, without looking up; “so you must take your own bearings from what I'm telling you. When I met you that night I had just arrived from Melbourne. I had been lucky in some trading speculations I had out there, and I had some bills with me, but no money except what I had tucked in the skin of that portmanteau and a few papers connected with my family at home. When a man lives the roving kind of life I have, he learns to keep all that he cares for under his own hat, and isn't apt to blab to friends. But it got out in some way on the voyage that I had money, and as there was a mixed lot of 'Sydney ducks' and 'ticket of leave men' on board, it seems they hatched a nice little plot to waylay me on the wharf on landing, rob me, and drop me into deep water. To make it seem less suspicious, they associated themselves with a lot of crimps who were on the lookout for our sailors, who were going ashore that night too. I'd my suspicions that a couple of those men might be waiting for me at the end of the wharf. I left the ship just a minute or two before the sailors did. Then I met you. That meeting, my lad, was my first step toward salvation. For the two men let you pass with my portmanteau, which they didn't recognize, as I knew they would ME, and supposed you were a stranger, and lay low, waiting for me. I, who went into the gin-mill with the other sailors, was foolish enough to drink, and was drugged and crimped as they were. I hadn't thought of that. A poor devil of a ticket of leave man, about my size, was knocked down for me, and,” he added, suppressing a laugh, “will be buried, deeply lamented, in the chancel of Dornton Church. While the row was going on, the skipper, fearing to lose other men, warped out into the stream, and so knew nothing of what happened to me. When they found what they thought was my body, he was willing to identify it in the hope that the crime might be charged to the crimps, and so did the other sailor witnesses. But my brother Bill, who had just arrived here from Callao, where he had been hunting for me, hushed it up to prevent a scandal. All the same, Bill might have known the body wasn't mine, even though he hadn't seen me for years.”
“But it was frightfully disfigured, so that even I, who saw you only once, could not have sworn it was NOT you,” said Randolph quickly.
“Humph!” said Captain Dornton musingly. “Bill may have acted on the square—though he was in a d——d hurry.”
“But,” said Randolph eagerly, “you will put an end to all this now. You will assert yourself. You have witnesses to prove your identity.”
“Steady, lad,” said the captain, waving his pipe gently. “Of course I have. But”—he stopped, laid down his pipe, and put his hands doggedly in his pockets—“IS IT WORTH IT?” Seeing the look of amazement in Randolph's face, he laughed his low laugh, and settled himself back in his chair again. “No,” he said quietly, “if it wasn't for my son, and what's due him as my heir, I suppose—I reckon I'd just chuck the whole d——d thing.”
“What!” said Randolph. “Give up the property, the title, the family honor, the wrong done to your reputation, the punishment”—He hesitated, fearing he had gone too far.
Captain Dornton withdrew his pipe from his mouth with a gesture of caution, and holding it up, said: “Steady, lad. We'll come to THAT by and by. As to the property and title, I cut and run from THEM ten years ago. To me they meant only the old thing—the life of a country gentleman, the hunting, the shooting, the whole beastly business that the land, over there, hangs like a millstone round your neck. They meant all this to me, who loved adventure and the sea from my cradle. I cut the property, for I hated it, and I hate it still. If I went back I should hear the sea calling me day and night; I should feel the breath of the southwest trades in every wind that blew over that tight little island yonder; I should be always scenting the old trail, lad, the trail that leads straight out of the Gate to swoop down to the South Seas. Do you think a man who has felt his ship's bows heave and plunge under him in the long Pacific swell—just ahead of him a reef breaking white into the lagoon, and beyond a fence of feathery palms—cares to follow hounds over gray hedges under a gray November sky? And the society? A man who's got a speaking acquaintance in every port from Acapulco to Melbourne, who knows every den and every longshoreman in it from a South American tienda to a Samoan beach-comber's hut,—what does he want with society?” He paused as Randolph's eyes were fixed wonderingly on the first sign of emotion on his weather-beaten face, which seemed for a moment to glow with the strength and freshness of the sea, and then said, with a laugh: “You stare, lad. Well, for all the Dorntons are rather proud of their family, like as not there was some beastly old Danish pirate among them long ago, and I've got a taste of his blood in me. But I'm not quite as bad as that yet.”
He laughed, and carelessly went on: “As to the family honor, I don't see that it will be helped by my ripping up the whole thing and perhaps showing that Bill was a little too previous in identifying me. As to my reputation, that was gone after I left home, and if I hadn't been the legal heir they wouldn't have bothered their heads about me. My father had given me up long ago, and there isn't a man, woman, or child that wouldn't now welcome Bill in my place.”
“There is one who wouldn't,” said Randolph impulsively.
“You mean Caroline Avondale?” said Captain Dornton dryly.
Randolph colored. “No; I mean Miss Eversleigh, who was with your brother.”
Captain Dornton reflected. “To be sure! Sibyl Eversleigh! I haven't seen her since she was so high. I used to call her my little sweetheart. So Sybby remembered Cousin Jack and came to find him? But when did you meet her?” he asked suddenly, as if this was the only detail of the past which had escaped him, fixing his frank eyes upon Randolph.
The young man recounted at some length the dinner party at Dingwall's, his conversation with Miss Eversleigh, and his interview with Sir William, but spoke little of Miss Avondale. To his surprise, the captain listened smilingly, and only said: “That was like Billy to take a rise out of you by pretending you were suspected. That's his way—a little rough when you don't know him and he's got a little grog amidships. All the same, I'd have given something to have heard him 'running' you, when all the while you had the biggest bulge on him, only neither of you knew it.” He laughed again, until Randolph, amazed at his levity and indifference, lost his patience.
“Do you know,” he said bluntly, “that they don't believe you were legally married?”
But Captain Dornton only continued to laugh, until, seeing his companion's horrified face, he became demure. “I suppose Bill didn't, for Bill had sense enough to know that otherwise he would have to take a back seat to Bobby.”
“But did Miss Avondale know you were legally married, and that your son was the heir?” asked Randolph bluntly.
“She had no reason to suspect otherwise, although we were married secretly. She was an old friend of my wife, not particularly of mine.”
Randolph sat back amazed and horrified. Those were HER own words. Or was this man deceiving him as the others had?
But the captain, eying him curiously, but still amusedly, added: “I even thought of bringing her as one of my witnesses, until”—
“Until what?” asked Randolph quickly, as he saw the captain had hesitated.
“Until I found she wasn't to be trusted; until I found she was too thick with Bill,” said the captain bluntly. “And now she's gone to England with him and the boy, I suppose she'll make him come to terms.”
“Come to terms?” echoed Randolph. “I don't understand.” Yet he had an instinctive fear that he did.
“Well,” said the captain slowly, “suppose she might prefer the chance of being the wife of a grown-up baronet to being the governess of one who was only a minor? She's a cute girl,” he added dryly.
“But,” said Randolph indignantly, “you have other witnesses, I hope.”
“Of course I have. I've got the Spanish records now from the Callao priest, and they're put in a safe place should anything happen to me—if anything could happen to a dead man!” he added grimly. “These proofs were all I was waiting for before I made up my mind whether I should blow the whole thing, or let it slide.”
Randolph looked again with amazement at this strange man who seemed so indifferent to the claims of wealth, position, and even to revenge. It seemed inconceivable, and yet he could not help being impressed with his perfect sincerity. He was relieved, however, when Captain Dornton rose with apparent reluctance and put away his pipe.
“Now look here, my lad, I'm right glad to have overhauled you again, whatever happened or is going to happen, and there's my hand upon it! Now, to come to business. I'm going over to England on this job, and I want you to come and help me.”
Randolph's heart leaped. The appeal revived all his old boyish enthusiasm, with his secret loyalty to the man before him. But he suddenly remembered his past illusions, and for an instant he hesitated.
“But the bank,” he stammered, scarce knowing what to say.
The captain smiled. “I will pay you better than the bank; and at the end of four months, in whatever way this job turns out, if you still wish to return here, I will see that you are secured from any loss. Perhaps you may be able to get a leave of absence. But your real object must be kept a secret from every one. Not a word of my existence or my purpose must be blown before I am ready. You and Jack Redhill are all that know it now.”
“But you have a lawyer?” said the surprised Randolph.
“Not yet. I'm my own lawyer in this matter until I get fairly under way. I've studied the law enough to know that as soon as I prove that I'm alive the case must go on on account of my heir, whether I choose to cry quits or not. And it's just THAT that holds my hand.”
Randolph stared at the extraordinary man before him. For a moment, as the strange story of his miraculous escape and his still more wonderful indifference to it all recurred to his mind, he felt a doubt of the narrator's truthfulness or his sanity. But another glance at the sailor's frank eyes dispelled that momentary suspicion. He held out his hand as frankly, and grasping Captain Dornton's, said, “I will go.”
V
Randolph's request for a four months' leave of absence was granted with little objection and no curiosity. He had acquired the confidence of his employers, and beyond Mr. Revelstoke's curt surprise that a young fellow on the road to fortune should sacrifice so much time to irrelevant travel, and the remark, “But you know your own business best,” there was no comment. It struck the young man, however, that Mr. Dingwall's slight coolness on receiving the news might be attributed to a suspicion that he was following Miss Avondale, whom he had fancied Dingwall disliked, and he quickly made certain inquiries in regard to Miss Eversleigh and the possibility of his meeting her. As, without intending it, and to his own surprise, he achieved a blush in so doing, which Dingwall noted, he received a gracious reply, and the suggestion that it was “quite proper” for him, on arriving, to send the young lady his card.
Captain Dornton, under the alias of “Captain Johns,” was ready to catch the next steamer to the Isthmus, and in two days they sailed. The voyage was uneventful, and if Randolph had expected any enthusiasm on the part of the captain in the mission on which he was now fairly launched, he would have been disappointed. Although his frankness was unchanged, he volunteered no confidences. It was evident he was fully acquainted with the legal strength of his claim, yet he, as evidently, deferred making any plan of redress until he reached England. Of Miss Eversleigh he was more communicative. “You would have liked her better, my lad, it you hadn't been bewitched by the Avondale woman, for she is the whitest of the Dorntons.” In vain Randolph protested truthfully, yet with an even more convincing color, that it had made no difference, and he HAD liked her. The captain laughed. “Ay, lad! But she's a poor orphan, with scarcely a hundred pounds a year, who lives with her guardian, an old clergyman. And yet,” he added grimly, “there are only three lives between her and the property—mine, Bobby's, and Bill's—unless HE should marry and have an heir.”
“The more reason why you should assert yourself and do what you can for her now,” said Randolph eagerly.
“Ay,” returned the captain, with his usual laugh, “when she was a child I used to call her my little sweetheart, and gave her a ring, and I reckon I promised to marry her, too, when she grew up.”
The truthful Randolph would have told him of Miss Evereleigh's gift, but unfortunately he felt himself again blushing, and fearful lest the captain would misconstrue his confusion, he said nothing.
Except on this occasion, the captain talked with Randolph chiefly of his later past,—of voyages he had made, of places they were passing, and ports they visited. He spent much of the time with the officers, and even the crew, over whom he seemed to exercise a singular power, and with whom he exhibited an odd freemasonry. To Randolph's eyes he appeared to grow in strength and stature in the salt breath of the sea, and although he was uniformly kind, even affectionate, to him, he was brusque to the other passengers, and at times even with his friends the sailors. Randolph sometimes wondered how he would treat a crew of his own. He found some answer to that question in the captain's manner to Jack Redhill, the abstractor of the portmanteau, and his old shipmate, who was accompanying the captain in some dependent capacity, but who received his master's confidences and orders with respectful devotion.
It was a cold, foggy morning, nearly two months later, that they landed at Plymouth. The English coast had been a vague blank all night, only pierced, long hours apart, by dim star-points or weird yellow beacon flashes against the horizon. And this vagueness and unreality increased on landing, until it seemed to Randolph that they had slipped into a land of dreams. The illusion was kept up as they walked in the weird shadows through half-lit streets into a murky railway station throbbing with steam and sudden angry flashes in the darkness, and then drew away into what ought to have been the open country, but was only gray plains of mist against a lost horizon. Sometimes even the vague outlook was obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into nothingness. As they crept along with the day, without, however, any lightening of the opaque vault overhead to mark its meridian, there came at times a thinning of the gray wall on either side of the track, showing the vague bulk of a distant hill, the battlemented sky line of an old-time hall, or the spires of a cathedral, but always melting back into the mist again as in a dream. Then vague stretches of gloom again, foggy stations obscured by nebulous light and blurred and moving figures, and the black relief of a tunnel. Only once the captain, catching sight of Randolph's awed face under the lamp of the smoking carriage, gave way to his long, low laugh. “Jolly place, England—so very 'Merrie.'” And then they came to a comparatively lighter, broader, and more brilliantly signaled tunnel filled with people, and as they remained in it, Randolph was told it was London. With the sensation of being only half awake, he was guided and put into a cab by his companion, and seemed to be completely roused only at the hotel.
It had been arranged that Randolph should first go down to Chillingworth rectory and call on Miss Eversleigh, and, without disclosing his secret, gather the latest news from Dornton Hall, only a few miles from Chillingworth. For this purpose he had telegraphed to her that evening, and had received a cordial response. The next morning he arose early, and, in spite of the gloom, in the glow of his youthful optimism entered the bedroom of the sleeping Captain Dornton, and shook him by the shoulder in lieu of the accolade, saying: “Rise, Sir John Dornton!”
The captain, a light sleeper, awoke quickly. “Thank you, my lad, all the same, though I don't know that I'm quite ready yet to tumble up to that kind of piping. There's a rotten old saying in the family that only once in a hundred years the eldest son succeeds. That's why Bill was so cocksure, I reckon. Well?”
“In an hour I'm off to Chillingworth to begin the campaign,” said Randolph cheerily.
“Luck to you, my boy, whatever happens. Clap a stopper on your jaws, though, now and then. I'm glad you like Sybby, but I don't want you to like her so much as to forget yourself and give me away.”
Half an hour out of London the fog grew thinner, breaking into lace-like shreds in the woods as the train sped by, or expanding into lustrous tenuity above him. Although the trees were leafless, there was some recompense in the glimpses their bare boughs afforded of clustering chimneys and gables nestling in ivy. An infinite repose had been laid upon the landscape with the withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed by heavy stone bridges much too large for them—all these were only pages of those books whose leaves he seemed to be turning over. Two hours of this fancy, and then the train stopped at a station within a mile or two of a bleak headland, a beacon, and the gray wash of a pewter-colored sea, where a hilly village street climbed to a Norman church tower and the ivied gables of a rectory.
Miss Eversleigh, dignifiedly tall, but youthfully frank, as he remembered her, was waiting to drive him in a pony trap to the rectory. A little pink, with suppressed consciousness and the responsibilities of presenting a stranger guest to her guardian, she seemed to Randolph more charming than ever.
But her first word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from Sir William, returned to America in the same ship.
“I really don't think she was quite as devoted to the poor child as all that, you know,” she continued with innocent frankness, “and Cousin Bill was certainly most kind to them both, yet there really seemed to be some coolness between them after the child's death. But,” she added suddenly, for the first time observing her companion's evident distress, and coloring in confusion, “I beg your pardon—I've been horribly rude and heartless. I dare say the poor boy was very dear to you, and of course Miss Avondale was your friend. Please forgive me!”
Randolph, intent only on that catastrophe which seemed to wreck all Captain Dornton's hopes and blunt his only purpose for declaring himself, hurriedly reassured her, yet was not sorry his agitation had been misunderstood. And what was to be done? There was no train back to London for four hours. He dare not telegraph, and if he did, could he trust to his strange patron's wise conduct under the first shock of this news to his present vacillating purpose? He could only wait.
Luckily for his ungallant abstraction, they were speedily at the rectory, where a warm welcome from Mr. Brunton, Sibyl's guardian, and his family forced him to recover himself, and showed him that the story of his devotion to John Dornton had suffered nothing from Miss Eversleigh's recital. Distraught and anxious as he was, he could not resist the young girl's offer after luncheon to show him the church with the vault of the Dorntons and the tablet erected to John Dornton, and, later, the Hall, only two miles distant. But here Randolph hesitated.
“I would rather not call on Sir William to-day,” he said.
“You need not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won't be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won't be very pleasant company.”
“Sibyl!” said the rector in good-humored protest.
“Oh, Mr. Trent has had a little of Cousin Bill's convivial manners before now,” said the young girl vivaciously, “and isn't shocked. But we can see the Hall from the park on our way to the station.”
Even in his anxious preoccupation he could see that the church itself was a quaint and wonderful preservation of the past. For four centuries it had been sacred to the tombs of the Dorntons and their effigies in brass and marble, yet, as Randolph glanced at the stately sarcophagus of the unknown ticket of leave man, its complacent absurdity, combined with his nervousness, made him almost hysterical. Yet again, it seemed to him that something of the mystery and inviolability of the past now invested that degraded dust, and it would be an equal impiety to disturb it. Miss Eversleigh, again believing his agitation caused by the memory of his old patron, tactfully hurried him away. Yet it was a more bitter thought, I fear, that not only were his lips sealed to his charming companion on the subject in which they could sympathize, but his anxiety prevented him from availing himself of that interview to exchange the lighter confidences he had eagerly looked forward to. It seemed cruel that he was debarred this chance of knitting their friendship closer by another of those accidents that had brought them together. And he was aware that his gloomy abstraction was noticed by her. At first she drew herself up in a certain proud reserve, and then, perhaps, his own nervousness infecting her in turn, he was at last terrified to observe that, as she stood before the tomb, her clear gray eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, please don't do that—THERE, Miss Eversleigh,” he burst out impulsively.
“I was thinking of Cousin Jack,” she said, a little startled at his abruptness. “Sometimes it seems so strange that he is dead—I scarcely can believe it.”
“I meant,” stammered Randolph, “that he is much happier—you know”—he grew almost hysterical again as he thought of the captain lying cheerfully in his bed at the hotel—“much happier than you or I,” he added bitterly; “that is—I mean, it grieves me so to see YOU grieve, you know.”
Miss Eversleigh did NOT know, but there was enough sincerity and real feeling in the young fellow's voice and eyes to make her color slightly and hurry him away to a locality less fraught with emotions. In a few moments they entered the park, and the old Hall rose before them. It was a great Tudor house of mullioned windows, traceries, and battlements; of stately towers, moss-grown balustrades, and statues darkening with the fog that was already hiding the angles and wings of its huge bulk. A peacock spread its ostentatious tail on the broad stone steps before the portal; a flight of rooks from the leafless elms rose above its stacked and twisted chimneys. After all, how little had this stately incarnation of the vested rights and sacred tenures of the past in common with the laughing rover he had left in London that morning! And thinking of the destinies that the captain held so lightly in his hand, and perhaps not a little of the absurdity of his own position to the confiding young girl beside him, for a moment he half hated him.
The fog deepened as they reached the station, and, as it seemed to Randolph, made their parting still more vague and indefinite, and it was with difficulty that he could respond to the young girl's frank hope that he would soon return to them. Yet he half resolved that he would not until he could tell her all.
Nevertheless, as the train crept more and more slowly, with halting signals, toward London, he buoyed himself up with the hope that Captain Dornton would still try conclusions for his patrimony, or at least come to some compromise by which he might be restored to his rank and name. But upon these hopes the vision of that great house settled firmly upon its lands, held there in perpetuity by the dead and stretched-out hands of those that lay beneath its soil, always obtruded itself. Then the fog deepened, and the crawling train came to a dead stop at the next station. The whole line was blocked. Four precious hours were hopelessly lost.
Yet despite his impatience, he reentered London with the same dazed semi-consciousness of feeling as on the night he had first arrived. There seemed to have been no interim; his visit to the rectory and Hall, and even his fateful news, were only a dream. He drove through the same shadow to the hotel, was received by the same halo-encircled lights that had never been put out. After glancing through the halls and reading room he hurriedly made his way to his companion's room. The captain was not there. He quickly summoned the waiter. The gentleman? Yes; Captain Dornton had left with his servant, Redhill, a few hours after Mr. Trent went away. He had left no message.