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MILDRED ARKELL.

A Novel.

BY

Mrs. HENRY WOOD,

AUTHOR OF
"EAST LYNNE," "LORD OAKBURN'S DAUGHTERS," "TREVLYN HOLD,"
ETC. ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1865.

All rights of Translation and Reproduction are reserved.

LONDON:
SAVILL AND EDWARDS, PRINTERS, CHANDOS-STREET,
COVENT-GARDEN.

[CONTENTS]

MILDRED ARKELL.

[CHAPTER I.]
THE SCHOOL-BOY'S LOVE.

A brilliant evening in July. The sun had been blazing all day with intense force, glittering on the white pavement of the streets, scorching the dry and thirsty earth; and it was not until his beams shone from the very verge of the horizon that the gay butterflies of humanity ventured to come forth.

Groups were wending their way to the Bishop's Garden: not the private garden of the respected prelate who reigned over the diocese of Westerbury, but a semi-public garden-promenade called by that name. In the years long gone by, a bishop of Westerbury caused a piece of waste land belonging to the grounds of his palace to be laid out as an ornamental garden. Broad sunny walks for the cold of winter, shady winding ones for the heat of summer, shrubberies and trees, flower-beds and grass-plots, miniature rocks and a fountain, were severally formed there; and then the bishop threw it open to the public, and it had ever since gone by the name of the Bishop's Garden. Not to the public indiscriminately—only to those of superior degree; the catering for the recreation of the public indiscriminately had not come into fashion then. It had always lain especially under the patronage of the residents of the grounds, and they took care—or the Cerberus of a gatekeeper did for them—that no inferior person should dare venture within yards of it: a tradesman might not so much as put his nose through the iron railings to take a peep in.

The garden was getting full when a college boy—he might be known by his trencher—passed the gate with a slow step. A party had just gone in whose movements his eyes had eagerly followed, but he was not near enough to speak. As he looked after them wistfully, his eye caught something glittering on the ground, and he stooped and picked it up. It was a small locket of gold, bearing the initials "G. B."

He knew to whom it belonged. He would have given half his remaining life, as it seemed, to go in and restore it to its owner. But that might not be; for the college boys, whether king's scholars or private pupils, were rigorously excluded by custom from the Bishop's Garden. And Williams, the gatekeeper, was stealing up then.

He was tall of his age, looking about sixteen, though he was not quite so much; tall enough to lean over the iron railings, which he did with intense eagerness; and never did woman's face betray more beauty, whether of form or colouring, than did his.

It was Henry Arkell. For the years have gone on, and the lovely boy of ten or eleven, has grown into this handsome youth. Other people and other things have grown with him.

"Now then! What be you doing here? You just please to take yourself off, young gentleman."

He quitted the railings in obedience; the college boys never thought of disputing the orders of the gatekeeper. Stepping backwards with a sort of spring, he stepped upon the foot of some one who was approaching the gate.

"Take care, Arkell."

He turned hastily and raised his trencher. The speaker was the good-natured Bishop of Westerbury; his widowed daughter on his arm.

"I beg your lordship's pardon."

"Too intent to see me, eh! You were gazing into the garden as if you longed to be there."

"I was looking for Miss Beauclerc, sir; I thought she might be coming near the gate. I have just picked up this, which she must have dropped going in."

"How do you know it is Miss Beauclerc's?" cried the bishop, glancing at the gold locket.

"I know it's hers, sir; and her initials are on it." But Henry turned his face out of sight, as he spoke. And lest any critic should set up a cavil at the bishop being addressed as "sir," it may be as well to mention that it was the custom with the college boys. Very few of them could bring their shy lips to utter any other title.

"Go in and give it to Miss Beauclerc, if it is hers," cried the bishop.

"The gatekeeper will not let me," said Henry, with a smile. "He tells us all that it is as much as his place is worth to admit a college boy."

"They ain't fit for such a place as this, nohow, my lord," spoke up the keeper. "Once let 'em in, and they'd be for playing at hare and hounds over the flower-beds."

"Nonsense!" said the bishop. "I don't see what harm there would be in admitting the seniors. You need not be so over-strict, Williams. Come in with me, Arkell, if you wish to find Miss Beauclerc; and come in whenever you like. Do you hear, Williams, I give this young gentleman the entrée of the garden."

The bishop laid his hand on Henry's shoulder, and they walked in together, all three, his daughter on his other side. Many a surprised eye-glass was lifted; many an indignant eye regarded them.

Never yet had a college boy—St. John always excepted—ventured within the pale of that guarded place. And if the bishop and his daughter had appeared accompanied by a fiery serpent, it could not have caused more inward commotion. But nobody dared betray it: the bishop was the bishop, and not to be interfered with.

"There's Miss Beauclerc, my lad."

And in a few minutes—Henry could not tell how, in his mind's tumultuous confusion—Georgina Beauclerc had turned into a side walk with him, and they were alone. Georgina was the same Georgina as ever—impulsive, wilful, and daringly independent. Everybody paid court to the dean's daughter.

"Did you drop this in coming in, Miss Beauclerc?"

"My locket! Of course I must have dropped it. Harry, I would not have lost it for the world."

His sensitive cheek wore a crimson flush at the words. He had given it to her on her last birthday, when she was eighteen. As she took it from him, their fingers touched. That touch thrilled through his veins, while hers were unconscious, or at best heedless of the contact.

It was the not uncommon tale; the tale that has been enacted many times in life, and which Lord Byron has made familiar to us as being his own heart's history—

"The maid was on the eve of womanhood:
The boy had fewer summers; but his heart had far outgrown his years:
And to his sight there was but one fair face on earth,
And that was shining on him."

It has been intimated that Georgina Beauclerc had inherited the dean's innate taste for what is called beauty, both human and statuesque. In the dean it was very marked. This, it may have been, that first drew forth her regard for Henry Arkell. Certain it was, she saw him frequently, and took no pains to disguise her admiration. He was a great favourite of the dean's—was often invited to the deanery. That he was no common boy, in nature, mind, or form, was apparent to the dean, as it was to many others, and Dr. Beauclerc evinced his regard openly. Georgina did the same. At first she had merely liked to patronize the young college boy; rather to domineer over him, looking upon him as a child in comparison with herself. But as they grew older, the difference in their years became less marked, and now they appeared nearly of the same age, for he looked older than he was, and Georgina younger. She was very pretty, with her large, rich blue eyes, and her small, fair features.

He had grown to love her; to love her with that impassioned love, which, pure and refined though it is, can only bring unhappiness. What did he think could be the ending? Did he reflect that it was utter madness in him to love the dean's daughter? It was nothing less than madness; and there were odd moments when the truth, that it was so, rose up in his mind, turning his whole soul to faintness.

And she, Georgina Beauclerc? She liked Henry Arkell very much indeed; she took pleasure in being with him, in talking with him, in flirting with him; she was conscious of a degree of pride when the handsome boy walked, as now, by her side; she encouraged his too-evident admiration for her; but she did not love him. She loved another too deeply to have any love left for him.

And she was so utterly careless of consequences. Had it been suggested to Miss Beauclerc that she was doing a wrong thing, bordering upon a wicked one, in thus trifling with that school-boy's heart, she would have laughed in very glee, and thought it fun. Though she must have known, if she ever took the trouble to glance forward, that in the years to come, did things continue as they were now, and Henry Arkell told his love to the ear, as well as to the eye and heart, the explosion must have place, and he would know how he had been deceived. What would her excuse be? that she liked him; that she liked his companionship; that she could not afford to reject his admiration? The gratification of the present moment was paramount with Georgina.

But what was Mrs. Beauclerc about, to suffer this? Mrs. Beauclerc! Had her daughter flirted with the whole forty king's scholars on a string, and the head master's private pupils to boot, she would never have seen it; no, nor understood it if pointed out to her. Her daughter was Miss Beauclerc, a young lady of high degree, and the college boys were inferior young animals with whom it was utterly impossible Georgina could possess anything in common.

"But how did you get in here, Harry?" began Miss Beauclerc, slipping the locket on her chain. "Has crusty old Williams gone to sleep this evening?"

"The bishop brought me in. He has given Williams orders that I am to be admitted here."

"Has he? What a glorious fellow! I'll give him ten kisses for that, as I used to do when I was a little girl. And now, pray, what became of you this afternoon? You said you should be in the cloisters."

"I know. I could not get out. I was doing Greek with my father."

"Doing Greek! It's always that. 'Doing Greek,' or 'doing Latin,' it's nothing else with you everlastingly. What a wretched pedant you'll be, Harry Arkell!"

"Never, I hope. But you know I must study; I have only my talents to depend upon for advancement in life; and my father, his heart is set on seeing me a bril—a good scholar."

"You are a brilliant scholar already," grumbled Georgina, bringing out the word which his modesty had left unspoken. "There's no reason why you should be at your books morning, noon, and night. I always said Mr. Peter Arkell was a martinet from the first hour he came to drill literature into me. Which he couldn't accomplish."

"The school meets in a week or two, you know, and——"

"Tiresome young reptiles!" interjected Miss Beauclerc. "We are quieter without them."

"And I must make the best use of my holidays for study," continued Henry. "They wish me to get to Oxford early."

"Goodness me! you might go now, if that's what you mean; you know enough. Harry, I do hope when you are ordained you'll get some high preferment."

"Such luck is not for me, Miss Beauclerc. I may never get beyond a curacy; or at most a minor canonry."

"Nonsense, and double nonsense! With the influential friends you may count even now! You know that everybody makes much of you. I should like to see you dean of this cathedral."

"And you——" Henry stopped in time. A tempting vision had mentally arisen, and for the moment led him out of himself. Did Georgina scent the treason, all but uttered? She resumed volubly, hastily—

"I have a great mind to tell you something; I think I will. But don't you let it go farther, Henry, for it is a secret as yet. There's going to be a school examination."

"No!" exclaimed Henry, some consternation in his tone.

"Why! are you afraid of it?"

"I am not. But I was thinking how very unfit the school is to stand it. What will Mr. Wilberforce say?"

"There's the fun," cried Georgina in glee. "When I heard papa talking of this, I said it would drive the head master's senses upside down. The dean and chapter are going to introduce all sorts of improvements into the school."

"What can have set them on to it!" exclaimed Henry, unable to recover his surprise and concern.

"The spelling, I think," said Georgina, pursing up her pretty mouth. "Jocelyn—and he'll be the senior boy this next half, you know—wrote a letter to his aunt; she rents her house and land under old Meddler, and knows the Meddlers—visits them, in fact. What should she do but take the letter to old Meddler, and asked him whether it was not a disgrace to any civilized community. Old Meddler kept the letter and brought it here, when he came into residence last week, and showed it to papa. There were not ten words spelt right in it. Altogether, there's going to be something or other done. But I'm sure you need not look so concerned over it, Henry Arkell; you are safe."

"I am safe. Yes, thanks to my father, I have enjoyed great advantages. But I am thinking of the others."

"Serve them right! They are a lazy set. Papa said, 'I should think Henry Arkell does not write like this!' I could have answered that, you know, had I chosen to bring out some of your letters."

There was a pause of silence. The tone had been significant, and his poor heart was beating wildly. "What a lovely rose!" he exclaimed, when the silence had become painful. "I wish I dare pluck it!"

"Dare! Nonsense! Pluck it if you wish."

"I thought it was forbidden to touch the flowers here!"

"So it is," said Georgina, snapping off the rose, one of the variegated species, and a great beauty. "But I do as I please. I would pluck all the flowers in the garden for two pins, just to see the old gardener's dismay."

"What would the visitors say to you?"

"Bow to me, and wish they dare perform such feats. Pshaw! I am the dean's daughter. Here, Harry, I will make you a present of it."

She threw the rose into his hand as she spoke, and she saw what the gift was to him.

"What shall you do with it, Harry?"

"Had I plucked the rose myself, I should have given it to my mother. I shall keep it now—keep it for ever. I may not," he added, lowering his tone, and speaking, as it were, to himself, "part with your gifts."

Georgina laughed lightly, an encouraging laugh.

Oh! it was wrong; wrong of her to act so. They reached the end of the shady walk and turned again.

"How long are you going to remain in that precious choir?" resumed Georgina, "wasting your time for the public benefit."

"Mr. St. John put the very same question to me this morning. He——"

"Mr. St. John!" she interrupted, in startling, nay, wild impulse, and her face became one glow of excitement. "But what do you mean?" she added, subsiding into calmness as recollection returned to her. "He is not in Westerbury."

The words, the emotion, told their own tale; and their true meaning flashed upon his brain. It was an era in the unhappy boy's life. How was it that he had been blind all these years?

"You take a strange interest in him, Miss Beauclerc," and there seemed to be no life left in his pale face, as he turned to her with the question.

"For another's sake," she evasively answered. "I told you some time ago Frederick St. John was in love with her."

He knew to whom she alluded. "Do you think it likely that he is, Miss Beauclerc?"

"If he's not in love with herself, he is in love with her beauty," said Georgina, with a laugh. "But you know what the popular belief is—that the heir of the St. Johns, whatever he may do with his love, may only give his hand to his cousin, Lady Anne."

"I hope it is so. She is the nicest girl, and he deserves a good wife. I used to sing duets with her when she was last at the Palmery."

"Oh!" said Georgina, turning her pretty nose into the air, "and so you fell in love with her."

"No," replied Henry; "my love was not mine to give."

Another pause. Georgina snatched a second flower—a carnation this time—and began pulling it to pieces.

"I suppose you heard from him this morning?"

"Yes."

"And where is he now?"

"In Spain. But he talks of coming home."

He stole a glance at her; at the loving light that shone in her bright blue eyes; at the soft glow, red as the carnation she was despoiling, on her conscious cheek. Why did he not read the signs in all their full meaning? Why did hope struggle with the conviction that would have arisen in his heart?

"Have you his letter?"

"Yes; you can read it if you like. There are no secrets. I have told him that Miss Beauclerc was fond of looking at his letters. He is enthusiastic, as usual, on the subject of pictures."

She closed her hand upon the foreign-looking letter which he took from his jacket pocket to give to her. "I will take it home with me, and return it to you to-morrow; I can't read it now. And, Harry, I am going back to my party, or perhaps they'll be setting the crier to work. Mind you don't breathe a word of that school examination: it would not do. But I tell things to you that I'd not tell to anybody else in the world."

She ran away up a side path, and Henry made his way to the more frequented part of the garden. It happened that he found himself again with the bishop; and the prelate laid his hand, as before, on the shoulder of the handsome boy, and kept him at his side.

Mrs. Peter Arkell had not grown better with years; on the contrary, the weakness in the back was greater, and her health in other ways began to fail. A residence of some weeks at the sea-side was deemed essential for her; absolutely necessary, said her medical attendant, Mr. Lane: and indeed it was not much less necessary for Peter Arkell himself, who was always ill now. His state of health told heavily upon them. He had been obliged to give up a great portion of his teaching; and but for his ever-ready friend and relative, Mr. Arkell, whose hand was always open, and for certain five-pound notes that came sometimes in Mildred's letters, Peter had not the remotest idea how he should have got along. This going to the sea-side would have been quite out of the question, but that they had met with a fortunate chance of letting their house for two months, to a family desirous of coming to Westerbury. Lucy, of course, would go with them; but the question was—what was to be done with Henry? Travice Arkell, in his impulsive good nature, said he must stop with them, and Mr. Arkell confirmed it. Henry supposed he must, but he felt sure it would not be palatable to Mrs. Arkell.

Travice Arkell was in partnership with his father now. At the time of his leaving school there had been a visible improvement in the prospects of the manufacturers, and Mr. Arkell yielded to his son's wish to join him, and hoped that the good times were coming back again. But the improvement had not lasted long; and Mr. Arkell was wont to say that Travice had cast in his lot with a sinking ship. The designation of the firm had never been altered; it was still "George Arkell and Son." Times fluctuated very much. Just now again there was a slight improvement; and altogether Mr. Arkell was still upon the balance, to give up business or not to give it up, as he had been for so many years.

Henry walked home from the Bishop's Garden, with the strange emotion displayed by Georgina Beauclerc, at the mention of Mr. St. John, telling upon his memory and his heart. Lucy met him at the door, her sweet face radiant.

"Oh, Henry! such news! News in two ways. I don't know which to tell you first. One part concerns you."

"Tell me that first, then," said he, laughing.

"You are not to be at Mr. Arkell's while we are away. You are to be at——guess where."

"I can't guess at all. I don't know anybody who'd have me."

"At the master's."

His eye lightened as he looked up.

"Am I? I am so glad! Is it true, Lucy?"

"It is quite true. Mr. Wilberforce saw mamma at the window, and came in to ask her how she was, and when she went, and all that. Mamma said how puzzled she had been what to do with you, but it was decided now you were to go to Mr. Arkell's. So then the master said he thought you had better go to him, and he should be most happy to invite you there for the time, no matter how long we remained away; and when mamma attempted to say something about the great kindness, he interrupted her, saying you had always been so good a pupil, and given him so little trouble, and did him altogether so much credit, that he should consider the obligation was on his side. So it is quite decided, Harry, and you are to go there."

"That's good news, then. And what's the other, Lucy?"

"Ah! the other concerns me. It is good, too."

"Are you going to be married?"

The question was but spoken in jest, and Henry wondered to see his sister's face change; but she only shook her head and laughed.

"Eva Prattleton is to accompany us to the sea-side."

"Eva Prattleton!"

"Mr. Prattleton came in just after the master left," resumed Lucy. "He said he had come with a petition: would mamma take charge of Eva to the sea-side, and let her go with us? He had intended—you know we heard of it, Harry—to take his two daughters to Switzerland this summer for a treat; but he begins to fear that Eva will not be equal to the travelling, for she's not strong, and a little thing fatigues her; and he thinks a month or two of quiet at the sea-side would do her more good. So that's arranged as well as the other."

"And what will Mary do?"

"Oh, she goes to Switzerland with her papa. He has not given up his journey. The two boys are to stay at home, and George Prattleton's to take care of them."

Henry laughed. The idea of Mr. George Prattleton's taking care of the boys struck him as being something ludicrous.

"But what do you think mamma says?" added Lucy, dropping her voice. "The terms hinted at by Mr. Prattleton for Eva were so liberal, that mamma feels sure he is doing this as much to make our sojourn there more easy to us, as for Eva's benefit; though she is not well, of course, and never has been since her mother's death; the grief then seemed to take such a hold upon her. How kind to us the Prattletons have always been!"

Henry mentally echoed the words—for they were true ones—all unconscious that a time was quickly approaching when he should have to repay this kindness with something very like ingratitude.

[CHAPTER II.]
THE TOUR OF DAVID DUNDYKE, ESQUIRE.

Perhaps of all the changes time had wrought, in those connected with our history, not one was more remarkable than that in Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke, in regard to their position in the world. They had changed in themselves of course; we all change; and were now middle-aged people of some five-and-forty years: Mr. Dundyke being red and portly; his wife, thin and meek as ever.

Little by little, step by step, had David Dundyke risen in the world. There had come a day when he was made a fourth partner in that famous tea-importing house, with which he had been so long connected. He was now the third partner, and his income was a large one. There had also come a day when he was elected a common councilman (I am not sure but this has been previously mentioned), and now the old longing, the height of his ambition, was really and truly dawning upon him. In the approaching autumn he was to be proposed for sheriff; and that, as we all know, leads in time to the civic chair.

You will readily understand that it was not at all consistent for a partner in a wealthy tea house, and a common councilman rising into note and attending the civic feasts, to remain the tenant of two humble rooms. Mr. Dundyke had made a change long ago. He and his wife, clinging still to apartments, as being less trouble, and also less expense on the whole, had moved into handsome ones; and there they remained for some years. But the prospect of the shrievalty demanded something more; and latterly Mr. Dundyke had taken a handsome villa at Brixton, had furnished it well, and set himself up there with two maid servants and a footman. In some degree his old miserly habits were on him still, and he rarely spent where he could save, or launched into any extravagance unless he had an end in view in doing it; but he had never very much loved money for its own sake alone, only as means to an end.

His great care, now that the glorious end was near, was to blazon forth his importance. He wanted the world (his little world) to forget what he had been; to forget the pinching and saving, the poor way of living, the red-herring dinners, and the past in general. He did what he could to blot out the past in the present. He looked out for correspondents to address him as "esquire;" and he took to wear a ring with a crest upon it.

In this very month of July, when you saw Henry Arkell and the dean's daughter walking in the Bishop's Garden—and a very hot July it was—Mr. Dundyke came to the decision of taking a tour. What first put it into his unfortunate head to do so, his wife never knew; though she asked herself the question afterwards many and many a time. He debated the point with himself, to go or not to go, some little while; balancing the advantages against the drawbacks. On the one hand, it would cost time and money; on the other, it would certainly be another stepping-stone in his advancing greatness, the more especially if he could get the Post or some other fashionable organ to announce the departure of "David Dundyke, Esquire, and Lady, on a Continental tour."

One sultry afternoon, when Mrs. Dundyke was sewing in her own sitting-room, he returned home somewhat earlier than usual.

"My mind is made up, Mrs. Dundyke," he said, before he had had time to look round, as he came in, wiping his hot brows. "I told you I thought I should go that tour; and I mean to start as soon as we have fixed upon our route. It must be somewhere foreign."

Mr. Dundyke's intellectual improvement had not advanced in an equal ratio with his fortunes; he called tour tower, and route rout. Indeed, he spoke almost exactly as he used to speak.

"Foreign!" echoed Mrs. Dundyke, somewhat aghast. Her geographical knowledge had always been imperfect and confused; the retired life she led, occupied solely in domestic affairs, had not tended to enlarge it; and the word "foreign" suggested to her mind extremely remote parts of the globe—the two poles and Cape Horn. "Foreign?"

"One can't travel anywhere now that's not foreign, Betsey," returned Mr. Dundyke, testily. "One can't humdrum up and down England in a stage-coach, as one used to do."

"True; but you said foreign. You don't mean America—or China—or any of those parts, do you, David?"

"It's never of no use talking to you about anything, Mrs. D.," said the common-councilman, in wrath. "Chinar! Why, it would be a life-journey! I shall go to Geneva."

"But, David, is not that very far?" she asked. "Where is it? Over in Greece, or Turkey, or some of those places."

"It is in Switzerland, Mrs. D. The tip-top quality go to it, and I mean to go. It will cost a good deal, I know; but I can stand that."

"And how shall we manage to talk Swiss?"

"There is no Swiss," answered Mr. Dundyke. "The language spoke there is French; the guide-book says so."

"It will be the same to us, David," she mildly said; "we cannot speak French."

"I know that 'we' means 'yes,' and 'no' means 'no.' We shall rub on well enough with that. So get all my stockings and shirts seen to, Betsey, and your own things; for the day after to-morrow I shall be off."

His wife looked up, not believing in the haste. But it proved true, nevertheless; for Mr. Dundyke had a motive in it. On the morning but one after, an excursion opposition steamer was advertised to start for Boulogne—fares, half-a-crown; return-tickets, four shillings. Of course David Dundyke could not let so favourable an opportunity slip; he still saved where he could.

Accordingly, on the said morning, which was very squally, they found themselves on the crowded boat. Such a sight! such a motley freight! Half London, as it seemed, had been attracted by the cheapness; but it was by no means a fashionable assemblage, nor yet a refined one.

"I hear somebody saying we shall have it rough, David," whispered Mrs. Dundyke, as they sat side by side, and the vessel passed Greenwich. "I hope we shall not be sea-sick."

"Pooh! sea-sick! we shan't be sea-sick!" imperiously cried the sheriff in prospective, as he turned his ring, now assumed for good, to the front of all beholders. "I don't believe in sea-sickness for my part. We did not feel sick when we went to Gravesend; you remember that, don't you, Betsey? It is more brag than anything else with people, talking about sea-sickness, that's my belief; a genteel way of letting out that they can afford to be travellers."

Excepting that one trip to Gravesend, of which he spoke, neither he nor his wife had ever been on the water in their lives. Neither of them had seen the sea. They had possessed really no inclination to stir from home; and saving had been, the ruling motive in David Dundyke's life.

The steamer went on. The river itself growing rough at Gravesend, the dead-lights were put in; and as they got nearer to the sea, the wind was freshening to a gale. Oh, the good steamer! will she ever live through it? The unbelieving common-councilman, to his horror and dismay, found sea-sickness was not a brag. He lay on the floor of the cabin, groaning, and moaning, and bewailing his ill fate in having come to sea.

"Heaven forgive me for having thought of this foreign tour! Steward! He stops up with them outsiders on deck! Heavens! Steward! Call him, somebody! Tell him it's for a common-councilman!"

Mrs. Dundyke was in the ladies' cabin—very ill, but very quiet. A dandy-looking man, impervious to the miseries of the passage, who had nothing to do but gape and yawn, took a sudden look in, by way of gratifying his curiosity, and, having done so, withdrew again—not, however, before one of the lady passengers had marked him. She took him for the captain.

"Capting! capting!" she called out; "if you please is that the capting?"

"Which?—where?" asked the steward's boy, to whom the question was addressed, turning round with a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand, which he was presenting to another lady, groaning up aloft in a berth.

"He came in at the door; he have got on tan kid gloves and shiny boots."

"That the captain!" cried the boy, gratified beyond everything at the lady's notion of a captain's rigging. "No, ma'am, he's up on deck."

"Just call the captain here, will you?" resumed the lady; "I know we are going down. I'm never ill aboard these horrid boats; but I'm worse, I'm dreadful timid."

"There ain't no danger, ma'am," said the boy.

"I know there is danger, and I know we are a going to be emerged to the bottom. If you'll call the capting down here, boy, I'll give you sixpence; and if you don't call him, I'll have you punished for insolence."

"Call him directly, ma'am," said the boy, rushing off with alacrity.

"I am the captain," exclaimed a rough voice, proceeding from a rough head, poking itself down the companion ladder; "what's wanted of me?"

"Oh! capting, we are going to the fishes fast! and some of us is dead of fright already. The vessel'll be in pieces presently! see how she rolls and pitches! and there's the sea dashing over the decks and against them boards at the windows, such as I never heard it; and all that awful crashing and cording, what is it?"

"There ain't no danger," shortly answered the commander, mentally vowing to punch the boy's head for calling him for nothing.

"Can't you put back, and land us somewhere, or take us into smooth water?" implored the petitioner; "we'd subscribe for a reward for you, capting, sir."

"Oh, yes, yes," echoed a faint chorus of voices; "any reward."

"There's no danger whatever, I tell ye, ladies," repeated the exasperated captain. "When we've got round this bit of headland, we shall have the wind at our starn, and go ahead as if the dickens druv us."

With this consolatory information, the rough head turned round and vanished. The grinning boy came out of a corner where he had hid himself, and appealed to the lady for his promised sixpence.

"I know we are going down!" she cried, as she fumbled in her bag for one. "That capting ought to lose his place for saying there's no danger; to me it's apparent to be seen. If he'd any humanity in him, he'd put back and land us somewhere, if 'twas only on the naked shore. Good mercy! what a lurch!—and now we're going to t'other side. No danger indeed! And all my valuable luggage aboard: my silk gownds, and my shawls, and my new lace mantle! Good gracious, ma'am, don't pitch out of your berth! you'll fall atop of me. Can't you hold on? What were hands made for?"

Some hours more yet, and then the steward, who had been whisking and whirling like one possessed, now on deck, now in the cabins, and now in his own especial sanctum, amid his tin jugs and his broken crockery, came whirling in once more to the large cabin, and said they were at the mouth of Boulogne harbour. "Just one pitch more, ladies and gentlemen—there it is—and now we are in the port, safe and sound."

"Don't talk to me about being in," cried poor Mr. Dundyke, from his place on the floor, not quite sure yet whether he was dead or alive, but rather believing he'd prefer to be the former. "Please don't step upon me, anybody. I couldn't stir yet."

All minor disasters of the journey overcome, the travellers reached Paris in safety. So far, Mr. Dundyke had found no occasion to rub on with his "we" and "no," for he encountered very few people who were not able to speak, or at least understand, a little English. But when they quitted Paris—and they remained in it but two days—then their difficulties commenced; and many were the distresses, and furious the fits of anger, of the common-councilman. It pleased Mr. Dundyke to travel by diligence on cross-country roads, rather than take the rail to Lyons—of which rail, and of all rails, he had a sort of superstitious dread—but this he found easy to do, though it caused him to be somewhat longer on the road. Here his tongue was at fault. He wanted to know the names of the towns and villages they passed through, the meaning of any puzzling object of wonder he saw on his way, and he could not ask; or, rather, he did ask repeatedly, but the answers conveyed to his ears only an unmeaning sound. It vexed him excessively.

"I don't think they understand you, David," Mrs. Dundyke said to him one day.

"And how should they understand, speaking nothing but heathen gibberish?" he returned. "It's enough to make a saint swear."

Another source of annoyance was the living. Those who have travelled by diligence in the more remote parts of France, and sat down to the tables-d'hôte at the road-side inns where the diligence halted, and remember the scrambling haste observed, may imagine the distresses of Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke. In common with their countrymen in general, they partook strongly of the national horror of frog-eating, and also of the national conviction that that delicate animal furnished the component parts of at least every second dish served up in France: so that it was little short of martyrdom to be planted down to a dinner, where half the dishes, for all the information they gave to the eye, might be composed of frogs, or something equally obnoxious. There would be the bouilli first, but Mr. Dundyke, try as he would, could not swallow it, although he had once dined on red-herrings; and there would be a couple of skinny chickens, drying on a dish of watercress, but before he could hope, in his English deliberation, to get at them, they were snapped up and devoured. Few men liked good living better than David Dundyke,—how else would he have been fit to become one of the renowned metropolitan body-corporate?—and when it was to be had at anybody else's cost, none enjoyed it more. At these tables-d'hôte, eat or not eat, he had to pay, and bitter and frequent were the heartburnings at throwing away his good money, yet rising up with an empty stomach. Not a tenth part of the cravings of hunger did he and his wife ever satisfy at these miserable tables-d'hôte. The very idea of but the minutest portion of a frog's leg going into their mouths, was more repulsive to their minds than that shuddering reminiscence of the steam-packet; and, what with this dread, and their inability to ask questions, Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke were nearly starved.

One day in particular it was very sad. They had halted at an inn in a good-sized town, not very far distant from Lyons. While the soup and bouilli were being devoured, the two unfortunates ate a stray radish or two, when up bustled the waiter with a funny-looking dish, its contents wonderfully like what a roast-beef eater might suppose cooked frogs to be, and presented it to Mr. Dundyke.

"What's this?" inquired Mr. Dundyke, delicately adventuring the tip of a fork towards the suspicious-looking compound, by way of indicating the nature of his question.

"Plait-il, monsieur?"

"This, this," rapping the edge of the dish with the fork; "what is it made of? what do you call it?"

"Une fricassée de petits pigeons, à l'oseille, monsieur," replied the discerning waiter.

Poor Mr. Dundyke pushed the dish away from him with a groan. "Une fricassée de petits pigeons, à l'oseille" in French, might be "Stewed frogs" in English.

"What was all that green mess in the dish?" asked his wife.

"The saints know," groaned the common-councilman. "Perhaps it's the fashion here to cook frogs in their own rushes."

Up came the waiter with another dish, that attentive functionary observing that the Monsieur Anglais ate nothing. A solid piece of meat, with little white ends sticking out of it, rising out of another bed of green. "Oseille" is much favoured in these parts of France.

"Whatever's this?" ejaculated the common-councilman, eyeing the dish with wondering suspicion. "It's as much like a porkipine as anything I ever saw. What d'ye call it?" rapping the edge of the dish as before.

"Foie-de-veau lardé, à l'oseille, monsieur."

The common-councilman was as wise as before, and sat staring at it.

"It can't be frogs, David, this can't," suggested Mrs. Dundyke, "it is too large and solid; and I don't think it's any foreign animal. It looks to me like veal. Veal, waiter?" she asked, appealingly.

"Oui, madame," was the answer, at a venture.

"And the green stuff round it is spinach, of course. Veal and spinach, my dear."

"That's good, that is, veal and spinach. I'll try it," said Mr. Dundyke.

He helped himself plentifully, and, pushing the dish to his wife, voraciously took the first mouthful, for he was fearfully hungry.

It was a rash proceeding. What in the world had he got hold of! Veal and spinach!—Heaven protect him from poison! It was some horrible, soft compound, sharp and sour; it turned him sick at once, and set his teeth on edge. He became very pale, and called faintly for the waiter.

But the garçon had long ago whisked off to other parts of the room, and there was Mr. Dundyke obliged to sit with that nauseous mystery underneath his very nose.

"Waiter!" he roared out at length, with all the outraged dignity of a common-councilman, "I say, waiter! For the love of goodness take this away: it's only fit for pigs. There's a dish there, with two little ducks upon it, and some carrots round 'em—French ducks I suppose they are: an Englishman might shut up shop if he placed such on his table. Bring it here."

"Plait-il, monsieur?"

"Them ducks—there—at the top, by the pickled cowcumbers. I'll take one."

The waiter ranged his perplexed eyes round and round the table. "Pardon, monsieur, plait-il?"

"I think you are an idiot, I do!" roared out Mr. Dundyke, unable to keep both his hunger and his temper. "That dish of ducks, I said, and it is being seized upon! They are tearing them to pieces! they are gone! Good Heavens! are we to famish like this?"

The waiter, in despair, laid hold of a slice of melon in one hand and the salt and pepper in the other, and presented them.

"The man is an idiot!" decided the exasperated Englishman. "What does he mean by offering me melon for dinner, and salt and pepper to season it?—that's like their putting sugar to their peas! I want something that I can eat," he cried, piteously.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est que je peux vous offrir, monsieur?" asked the agonized garçon.

"Don't you see we want something to eat," retorted the gentleman; "this lady and myself? We can't touch any of the trash on the table. Get us some mutton chops cooked."

"Pardon, monsieur, plait-il?"

"Some—mut—ton—chops," repeated the common-councilman, very deliberately, thinking that the slower he spoke, the better he should be understood. "And let 'em look sharp about it."

The waiter sighed and shrugged, and, after pushing the bread and butter and young onions within reach, moved away, giving up the matter as a hopeless job.

"Let's peg away at this till the chops come," cried Mr. Dundyke. And in the fallacious hope that the chops were coming, did the unconscious couple "peg" away till the driver clacked his long whip, and summoned his passengers to resume their seats in the diligence.

"I have had nothing to eat," screamed Mr. Dundyke. "They are doing me some mutton chops. I can't go yet."

"Deux diners, quatre francs, une bouteille de vin, trente sous," said the waiter in Mr. Dundyke's ear. "Fait cinq francs, cinquante, monsieur."

"Fetch my mutton chops," he implored; "we can't go without them: we can eat them in the diligence."

"Allons! dépêchons-nous, messieurs et dames," interrupted the conductor, looking in, impatiently. "Prenez vos places. Nous sommes en retard."

"They are swindlers, every soul of them, in this country," raved the common-councilman, passionately throwing down the money, when he could be made to comprehend its amount, and that there were no chops to come. "How dare you be so dishonest as charge for dinners we don't eat."

"I am faint now for the want of something," bewailed poor Mrs. Dundyke.

"If ever I am caught out of Old England again," he sobbed, climbing to his place in the diligence, "I'll give 'em leave to make a Frenchman of me, that's all."

[CHAPTER III.]
A MEETING AT GRENOBLE.

They arrived at Lyons; but here Mr. Dundyke's total ignorance of the language led him into innumerable misapprehensions and mishaps, not the least of which was his going from Lyons to Grenoble, thinking all the time that he was on the shortest and most direct road to Switzerland. This was in consequence of his rubbing on with "we" and "no." They had arrived at Lyons late in the evening, and after a night's rest, Mr. Dundyke found his way to the coach-office, to take places on to Switzerland. There happened to be standing before the office door a huge diligence, with the word "Grenoble" painted on it.

"I want to engage a place in a diligence; two places; direct for Switzerland," began Mr. Dundyke; "in a diligence like that," pointing to the great machine.

"You spoke French, von littel, sare?" asked the clerk, who could himself speak a very little imperfect English.

"We," cried Mr. Dundyke, eagerly, not choosing to betray his ignorance.

Accordingly, the official proceeded to jabber on in French, and Mr. Dundyke answered at intervals of hazard "we" and "no."

"Vous désirez aller à Grenoble, n'est-ce pas, monsieur?" remarked the clerk.

"We," cried out Mr. Dundyke at random.

"Combien de places, monsieur?"

"We," repeated the gentleman again.

"I do demande of the monsieur how few of place?" said the official, suspecting his French was not understood quite so well as it might be.

"Two places for Switzerland," answered Mr. Dundyke. "I'm going on to Geneva, in a diligence like that."

"C'est ça. The monsieur desire to go to Gren-haub; et encore jusqu'à Genève—on to Geneva."

"We," rapturously responded the common-councilman.

"I do comprends. Two place in the Gren-haub diligence. Vill the monsieur go by dat von?" pointing to the one at the door. "She do go in de half hour."

"Not that one," retorted Mr. Dundyke, impatient at the clerk's obscure English. "I said in one like that, later."

"Yes, sare, I comprends now. You would partir by anoder von like her, the next one that parts. Vill you dat I retienne two place for Gren-haub?"

"We, we," responded Mr. Dundyke. "Two places. My wife's with me, Mrs. D.: I'm a common-councilman, sir, at home. Two places for Gren-haub. Corner ones, mind: in the interior."

"C'est bien, monsieur. She goes à six of de hours."

"She! Who?"

"The diligence, I do say."

"Oh," said the common-councilman to himself, "they call coaches 'she's' in this country. I wonder what they call women. Six hours you say we shall take going."

"Oui, monsieur," answered the clerk, without quite understanding the question, "il faut venir à six heures."

"And when does it start?"

"What you ask, sare?"

"She—the diligence—at what o'clock does it start for Gren-haub?"

"I do tell de sare at de six of de hours dis evening."

"We'll be here a quarter afore it then: never was late for anything in my life. Gren-haub's a little place, I suppose, sir, as it's not in my guide-book?"

"Comme ça," said the clerk, shrugging his shoulders. "She's not von Lyon."

"Who's she?" exclaimed the bewildered Mr. Dundyke; "who's not a lion?"

"Gren-haub, sare. I thought you did ask about her."

"The asses that these French make of themselves when they attempt to converse in English!" ejaculated the common-councilman. "Who's to understand him?"

He turned away, and went back to the hotel in glee, dreadfully unconscious that he had booked himself for Grenoble, and imagining that Gren-haub (as the word Grenoble in the Frenchman's mouth sounded to his English ears) must be the first town on the Swiss frontiers. "It's an awkward hour, though, to get in at," he deliberated: "six hours, that fellow said we should be, going: that will make it twelve at night when we get to the place. Things are absurdly managed in this country." This was another mistake of his: the anticipated six hours necessary, as he fancied, to convey him from Lyons to "Gren-haub," would prove at least sixteen.

At the appointed hour Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke took their seats in the diligence, which began its journey and went merrily on; at least as merrily as a French diligence, of the average weight and size, can be expected to go. Mr. Dundyke was merry, too, for him; for he had fortified himself with a famous dinner before starting: none of your frogs and rushes and "oseille," but rosbif saignant, and pommes de terre au naturel, specially ordered. Both the travellers had done it ample justice, and seasoned it with some hot brandy-and-water; Mr. Dundyke taking two glasses and making his wife take one. Therefore it was not surprising that both should sink, about nine o'clock, into a sound sleep. They had that compartment of the coach, called the intérieur, to themselves, and could recline almost at full length; and so comfortable were they, that all the various changing of horses and clackings of the whip failed to arouse them.

Not until six o'clock in the morning did Mr. Dundyke open his eyes, and then only partially. He was in the midst of the most delicious dream—riding in that coveted coach, all gilt and gingerbread, on a certain 9th of November to come, moving in stately dignity through Cheapside, amidst the plaudits of little boys, the crowding of windows, and the arduous exertions of policemen to preserve order in the admiring mob; sitting with the mace and sword-bearer beside him, his mace and sword-bearer! Mr. Dundyke had been pleased that his sleep, with such a dream, had lasted for ever, and he unwillingly aroused himself to reality.

It was broad daylight; the sun was shining with all the glorious beauty of a summer morning, shining right into the diligence, and roasting the face of the common-councilman. He rubbed his eyes and wondered where he was. Recollection began to whisper that when he had gone to sleep the previous evening it was dusk, and that ere that dusk had well subsided into the darkness of midnight he had expected to be at his destination, "Gren-haub;" whereas—was he asleep still, and dreaming it?—or was it really morning, and he still in the diligence?—or had some unexampled phenomenon of nature caused the sun to shine out at midnight? What was it? In the greatest perturbation he tore his watch from his pocket, and found it was five minutes past six; but he knew that he was rather slower than French time.

A fine hubbub ensued. Mr. Dundyke startled his wife up in such a fright, that he nearly sent her into fits: he roared out to the coachman, he called for the conductor: he shook the doors, he knocked at the windows: he caused the utmost consternation amongst the quiet passengers in the rotonde and banquette, and woke up a deaf old gentleman in the coupé, who all thought he had gone suddenly mad. The diligence was stopped in haste, and out of the door rushed Mr. Dundyke.

"Where were they taking him to? Why had they not left him at Gren-haub? Did they know he was a common-councilman of the great city of London, a brother of the Lord Mayor and aldermen? How dared they run away with him and his wife in that style? Where were they carrying him to? Were they going to smuggle him off to Turkey or any of them heathen places to sell him for a slave? They must turn round forthwith, and drive him back to Gren-haub."

All this, and a great deal more of it, delivered in the English tongue and interspersed with not a few English expletives, was as Greek to the astonished lookers-on; and when they had sufficiently exercised their curiosity and stared at the enraged speaker, standing there without his hat, stamping his feet in the dust, and gesticulating more like a Frenchman than a stout specimen of John Bull, they all let loose their tongues together, in a jargon equally incomprehensible to the distressed Englishman. In vain did Mr. Dundyke urge their return to "Gren-haub," now with angry fury, now with tears, now with promises of reward; in vain the other side demanded to know what was the matter, and tried to coax him into the diligence. Not a word could one party understand of the other.

"Montez, monsieur; montez, mon pauvre monsieur. Dieu! qu'est-ce qu'il a? Montez, donc!"

Not a bit of it. Mr. Dundyke would not have mounted till now, save by main force. It took the conductor and three passengers to push and condole him in; and indeed they never would have accomplished it, but for the sudden dread that flashed over his mind of what would become of him if he were left there in the road, hatless, hopeless, and Frenchless, while his wife and his luggage and the diligence went on to unknown regions. Some of those passengers, if you could come across them now, would give you a dolorous history of the pauvre monsieur Anglais who went raving mad one summer's morning in the diligence.

There was little haste or punctuality in those old days of French posting—driver, conductor, passengers, and horses all liking to take their own leisure; and it was not far off twelve o'clock at noon, six hours after the morning's incomprehensible scene, and eighteen from the time of departure from Lyons, that the lazy old diligence reached its destination, and Mr. Dundyke discovered that he was in Grenoble. How he would ever have found his way out of it, and on the road to Switzerland, must be a question, had not an Englishman, a young man, apparently in delicate health, who was sojourning in the town, fortunately chanced to be in the diligence yard, and heard Mr. Dundyke's fruitless exclamations and appeals, as he alighted.

"Can I do anything for you?" asked the stranger, stepping forward. "I perceive we are countrymen."

Overjoyed at hearing once more his own language, the unhappy traveller seized the Englishman's hand with a rush of delight, and explained the prolonged torture he had gone through, and the doubt and dilemma he was still in—at least as well as he could explain what was to him still a mystery. "The savages cannot understand me," he concluded politely, "and of course I cannot be expected to understand them."

Neither could the stranger understand just at first; but with the conductor's tale on one side and Mr. Dundyke's on the other, he made out the difficulty, and set things straight for him, and went with him to the diligence office. No coach started for Chambéry, by which route they must now proceed, till the next morning at nine, so the stranger took two places for them in that.

"I'm under eternal obligations to you, sir," exclaimed the relieved traveller, "and if ever I should have it in my power to repay you, be sure you count on me. It's a common-councilman, sir, that you have assisted; that's what I am at home, and I'm going on to be Lord Mayor. You shall have a card for my inauguration dinner, sir, if you are within fifty miles of me. You will tell me your name, and where you live?"

"My name is Robert Carr," said the stranger. "I am a clergyman. I am from Holland."

The name struck on a chord of Mrs. Dundyke's memory. It took her back to the time when she was Betsey Travice, and on a certain visit at Westerbury. Though not in the habit of putting herself forward when in her husband's company, she turned impulsively to the stranger now.

"Have you relations at Westerbury, sir? Was your mother's name Hughes?"

"Yes," he said, looking very much surprised. "Both my father and mother were from Westerbury. I have a grandfather, I believe, living there still. My mother is dead."

"How very strange!" she exclaimed. "Can you come in this evening to us at the hotel for half-an-hour?"

"I would, with pleasure, but I leave Grenoble this afternoon," was the young clergyman's answer. "Can I do anything for you in London?"

"Nothing," said Mrs. Dundyke. "But my husband has given you our address; and if you will call and see us when we get home——"

"And you'll meet with a hearty welcome, sir," interrupted the common-councilman, shaking his hand heartily. "I'm more indebted to you this day than I care to speak."

Mrs. Dundyke watched him out of the yard. He might be about four-and-twenty; and was of middle height and slightly made, and he walked away coughing, with his hand upon his chest.

"David," she said to her husband, "I do think he must be a relative of yours! The Hughes's of Westerbury were related in some way to your mother."

"I'm sure I don't know," said David Dundyke. "I think I have heard her talk about them, but I am not sure. Any way I'm obliged to him; and mind, Betsey, if he does come to see us in London, I'll give him a right good dinner."

Ah, how little! how little do we foresee even a week or two before us! Never in this world would those two meet again.

And Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke proceeded under convoy to the Hôtel des Trois Dauphins, and made themselves as comfortable for the night as circumstances and the stinging gnats permitted.

Arriving at Geneva without further let or hindrance, David Dundyke, Esquire, and his wife, put up at the Hôtel des Bergues. And on the morning afterwards, when Mrs. Dundyke had dressed herself and looked about her, she felt like a fish out of water. The size of the hotel, the style pervading it, the inmates she caught chance glimpses of in the corridors, were all so different from anything poor humble Betsey Dundyke had been brought into contact with, that she began to feel her inferiority. And yet she looked like a lady, in her good and neat dress, and her simple cap half covering her fair and still luxuriant hair. Her face was red, tanned with the journey; but it was a pleasing and a nice face yet to look upon.

They descended to the great salle a little before ten. Many groups were breakfasting there at the long tables; most of them English, as might be heard by their snatches of quiet conversation. Some of them possessed an air of distinction and refinement that bespoke their standing in society. An English servant came in once and accosted his master as "my lord;" and a plain little body in a black silk gown and white net cap, was once spoken to as "Lady Jane." Mr. Dundyke had never, to the best of his knowledge, been in a room with a lord before; had never but once set eyes on a Lady Jane; and that was King Henry the Eighth's wife in waxwork; and, alive to his own importance though the common-councilman was, he felt unpleasantly out of place amidst them. In spite of his ambition his nature was a modest one.

Scarcely had he and his wife begun breakfast, when a lady and gentleman came in and took the seats next to him. The stranger was a tall, dark, rather handsome man; taller than Mr. Dundyke, who was by no means undersized, and approaching within three or four years to the same age. But while the common councilman was beginning to get rather round and puffy, just as an embryo alderman is expected to be, the stranger's form was remarkable for wiry strength and muscle: in a tussle for life or death, mark you, reader, the one would be a very child in the handling of the other.

Mr. Dundyke moved his chair a little to give more room, as they sat down, and the gentleman acknowledged it with a slight bow of courtesy. He spoke soon after.

"If you are not using that newspaper, sir," pointing to one that lay near Mr. Dundyke, "may I trouble you for it?"

"No use to me, sir," said the common-councilman, passing the journal. "I understand French pretty well when it's spoke, but am scarcely scholar enough in the language to read it."

"Ah, indeed," replied the stranger. "This, however, is German," he continued, as he opened the paper.

"Oh—well—they look sufficiently alike in print," observed the common-councilman. "Slap-up hotel, this seems, sir."

"Comfortable," returned the stranger, carelessly. "You are a recent arrival, I think."

"Got here last night, sir, by the diligence. We are travelling on pleasure; taking a holiday."

"There's nothing like an occasional holiday, a temporary relaxation from the cares of business," remarked the stranger, scanning covertly Mr. Dundyke. "As I often say."

"I am delighted to hear you say it, sir," exclaimed the common-councilman, hastily assuming a fact, from the words, which probably the speaker never thought to convey. "I am in business myself, sir, and this is the first holiday from it I have ever took: I gather that you are the same. Nothing so respectable as commercial pursuits: a London merchant, sir, stands as a prince of the world."

"Respectable and satisfactory both," joined in the stranger. "What branch of commerce—if you don't deem me impertinent—may you happen to pursue?"

"I'm a partner in a wholesale tea-house, sir," cried Mr. Dundyke, flourishing his hand and his ring for the stranger's benefit. "Our establishment is one of the oldest and wealthiest in Fenchurch-street; known all over the world, sir, and across the seas from here to Chinar. And as respected as it is known."

"Sir, allow me to shake hands with you," exclaimed the stranger, warmly. "To be a member of such a house does you honour."

"And I am a common-councilman," continued Mr. Dundyke, his revelations increasing with his satisfaction, "rising on fast to be a alderman and Lord Mayor. No paltry dignity that, sir, to be chief magistrate of the city of London, and ride to court in a gold and scarlet dress, and broidered ruffles! I suspect we have got some lords round about us here," dropping his voice to a still lower key, "but I'm blest, sir, if I'd change my prospects with any of them. I'm to be put up for sheriff in October."

"Ah," said the stranger, casting his deep black eyes around, "young scions with more debts than brains, long pedigrees and short purses, dealers in post obits and the like—they can't be put in comparison with a Lord Mayor of London."

"And what line are you in, sir?" resumed the gratified Lord Mayor in prospective. "From our great city, of course?"

The stranger nodded, but, before he answered, he finished his second cotelette, poured out some wine—for his breakfast disdained the more effeminate luxuries of tea and coffee—popped a piece of ice in, and drank it. "Have you heard of the house of Hardcastle and Co.?" he asked, in a tone meant only for Mr. Dundyke's ear.

"The East India merchants?" exclaimed the latter.

The stranger nodded again.

"Of course I have heard of them: who has not? A firm of incalculable influence, sir; could buy up half London. What of them?"

"Do you know the partners personally?"

"Never saw any of them in my life," replied Mr. Dundyke. "They are top-sawyers, they are; a move or two above us city tea-folks. Perhaps you have the honour of being a clerk in the house, sir?"

"I am Mr. Hardcastle," observed the stranger, smiling.

"Bless my soul, sir!" cried the startled Mr. Dundyke. "I'm sure I beg pardon for my familiarity. But stop—eh—I thought——"

"Thought what?" asked the stranger, for Mr. Dundyke came to a pause.

"That Mr. Hardcastle was an old man. In fact, the impression on my mind was, that he was something like seventy."

"Pooh, my dear sir! your thoughts are running on my uncle. He has been virtually out of the firm these ten years, though his name is still retained as its head. He is just seventy. A hale, hearty man he is too, and trots about the grounds of his mansion at Kensington as briskly as one of his own gardeners. But not a word here of who I am," continued the gentleman, pointing slightly round the room: "I am travelling quietly, you understand—incog., if one may say so—travelling without form or expense, in search of a little peace and quietness. I have not a single attendant with me, nor has my wife her maid. Mrs. Hardcastle," he said, leaning back, the better to introduce his wife.

The lady bowed graciously to Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke, and the former, in his flurry to acknowledge the condescension, managed to upset the coffee-pot. Mrs. Dundyke saw a stylish woman of thirty—at least, if a great deal of dress can constitute style. She had a handsome, but deadly pale face, with bold eyes, black as her husband's.

"I feel really glad to make your acquaintance," resumed Mr. Hardcastle. "Standing aloof, as I have purposely done, from the persons of condition staying in the hotel, I had begun to find it slow."

"Sir, I am sure I'm greatly flattered," said Mr. Dundyke. "Have you been long here, sir?"

"About three weeks or a month," replied the gentleman, carelessly. "We shall soon be thinking of going."

Mr. Dundyke did indeed feel flattered, and with reason, for the firm in question was of the very first consideration, and he was overwhelmed with the honour vouchsafed him. "A Lord Mayor might be proud to know him," he exclaimed to his wife, when they got upstairs from the breakfast. "I hope he'll give me his friendship when I am in the Chair."

"I think they have the next room to ours," observed Mrs. Dundyke. "I saw the lady standing at the door there this morning, when I was peeping out, wondering which was the way down to breakfast. Is it not singular they should be travelling in this quiet way, without any signs of their wealth about them?"

"Not at all singular," said the shrewd common-councilman. "They are so overdone with grandeur at home, these rich merchants, with their servants, and state, and ceremony, that it must be a positive relief to get rid of it altogether for a time, and live like ordinary people. I can understand the feeling very well."

It was more than Mrs. Dundyke could; and though, from that morning, the great merchant and his lady took pains to cultivate the intimacy thus formed, she never took to them so cordially as her husband. He, if one may use the old saying in such a sense, fell over head and ears in love with both, but Mrs. Dundyke never could feel quite at home with either. No doubt the sense of her own inferiority of position partly caused this: she felt, if her husband did not, that they were no society, even abroad, for the powerful Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle. And, in her inmost heart, she did not like the lady. Her attire was ten times as costly and abundant as Mrs. Dundyke's, and she would wear more jewellery at one time than the latter had ever seen in all her life; and that was perhaps as it should be; but Mrs. Dundyke was apt to take likings and dislikings, and she could not like this lady, try as she would. She was certainly not a gentlewoman; and Mrs. Dundyke, with all her previous life's disadvantages of position, was that at heart, and could appreciate one. She decidedly wore rouge on her cheeks in an evening; she was not choice in her expressions at all times; and she was fond of wine, and did not object to brandy.

One morning Mrs. Dundyke happened to be in Mrs. Hardcastle's room, when the English waiter entered.

"My master's compliments, madam," he said, "and he hopes Mr. Hardcastle has some news for him this morning."

The lady's face went crimson, the first time Mrs. Dundyke had seen any natural colour on it, and she answered, in a haughty tone, that Mr. Hardcastle was not then in—when he was, the man could speak with him.

"For it is now a fortnight, madam, since he has daily promised to——"

"I have nothing to do with it," interrupted Mrs. Hardcastle, imperiously motioning the waiter from the room; "you must address yourself to my husband."

Mrs. Dundyke wondered what this little scene could mean. Had it been people of less known wealth than the Hardcastles, she might have thought it bore reference to the settlement—or non-settlement—of the bill. But that could scarcely happen with them.

"What are you thinking of, Betsey?" Mr. Dundyke asked her that same day, she sat so deep in thought.

"I was thinking of Mr. Hardcastle's eyes."

"Of Mr. Hardcastle's eyes!" echoed the common-councilman.

"Just then I was, David. The fact is, they puzzle me—they are always puzzling me. I feel quite certain I have seen them somewhere, or eyes exactly like them."

"They are as handsome eyes as ever I saw," was the answer.

"They may be handsome, but I don't like them. But that it is wrong to say it, I could almost say I hate them. They frighten me, David."

"That's just one of your foolish fancies," cried Mr. Dundyke, in wrath. "You are always taking them up, you know."

A day or two after this, Mr. Hardcastle came straight into the presence of Mr. Dundyke, some papers in his hand. "My dear sir," he said, "I want you to do me a favour."

The common-councilman jumped up and placed a chair for the great man, delighted at the prospect of doing him a favour.

"I wrote home a few days ago for them to send me a letter of credit on the bankers here. It came this morning, and just see what they have done!"

Mr. Hardcastle tossed, as he spoke, the letter of credit to Mr. Dundyke. Now the latter, shrewd man of business though he was amid his own chests of tea, knew very little of these foreign letters of credit, their forms, or their appearance. All he could make out of the present one was, that it was a sort of order to receive one hundred pounds.

"Don't you see the error?" exclaimed Mr. Hardcastle. "They have made it payable to my uncle, Stephen Hardcastle, instead of to me. My name's not Stephen, so it would be perfectly useless for me to present it. How the clerks came to make so foolish a mistake I cannot tell. Some one of them I suppose, in the pressure of business, managed to give unintelligible orders to the bankers, and so caused the error."

"Dear me!" said Mr. Dundyke.

"Now I want to know if you can let me have this sum. I shall write immediately to get the thing rectified, and if you can accommodate me for a few days, until the needful comes, I will then repay you with many thanks."

"But, dear me, sir!" exclaimed Mr. Dundyke,—"not but what I should be proud to do anything for you that I could, in my poor way—you don't suppose I've got a hundred pound here? Nor the half! nor the quarter of it!"

Mr. Hardcastle carelessly smiled, and played with his glittering cable watch-chain.

"I should not like to offer you what I have got, sir," continued the common-councilman, "but I am sure if you took it as no offence, and it would be of any temporary use to you——"

"Oh, thank you! No, it's not that," interrupted the great merchant. "Less than the hundred pounds would not be worth the trouble of borrowing. You have nothing like that sum, you say?"

Out came Mr. Dundyke's purse and pocket-book. He counted over his store, and found that, English and French money combined, he possessed twenty-two pounds, eleven shillings. The twenty pounds, notes and gold, he pushed towards Mr. Hardcastle, the odd money he returned to his pocket. "You are quite welcome, sir, for a few days, if you will condescend to make use of it."

"I feel extremely obliged to you," said Mr. Hardcastle; "I am half inclined to avail myself of your politeness. The fact is, Dundyke," he continued, confidentially, "my wife has been spending money wholesale, this last week—falling in love with a lot of useless jewellery, when she has got a cartload of it at home. I let her have what money she wanted, counting on my speedy remittances, and, upon my word, I am nearly drained. I will write you an acknowledgment."

"Oh no, no, sir, pray don't trouble to do that," cried the confiding common-councilman, "your word would be your bond all over the world." And Mr. Hardcastle laughed pleasantly, as he gathered up the money.

"Can you let me have five francs, David," said Mrs. Dundyke, coming in soon afterwards, when her husband was alone.

"Five francs! What for?"

"To pay our washing bill. It comes to four francs something; so far as I can make out their French figures."

"I don't know that you can have it, Mrs. D."

"But why?" she inquired, meekly.

"I have just lent most of my spare cash to Mr. Hardcastle. He received a hundred pound this morning from England, but there was a stupid error in the letter of credit, and he can't touch the money till the order has been back home to be rectified."

The information set Mrs. Dundyke thinking. She had just returned from a walk, and it was in coming up the stairs that a chambermaid had met her and given her the washing-bill. Not being accustomed to French writing and accounts, she could not readily puzzle it out, and, bill in hand, had knocked at Mrs. Hardcastle's door, intending to crave that lady's assistance. Mr. Hardcastle opened it only a little way.

"Is Mrs. Hardcastle at leisure, if you please, sir?" she asked.

"No; she's not in. I'll send her to you when she comes," was his reply, as he re-closed the door. And yet Mrs. Dundyke was almost certain she saw the tip of Mrs. Hardcastle's gown, as if she were sitting in the room on the right, the door opening to the left. And she also saw distinctly the person who had been once pointed out to her as the landlord of the hotel. He was standing at the table, counting money—a note or two, it looked, and a little gold. There was food in this to employ Mrs. Dundyke's thoughts, now she knew, or supposed, that very money was her husband's. A sudden doubt whether all was right—she afterwards declared it many times—flashed across her mind. But it left her as soon as thought: left her ashamed of doubting such people as the Hardcastles, even for a moment. She remained thinking, though.

"I know these foreign posts are uncertain," she observed, arousing herself, "and it will take, I suppose, eight or ten days before Mr. Hardcastle's remittance can reach him. Suppose it should not come when he expects, or that there should be another mistake in it?"

"Well?"

"Why—as we cannot afford to remain on here an indefinite period, waiting; at least, I suppose you would not like to do so, David; I was thinking it might be better for you to write home for more money yourself, and make certain."

"Just leave me to manage my own business, Betsey, will you: I am capable, I hope," was the common-councilman's ungracious answer. Nevertheless, he adopted his wife's suggestion.

Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle continued all grace and smiles, pressing their champagne upon Mr. Dundyke and his wife at dinner, and hiring carriages, in which all the four drove out together. The common-councilman was rapidly overcoming his repugnance to a table-d'hôte, but the sumptuous one served in the hotel was very different from those he had been frightened with on his journey, and in the third week of his stay his wife had to let out all his waistcoats. The little excursions in the country he cared less for. The lovely country about Geneva was driven over again and again: Ferney, Coppet, the houses of Madame de Staël and Voltaire, all were visited, not much, it is to be feared, to the edification of the common-councilman. Thus three weeks from the time of their first arrival, passed rapidly away, and Mr. Dundyke and his wife felt they could not afford the time to linger longer in Geneva. They now only waited for the repayment of the twenty pounds from Mr. Hardcastle, and, strange to say, that gentleman's money did not arrive. He could not account for it, and gave vent to a few lordly explosions each morning that the post came in and brought him no advice of it.

"I'll tell you what it is!" he suddenly observed one morning—"I'll lay a thousand pounds to a shilling they have misunderstood my instructions, and have sent the money on to Genoa, whither we are bound after leaving here!"

"What a disaster!" uttered Mr. Dundyke. "Will the money be lost, sir?"

"No fear of that: nobody can touch it but myself. But look at the inconvenience it is causing, keeping me here! And you also!"

"I cannot remain longer," said Mr. Dundyke; "my time is up, and I may not exceed it. You can give me an order to receive the 20l. in London, sir: it will be all the same."

"But, my good fellow, how will you provide for the expenses of your journey to London?"

"I have managed that, sir," said the common-councilman. "I wrote home for thirty pounds."

"And is it come?" asked Mr. Hardcastle, turning his eye full upon the common-councilman with the startling rapidity of a flash of lightning. Mrs. Dundyke noticed, with astonishment, the look and the eager gesture: neither ever faded from her recollection.

"They came this morning," said the common-councilman. "I have them both safe here," touching the breast-pocket of his coat. "They were in them letters you saw me receive."

On rising from breakfast, Mr. Dundyke strolled out of the hotel, and found himself on the borders of the lake. The day was fearfully hot, and he began to think a row might be pleasant. A boat and two men were at hand, waiting to be hired, and he proceeded to haggle about the price, for one of the boatmen spoke English.

"I have spent a deal of money since I have been here, one way or another," he soliloquized, "and the bill I expect will be awful. But it won't be much addition, this row—as good be hung for a sheep as a lamb—so here goes."

He stepped into the boat, anticipating an hour's enjoyment. A short while after this, Mrs. Hardcastle, accompanied by Mrs. Dundyke, came on to Rousseau's Island. Mr. Dundyke was not so far off then, but that his wife recognised him. Mr. Hardcastle was the next to come up.

"What are you looking at? Why, who's that in a boat there? Surely not Dundyke! Give me the glass."

"Yes, it is," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"Where in the name of wonder is he off to, this melting day? To drown himself?"

The ladies laughed.

"Ah! I see; he can't stand it. The men are bearing off to the side—going to land him there. They had better put back."

Mrs. Dundyke sat down underneath the poplar trees, spreading a large umbrella over her head, and took out her work. Mrs. Hardcastle was never seen to do any work, but she seated herself under the shade of the umbrella; and the gentleman, leaving them to themselves, walked back again over the suspension bridge.

[CHAPTER IV.]
A MYSTERY.

Which of the three wore the deepest tint, the darkest blue—the skies, the hills, or the lake? Each was of a different shade, but all were blue and beautiful; and on all lay the aspect of complete repose. The two ladies, in that little garden near the Hôtel des Bergues, Rousseau's Island, as it is called, and which you who have sojourned in Geneva remember well, looking out over the lake at the solitary boat bearing away towards the right, noticed that no other object broke the prospect's stillness. It was scarcely a day for a row on Geneva's lake. Not a breath of air arose to counteract the vivid heat of the August sun; hot and shadeless he poured forth his overpowering blaze; and, lovely as the lake is, favoured by nature and renowned in poetry, it was more lovely that day to look at than to glide upon.

So thought the gentleman in that solitary boat, our friend Mr. David Dundyke—or, let us give him the title he had of late aspired to, David Dundyke, Esquire. He felt, to use his own words, "piping hot;" he sat on one side of the boat, and the sun burnt his back; he changed to the other, and it blistered his face; he tried the stern, and the sun seemed to be all round him. He looked up at the Jura, with a vain longing that they might be transported from their site to where they could screen him from his hot tormentor: he turned and gazed at the Alps, and wished he could see on them a shady place, and that he was in it; but, wherever he looked and turned, the sun seemed to blind and to scorch him. Some people, clayey mortals though the best of us are, might have found poetry, or food for it, in all that lay around; but David Dundyke had no poetry in his heart, still less in his head. He glanced, with listless, half-shut eyes, at the two men who were rowing him along; and began to wonder how any men could be induced to row, that burning day, even to obtain a portion of the world's idol—money. David Dundyke cared not, not he, for the scenery around; he never cared for anything in his life that was not substantial and tangible. What was the common scenery of nature to him, since it could not add to his wealth or enhance his importance?—and that was all the matter at his heart. He had never looked at it all the way from London to Geneva; he did not look at that around him now. Geneva itself, its lovely surrounding villas, its picturesque lake, the glorious chain of mountains on either side, even Mont Blanc in the distance, were as nothing to him. For some days after his arrival at Geneva, the mountain had remained obstinately enshrouded in clouds; but one evening that he and his wife were walking outside the town with Mr. Hardcastle, it was pointed out to him, standing proudly forth in all its beauty; and he had stared at it with just as much interest as he would have done at the hill in Greenwich Park covered with snow. He had seen the lovely colour, the dark, brilliant blue of the Rhone's waters, as they escaped from the lake to mingle with those of the thick, turbulent Arve; and he did not care to notice the contrast in the streams. There were no associations in his mind connected with that fair azure lake, whence coursed the one; he had no curiosity as to the never-changing glaciers that were the source of the other.

But, had Mr. Dundyke's soul been wholly given up to poetry and sentiment, it would have been lost that day in the overpowering heat. He bore it as long as he could, and then suddenly told the men to bear to the right and put him on shore. This movement had been observed by Mr. Hardcastle, from the little island, as you may remember. The men, not sorry perhaps to be off the lake themselves, inured though they were to Geneva's August sun, made speedily for a shady place, and landed him.

"Ah! this is pleasant," exclaimed Mr. Dundyke, throwing himself at full length on the cool and shady grass. "It is quite Heaven, this is, after that horrid burning lake." The two boatmen laid on their oars and rested.

"How thirsty it has made me!" he resumed, "I could drink the lake dry. What a luxury some iced wine would be now! And ice is so cheap and plentiful up at the hotel yonder. Suppose I send the boat back for Mr. Hardcastle, and the two women? And tell 'em it's Paradise, sitting here, in comparison with the hot hotel; and drop in a hint about the iced wine? He will be sure to take it, and be glad of the excuse. The women would find it rather of the ratherest for heat, coming across the lake, but charming when they got here. 'Tain't far, and their complexions are not of the spoiling sort. Mrs. D.'s ain't of no particular colour at all just now, except red; and t'other's is like chalk. Oh! let 'em risk it."

Taking out his silver pencil-case (as the men deposed to subsequently) he tore a leaf from his pocket-book, scribbled a few lines on it, and folding it, directed it to —— Hardcastle, Esquire: and it had never occurred to Mr. Dundyke until that moment, and the fact struck him as a singular one, that he was ignorant of —— Hardcastle, Esquire's Christian name. The men received the note and their orders, and then prepared to push off.

"We com back when we have give dis; com back for de jontilmans?" asked the one who spoke English.

"Come back! of course you are to come back," responded the common-councilman. "How am I to get home, else? But you are to bring the two ladies and the gentleman, and some ice and some wine; and to look sharp about it. Take care that the bottles don't get broke in the boat."

The men rowed away, leaving Mr. Dundyke lying there. They made good speed to the Hôtel des Bergues, according to orders, but were told that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Hardcastle was in. This caused a delay of two good hours. The boatmen lingered near the door of the hotel, waiting; and at last one of the waiters bethought himself that the ladies might be on Rousseau's Island. There they were found, and Mrs. Hardcastle read the note.

"What do you say?" she asked, tossing it to Mrs. Dundyke. "Shall we go?"

"But where is Mr. Hardcastle, ma'am?"

"Who's to know? He may be gone round to meet your husband. He saw the probable spot the boat was making for. We may as well go. Perhaps they are both waiting for us. Waiter," continued Mrs. Hardcastle, in her customary imperious manner, "let some wine be placed in the boat, and plenty of ice."

Under cover of umbrellas, the two ladies were rowed across the hot lake to the place where the men had left Mr. Dundyke. But no trace of that gentleman could now be seen; and they sat down in the shade to cool their heated faces, glad of the respite. Mrs. Hardcastle helped herself to some wine and ice, and Mrs. Dundyke presently took her work out of her pocket.

"How industrious you are!" exclaimed the idle woman. "What do you say the embroidery is for? A shirt front?"

Mrs. Dundyke displayed her work. It was for a shirt-front, and the embroidery was beautiful. She was doing two of them, she said. Her husband would require them during his shrievalty.

"I'd not take such trouble for my husband, though he were made king to-morrow," exclaimed Mrs. Hardcastle.

After making that remark she took some more wine, and subsequently dropped asleep. Mrs. Dundyke, engaged in her labour of love, for she loved both the work itself and him who was to wear it, let the time slip on unconsciously. It was only when the afternoon shadows struck on her view as becoming long, when the sun had changed his place from one part of the heavens to another, that a vague feeling of alarm stole over her.

"Where can he be? What is the time?"

She spoke aloud. Mrs. Hardcastle started at the words, and stared to see how the day had gone on. She, Mrs. Hardcastle, was the first to call out the name of Mr. Dundyke. She called it several times, and she had a loud, coarse, harsh voice; but only echo answered her. The boatmen woke up from their slumbers, and shouted in their patois, but there came no response from Mr. Dundyke. A sickening fear, whose very intensity made her heart cold, rushed over Mrs. Dundyke. Her hands shook; the red of her face turned to pallor.

"Why, you never mean to say you are alarmed!" exclaimed Mrs. Hardcastle, looking at her in surprise.

"No—no, ma'am, not exactly alarmed," returned poor Mrs. Dundyke, half ashamed to confess to the feeling. But her quivering lips gave the lie to her words. "I do think it strange he should go away, knowing he had sent for us. I was quite easy at first, thinking he had gone to sleep somewhere, overpowered with the heat. There is no danger, I suppose, that—that—anyone could fall into the water from this spot?"

There was certainly no danger of that: and the boatmen laughed at the notion, for the bank and the water were at that place nearly on a level.

"A man might walk in if he felt so inclined," observed Mrs. Hardcastle, jestingly, "but he could scarcely enter it in any other manner. And your husband is not one to cut short his life for pleasure."

Not he, indeed! Never a man less likely to make his own quietus than plain practical David Dundyke, with his future aspirations and his harmless ambition. His wife knew that the Lord Mayor's chair, shining in the distant vista, would alone have kept him from plunging head foremost into the most tempting lake that ever bubbled in the sunlight.

"There is no marvel about it," said Mrs. Hardcastle. "The boatmen were kept two hours at the hotel, remember, before we were found, and Mr. Dundyke naturally grew tired of waiting, and went away, thinking we should not come."

"But where can he be?" cried Mrs. Dundyke. "What has he done with himself?"

"He has gone back by land. There was no other course for him, if he thought—as he no doubt did think—that the boatman had misunderstood his orders and would not return."

"But, ma'am, he does not know his way back."

"Not know it! Instinct would tell it him. He has only to keep the lake on his right, and follow his nose; he would soon be in Geneva."

It was so probable a solution of the mystery, that Mrs. Dundyke had been unreasonable not to adopt it; indeed she was glad to do it; and they got into the boat, and were rowed back again, expecting Mr. Dundyke would be at the hotel. But they did not find him there. And it was nearly five o'clock then.

"That's nothing," said Mrs. Hardcastle. "The day is so hot he would take his time walking. My husband has not been in either, it seems. Rely upon it they have met and are together; they have turned into some cool café."

The ladies went upstairs together, each into her respective chamber: it has been said that the rooms joined. But that undefined dread, amounting to a positive agony, weighed still on the spirits of Mrs. Dundyke. She could not rest. Mrs. Hardcastle was attiring herself for dinner; not so Mrs. Dundyke; she stood at the door peeping out, hoping to see her husband appear in the long corridor. While thus looking, there came, creeping up the stairs, Mr. Hardcastle, stealing along, as it seemed to Mrs. Dundyke, to shun observation, his boots white, as if he had walked much in the dusty roads, his face scratched, and one of his fingers sprained (as she learnt afterwards) and bound up with a handkerchief.

"Oh, sir!" she cried, darting forward in high excitement, "where is he? where is Mr. Dundyke? What has happened to him?"

Mr. Hardcastle stood for a moment transfixed, and, unless Mrs. Dundyke was strangely mistaken, his face changed colour. She associated no suspicion with that pallor then; she but thought of her own ill manners in accosting him so abruptly.

"What of your husband?" he asked, rallying himself. "I don't know anything of him. Is he not in?"

Mrs. Dundyke explained. Mrs. Hardcastle, hearing their voices, came out of her room and helped her.

"Is that all?" exclaimed Mr. Hardcastle, when he had listened, and his tone was one of indifference. "Oh, he will soon be back. If he is not in, in time for dinner, Mrs. Dundyke, you can go down with us. Don't alarm yourself."

"But have you not seen him?—not been with him?" urged poor Mrs. Dundyke.

"I have never seen him since breakfast."

"We thought you might have walked round by the shore to join him, as you saw this morning where the boat was making for," remarked Mrs. Hardcastle.

He turned savagely upon her, his eyes glaring like a tiger's.

"No, madam," he said, with concentrated passion, "none save a fool would undertake such a walk to-day. I have been in the town, executing various commissions," he added, changing his tone, and addressing Mrs. Dundyke, "and a pretty accident I had nearly met with: in avoiding a restive horse on the dusty quays, I slipped down, with my face on some flint stones."

Mrs. Dundyke would not go down to dinner, but Mrs. Hardcastle fetched her into her own room afterwards, and ordered tea brought up, and they were both very kind to her, buoying up her spirits, and laughing at her fears. Her husband had only lost his way, they urged, and would be home fast enough by morning—a rare joke they would have with him about running away, when he did come.

It was eleven o'clock when Mrs. Dundyke wished them good night, and retired to her chamber, feeling like one more dead than alive. It is probable that few of us can form any adequate idea of her sensations. But for that horrible, mysterious dread, which seemed to have come upon her without sufficient cause, the mere absence of her husband ought not so very much to have alarmed her. She felt a conviction, sure and certain, that some dreadful fate had overtaken him; and, in that dread torture of suspense, she would have given her own life up the next moment, oh, how willingly, to see him return.

She stood at the open window of her room, leaning far out of it, hoping to see him come round the corner of the street, (stay, not so much hoping as wishing,) foot-sore and travel-worn, having lost his way and found it again. She wondered whether anyone was still up, to let him in, if he did come; if not, she would steal downstairs herself, and work at the door fastenings until she undid them. It was with great difficulty, exercising the very utmost self-control, that she stopped where she was, that she did not go out into the streets, searching for him.

While thus thinking, Mrs. Dundyke became aware that strange sounds were proceeding from the next room, though not at first had she heeded them. A fearful quarrel appeared to be taking place between Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle, and Mrs. Dundyke drew back and closed her window in tremor. Its substance she could not hear, did not wish to hear; but wild sobs and reproaches seemed to come from the lady, and sharp words, not unmixed with oaths, from the gentleman. Twice Mrs. Dundyke heard her husband's name mentioned, or her own ("Dundyke"); and the quarrel seemed to have reference to him. One sentence of Mr. Hardcastle's came distinctly on her ear, apparently in answer to some threat or reproach; it was to the effect that Mrs. Hardcastle might leave him as soon as she pleased; might take her departure then, in the midnight hour. After awhile the anger appeared to subside, silence supervened, and Mrs. Dundyke watched through the live-long night. But her husband did not come.

With the morning Mrs. Hardcastle came to her. She said they had received letters which must cause them to depart for Genoa, where they found their remitted money had really been sent.

"But, ma'am," urged poor Mrs. Dundyke, "surely Mr. Hardcastle will not go and leave me alone in this dreadful uncertainty!"

"He intends to stay until the evening; he will not leave you a moment earlier than he is obliged. Perhaps your husband will make his appearance this morning."

In the course of the morning, Mr. Hardcastle went with the two boatmen to the place where they had landed Mr. Dundyke on the previous day, and a gentleman named by the proprietor of the hotel accompanied them; but not the slightest trace of him could be found, though some hours were spent in exploring. In the evening, by the six o'clock diligence, Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle left Geneva, the former handing to Mrs. Dundyke an order upon the house in London, Hardcastle and Co., for the twenty pounds he had borrowed of her husband. He regretted, he said, his inability to furnish her, then, with any funds she might require, but he had barely sufficient to carry himself and wife to Genoa. If Mrs. Dundyke approved, he would, with the greatest pleasure, forward from that city any sum she chose to name; for, being known there, his credit was unlimited. Mrs. Dundyke declined his offer, with thanks: she reflected that, if her husband returned, he would have his money with him; and in the event of his mysterious absence being prolonged, she might as well write home for money as borrow it from Mr. Hardcastle at Genoa. She wondered, but did not presume to ask, how he had procured funds for his own journey, and to discharge his hotel bill, which he paid before starting.

"Keep up your spirits, Mrs. Dundyke," he cheeringly said as he shook hands with her at parting. "Depend upon it, your husband will come home, and bring some good reason for his absence; and if it were not that I am compelled—compelled by business—to go on to Genoa, I would not leave you."

She sat down as if some cold shiver had seized upon her heart. It was in her own room that this farewell was spoken; and in that one moment, as he released her hand, and his peculiar eyes rested on her in the parting, and then were lost sight of, it flashed into her mind where she had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes she had once so shrunk from at Westerbury; at least, they bore the same expression—Benjamin Carr's.

Mrs. Dundyke's pulses quickened, and she clasped her hands. For one single moment a doubt arose to her whether Mr. Hardcastle could be Mr. Hardcastle—whether he was not an impostor, Benjamin Carr, or any other, travelling under a false name; and a whole host of trifling incidents, puzzles to her hitherto, arose to her mind as if in confirmation. But the doubt did not last. That he was really anybody but the great Mr. Hardcastle—head, under his uncle, of the great house of Hardcastle and Co.—she did not believe. As to the resemblance in the eyes to those of Benjamin Carr, she concluded it must be accidental; and of Benjamin Carr's features she retained no recollection. She opened the order he had given her to receive the twenty pounds, and found it was signed "B. Hardcastle:" no Christian name in full. Mrs. Dundyke dismissed all doubts from her memory, and continued to believe implicitly in Mr. Hardcastle.

It was, perhaps, a somewhat curious coincidence—at least, you may deem it so, as events go on—that on this same evening an English clergyman should arrive at Geneva, and put up at the hotel. It was the Rev. Wheeler Prattleton, who was visiting Switzerland in pursuance of his intentions (as you once heard mention of), accompanied by his eldest daughter. The strange disappearance of Mr. Dundyke had caused some stir in the hotel, and the clergyman was told of it.

"It is an uncommon name, papa—Dundyke," observed Miss Prattleton. "Do you think it can be the Dundykes who are relatives of Mrs. Arkell's?"

"What Dundykes?" returned Mr. Prattleton, his memory on these points not so retentive as his daughter's. "Has Mrs. Arkell relatives of the name?"

"Oh, papa, you forget. Mrs. Arkell's sister is a Mrs. Dundyke. I have often heard Travice Arkell speak of her; he calls her Aunt Betsey. They live in London."

"We will ascertain, Mary," said Mr. Prattleton, his sympathies aroused. "If this lady should prove to be Mrs. Arkell's sister, we must do all we can for her."

It was very soon ascertained, for the clergyman at once sent up his card, and requested an interview with Mrs. Dundyke. Mr. Prattleton threw himself completely into the affair, and became almost painfully interested in it. He believed, as did all others, that nothing serious had occurred, but that from some unaccountable cause Mr. Dundyke remained absent—perhaps from temporary illness or accident; and every hour, as the days went on, was his return looked for. Mary Prattleton had the room vacated by the Hardcastles, Mr. Prattleton had one on the same floor; and their presence was of the very greatest comfort to poor, lonely, bereaved Mrs. Dundyke.

"Mary, I cannot tell you how I like her!" Mr. Prattleton impulsively exclaimed to his daughter. "She is a true lady; but so unobtrusive, so simple, so humble—there are few like her."

All the means they could think of were put in force to endeavour to obtain some clue to Mr. Dundyke, and to the circumstances of his disappearance. Mr. Prattleton took the conduct of the search upon himself. A Swiss peasant, or very small farmer, a man of known good character, and on whose word reliance might be placed, came forward and stated that on the day in question he had seen two gentlemen, whom he took to be English by their conversation, walking amicably together away from the lake, and about a mile distant from the spot of Mr. Dundyke's landing. The description he gave of these tallied with the persons of the missing man and Mr. Hardcastle. The stouter of the two, he said, who wore a straw hat and a narrow green ribbon tied round it, carried a yellow silk handkerchief, and occasionally wiped his face, which looked very red and hot. The other—a tall, dark man—had a cane in his hand with a silver top, looking like a dog's head, which cane he whirled round and round as he walked, after the manner of a child's rattle. All this agreed exactly. Mr. Dundyke's hat was straw, its ribbon green and narrow, and the handkerchief, which Mrs. Dundyke had handed him clean that morning, was yellow, with white spots. And again, that action of whirling his cane round in the air, was a frequent habit of Mr. Hardcastle's. The country was scoured in the part where this peasant had seen them, and also in the direction that they appeared to be going, but nothing was discovered. Mr. Prattleton reminded Mrs. Dundyke that there were more yellow silk handkerchiefs in the world than one, that straw hats and green ribbons were common enough in Geneva, and that many a gentleman, even of those staying at the hotel, carried a silver-headed cane, and might twirl it in walking. "Besides," added the clergyman, "if Mr. Hardcastle had been that day with Mr. Dundyke, what possible motive could he have for denying it?"

"True; most true," murmured the unhappy lady. She was still unsuspicious as a child.

One of Mr. Prattleton's first cares had been to write to London, asking for the number of the notes, forwarded by the house in Fenchurch-street to Mr. Dundyke. It had of course been lost with him; as also anything else he might have had in the shape of letters and papers, for they were all in his pocket-book, and he had it about him. When the answer was received by Mr. Prattleton, he made inquiries at the different money-changers, and traced the notes, a twenty-pound and a ten-pound. They had been changed for French money at Geneva, on the day subsequent to Mr. Dundyke's disappearance: the halves were in the shop still, and were shown to the clergyman. The money-changer could not recollect who had changed them, except that it was an Englishman; he thought a tall man: but so many English gentlemen came in to change money, he observed, that it was difficult to recollect them individually.

The finding of these notes certainly darkened the case very much, and Mr. Prattleton went home with a slow step, thinking how he could break the news to Mrs. Dundyke. She was sitting in his daughter's room, and he disclosed the facts as gently as possible.

Mrs. Dundyke did not weep; did not cry aloud: her quiet hands were pressed more convulsively together in her lap; and that was all.

"If my husband were living, how could anyone else have the notes to change?" she said. "Oh, Mr. Prattleton, there is no hope! It is as I have thought from the first: he fell into the lake and was drowned."

"Nay," said the clergyman, "had he been drowned the notes would have been drowned too. Indeed, I do not think there is even a chance that he was drowned: had he got into the lake accidentally, (which is next to impossible, unless he rolled in from the grass,) he could readily have got out again. But I find that more money was sent him than this thirty pounds, Mrs. Dundyke. The two halves of a fifty-pound note were sent as well. Do you know anything of it?"

"Nothing," she answered. "I knew he wrote home for thirty pounds; I knew of no more."

Mr. Prattleton gave her the letter, received that morning from Fenchurch-street, and she found it was as the clergyman said. Mr. Dundyke had written for fifty pounds, as well as the thirty; and it had been sent in two half notes, the whole of the notes in two separate letters: three half notes in one letter, and three in the other, and both letters had been dispatched by the same post. There could be no reasonable doubt therefore that all the money had been received by Mr. Dundyke.

"But I cannot trace the fifty," observed Mr. Prattleton, "and I have been to every money-changer's, and to every other likely place in Geneva. I went to the bank; I asked here at the hotel, but I can't find it. What do you want, Mary?"

Mary Prattleton had been for some few minutes trying to move a chest of drawers; the marble top made them heavy, and she desisted and looked at her father.

"I wish you would help me push aside these drawers, papa. My needle-book has fallen behind."

He advanced, and helped her to move the drawers from the wall. A chink, as of something falling, was heard, and a silver pencil-case rolled towards the feet of Mrs. Dundyke. She stooped mechanically to pick it up; and Miss Prattleton, who was stooping for her needle-book, was startled by a suppressed shriek of terror. It came from Mrs. Dundyke.

"It is my husband's pencil-case! it is my husband's pencil-case!"

"Dear, dear Mrs. Dundyke!" cried the alarmed clergyman, "you should not let the sight of it agitate you like this."

"You do not understand," she reiterated. "He had it with him on that fatal morning; he took it out with him. What should bring it back here, and without him? Where is he?"

Mr. Prattleton stood confounded; not able at first to take in quite the bearings of the case.

"How do you know he had it? He may have left it in the hotel."

"No, no, he did not. He went straight out from the breakfast-room, and, not a minute before, I saw him make a note with it on the back of a letter, and then return the pencil to the case in his pocket-book, where he always kept it, and put the pocket-book back into his pocket. How could he have written the note after the men landed him, telling us to join him there, without it?—he never carried but this one pencil. And now it is back in this room, and——oh, sir! the scales seem to fall from my eyes! If I am wrong, may Heaven forgive me for the thought!"

Her hands were raised, her whole frame was trembling; her livid face was quite drawn with the intensity of fear, of horror. Mr. Prattleton stood aghast.

"What do you say?" he asked, bending his ear, for the words on her lips had dropped to a low murmur. "What?"

"He has surely been murdered by Mr. Hardcastle."

[CHAPTER V.]
HOME, IN DESPAIR.

The Reverend Mr. Prattleton literally recoiled at the words, and staggered back a few steps in his dismay. Not at first could he recover his amazement. The suggestion was so dreadful, so entirely, as he believed, uncalled for, that he began to doubt whether poor Mrs. Dundyke's trouble had not turned her brain.

"It surely, surely is so!" she impressively repeated. "He has been murdered, and by Mr. Hardcastle."

"Good heavens, my dear lady, you must not allow your imagination to run away with you in this manner!" cried the shocked clergyman. "A gentleman in Mr. Hardcastle's position of life——"

"Oh, stop! stop!" she interrupted; "is it his position of life? Is he indeed Mr. Hardcastle?"

And she began, in her agitation, to pour out forthwith the whole tale: the various half doubts of the Hardcastles, suppressed until now. Her conviction that Mrs. Hardcastle was certainly not a lady, their embarrassments for money, and other little items. Then there had been the long absence of Mr. Hardcastle on the day of the disappearance; his sneaking upstairs quietly on his return, hurt and scratched, warm and dusty, as if he had walked far; his sudden change of colour when she asked after her husband, and the angry look turned upon his wife when she suggested that he had possibly been with Mr. Dundyke. There was the description given by the Swiss peasant of the two gentlemen he had seen walking together that day, and the furious quarrel she had heard at night, when her husband's name was mentioned. All was told to Mr. Prattleton, what she knew, what she thought; all with an exception: the one faint suspicion that had crossed her as to whether Mr. Hardcastle could be Benjamin Carr. She did not mention that. Perhaps it had faded from her memory; and Benjamin Carr, a gentleman born, would be no more likely to commit a murder than the real Mr. Hardcastle. However it may have been, she did not mention it, then, or at any other time.

How could the pencil have got back to the hotel, and into that room, unless brought by Mr. Hardcastle? The testimony of the Swiss peasant, of the two gentlemen he had seen walking together, was terribly significant now. Mr. Prattleton, who had never been brought into contact with anything like murder in his life, felt as if he were on the eve of some awful discovery.

"It was so strange that people of the Hardcastles' position should be up here in one small room on the third floor of the hotel!" cried Mrs. Dundyke, mentioning the thought that had often struck her. "Mrs. Hardcastle said no other room was vacant when they came, and that may have been so; but would they not have changed afterwards?"

Mr. Prattleton went downstairs. He sought an interview with the host, and gleaned what information he could, not imparting a hint of these new suspicions. Could the host inform him who Mr. Hardcastle was?

The host supposed Mr. Hardcastle was—Mr. Hardcastle. Voilà tout! Although he did think that the name given in to the hotel at first was not so long as Hardcastle, but he was not quite sure; it had not been written down, only the number of the room they occupied. Monsieur and Madame had very much resented being put up on the third floor. It was the only room then vacant in all the hotel, and at first Madame said she would not take it, she would go to another hotel; but she was tired, and stopped, and the luggage, too, had been all brought in. Afterwards, when Madame was settled in it, she did not care to change. In what name were Monsieur's letters addressed—Hardcastle? Ma foi, yes, for all he knew; but Monsieur's letters stopped at the post-office, as did those of three parts of the company in the hotel, and Monsieur went for them himself. Money? Well, Monsieur did seem short of money at times; but he had plenty at others, and he had paid up liberally at last. Other gentlemen sometimes ran short, when their remittances were delayed.

There was not a word in this that could tell really against Mr. Hardcastle. The host evidently spoke in all good faith; and Mr. Prattleton began to look upon Mrs. Dundyke's suspicions as the morbid fancies of a woman in trouble. He put another question to the landlord—what was his private opinion of this singular disappearance of Mr. Dundyke?

The landlord shook his head; he had had but one opinion upon the point for some days past. The poor gentleman, there was not the least doubt, had in some way got into the lake and been drowned. But the notes in his pocket-book? urged the clergyman—the money that had been changed at the money-changer's? Well, the fact must be, the host supposed, that his pocket-book was left upon the grass, or had floated on the water, and some thief had come across it and appropriated the contents.

Mr. Prattleton, after due reflection, became convinced that this must have been the case; and for the pencil-case, he believed that Mrs. Dundyke was in error in supposing her husband took it out with him.

Mrs. Dundyke was not so easily satisfied. She urged the strange fact of Mr. Hardcastle's appearance when he returned that day: his scratched face, his dusty clothes, his altogether disordered look, his sneaking up the stairs as if he did not want to be seen. But upon inquiry it was found that a gentleman, whose appearance tallied with the person of Mr. Hardcastle, did so fall on the dusty flint stones, in trying to avoid a restive horse, and his face was scratched and his hand hurt in consequence; and, as Mr. Prattleton observed, he really might be trying to avoid observation in coming up the hotel stairs, not caring to be met in that untidy state. The pencil-case was next shown to the boatmen; but they could not say whether it was the one the gentleman had written the note with. They were tired with the row in the hot sun, and did not take particular notice. One of them was certain that, whatever pencil the gentleman had used, he took it from his pocket; and he saw him tear the leaf out of the pocket-book to write upon.

Altogether it amounted to just this—that while Mr. Hardcastle might be guilty, he probably was innocent. Mr. Prattleton inclined to the latter belief; and as the days went on, Mrs. Dundyke inclined to it also. The points fraught with suspicion began to lose their dark hue, and when there arrived a stranger at the hotel, who happened to know that old Mr. Hardcastle's nephew was travelling on the continent, and was much inclined to spend money faster than he got it, though otherwise honourable, Mrs. Dundyke's suspicions faded, and she reproached herself for having entertained them.

But nothing further could be heard of Mr. Dundyke; nothing further was heard, and it became useless to linger on in Geneva. That he was in Geneva's lake, she never doubted, and the place became hateful to her.

She travelled towards home in company with Mr. Prattleton and his daughter. At Paris they parted; they remaining in it for a few days, she proceeding to London direct, which she reached in safety. Poor Mrs. Dundyke! As she sat alone in the dark cab which was to take her to her now solitary home at Brixton, she perhaps felt the loss, the dreadful circumstances of it altogether, more keenly than she had felt them yet. She sat with dry eyes, but a throbbing brain, feeling that life for her had ended; that she was left in a world whose happiness had died out.

It was a very pretty white villa, with a lawn before it, and encircled by carriage drive, with double gates. As the man drove in at one, and stopped before the entrance, and the door was thrown open to the light of the hall, Mrs. Dundyke became aware that some gentleman was standing there, behind the servant.

"Who is that, John?" she whispered.

"It's a stranger, ma'am; a gentleman who has just called. He seemed so surprised when I said you had not returned yet; but you drove up at the moment. And master, ma'am?"

Mrs. Dundyke did not answer. The servants knew that something was amiss; but she had not courage to explain then; in fact, she could scarcely suppress her emotion sufficiently to speak with composure. The stranger came forward to meet her, and she recognised the gentleman who had assisted them in Grenoble, and had given his name as Robert Carr.

"You see I have availed myself of your invitation to call," he said. "It is curious I should happen to come to-night when you are only returning. I fancied you did not intend to remain away so long. But where is Mr. Dundyke?"

She turned with him into one of the sitting-rooms—an elegant room of good proportions. The chandelier was lighted; a handsome china tea-service, interspersed with articles of silver, stood on the table; cold meats and other good things were ready; and altogether it was a complete picture of home comfort, of easy competency. The thought that he, who had been the many years partner of her life, would never come back to this again, combined with the home question of the Rev. Mr. Carr, struck out of her what little composure she had retained, and Mrs. Dundyke sank down in an easy chair, and burst into a storm of sobs.

To say that the young clergyman stood in consternation, would be saying little. He was not used to scenes, did not like them; and he felt inwardly uncomfortable, not knowing what he ought to say or do.

"Pray, forgive me," she murmured, when she had recovered sufficiently to speak. "You asked after my husband. He is lost—he is gone. He will never come home again."

"Lost!" repeated Robert Carr.

Mrs. Dundyke told her tale, and the young man listened in utter astonishment. He had never heard of such a thing in all his life; had never imagined anything so strange. It seemed that he could not be tired of asking questions—of hazarding conjectures. He wished he had been there, he said; he was sure that the search he would have instituted would have found him, dead or alive. And it was a somewhat remarkable fact that everybody, forthwith destined to hear the story, said the same. So prone are we to under-rate the exertions of other people, and over-rate our own.

But simple, courteous Mrs. Dundyke, could not forget the duties of hospitality amid her great sorrow. She went upstairs for a minute to take off her travelling things, and then quietly made tea for Robert Carr, asking him questions about himself as he drank it.

He had come straight to London from Grenoble, on business connected with an assistant ministry he expected to get in November, and then went to Holland. He had been back in London now about a week, but should soon be returning to Holland, as his wife was not in good health.

"His wife!" Mrs. Dundyke repeated in surprise. She thought he looked too young to have a wife.

Robert Carr laughed. He had a wife and two children, he said; he had married young.

Mrs. Dundyke told him that she thought they were connected—in fact, she knew they were, for old Mrs. Dundyke used to say so. "I do not quite remember how she made it out," continued Mrs. Dundyke; "I think she was a cousin in the second degree to the Miss Hughes's of Westerbury. They were——"

Mrs. Dundyke stopped short. None were more considerate than she of the feelings of others; and it suddenly struck her that the young clergyman before her, a gentleman himself, might not like to be reminded of these things.

"They were dressmakers, if you speak of my mother's sisters," he quietly said; "I have heard her say so. She was a lady herself in mind and manners; but her family were quite inferior."

Mrs. Dundyke did not feel her way altogether clear. She remembered hearing of the elopement; she remembered certain unpleasant subsequent rumours—that Martha Ann Hughes remained with Mr. Carr in Holland, although the ceremony of marriage had not passed between them. Always charitably judging, she supposed now that they must have been married at some subsequent period; and this, their eldest son, called himself Robert Carr. But it was not a topic that she felt comfortable in pursuing.

"You say that your mother is dead?" she resumed.

"She has been dead about five years. We are three of us: I; my brother Thomas, who was born two years after me; and my sister, Mary Augusta, who is several years younger. There were two other girls between my brother and Mary, but they died."

"Mr. Carr is in business in Rotterdam?"

"Yes; partner in a merchant's house there. He has saved money, and is well off."

Mrs. Dundyke faintly smiled; she was glad for a moment to make a semblance of forgetting her own woes. "Those random young men often make the most sober ones when they settle down. Your father was wild in his young days."

"Was he? I'm sure I don't know. You should see him now: a regular steady-going old Dutchman, fat and taciturn, who smokes his afternoons away in the summer-house. He has not been very well of late years; and I tell him he ought to spend his hours of recreation in taking exercise, not in sitting still and smoking."

"Does he keep up any intercourse with his relatives in Westerbury?" asked Mrs. Dundyke, for she had heard through Mildred Arkell that Westerbury never heard anything of its renegade son, Robert Carr, and did not know or care whether he was dead or alive—in fact, had forgotten all remembrance of him.

"Not any—not the least. I fancy my father and mother must have had some disagreement with their home friends, for they never spoke of them. I remember, when I was a little boy, my mother getting news of the death of a sister; but how it came to her I'm sure I don't know."

"She had two sisters, and she had a brother," said Mrs. Dundyke. "I heard that Mary died. Are the other sister and the brother living?"

"I really do not know. If we had possessed no relatives in the world, we could not have lived more completely isolated from them. I believe my grandfather is living, and in Westerbury—at least, I have not heard of his death."

"Have you lived entirely in Rotterdam?" she asked, her interest very much awakened, she scarcely knew why, for this young man. Perhaps it took its rise in the faint, sad thought, which would keep arising in spite of herself, that a terrible blow might be in future store for him, of whose possible existence he was evidently in utter ignorance.

"Our home has been in Rotterdam, but I and my brother have been educated in England. We were with a clergyman for some years in London, and then went to Cambridge. It would not have done for me to preach with a foreign accent," he added, with a smile.

"But you speak with a perfect accent," said Mrs. Dundyke; "as well as if you had never been out of England. Do you speak Dutch?"

"As a native; in fact, I suppose it may be said that I am a native. Dutch, English, German, and French—we speak them all well."

Poor Mrs. Dundyke heaved a bitter sigh. The words brought to her remembrance what her husband had said about their rubbing on with "we" and "no;" but she would not let it go on again to emotion. She observed the same delicate look on this young man that had struck her at Grenoble; and he coughed rather frequently, always putting his hand to his chest at the time, as if the cough gave him pain.

"Will you let me ask you if you are very strong?" she said. "I do not think you look so."

"I was strong," he replied, "no one more so, until I met with a hurt. In riding one day at Cambridge, the horse threw me, and kicked me here," touching his chest. "Since then, I have had a cough, more or less, and am sometimes in slight pain. My father despatched me on that tour, when I met you, with a view of making me strong."

"Was the injury great at the time?"

"No, I think not; the doctors said not. I believe some of the small arteries were ruptured. I spit blood for some time after it; and, do you know," he added, looking suddenly up at her, "the last day or two I have been spitting it a little again."

"You must take care of yourself," said Mrs. Dundyke, after a pause.

"So I do. I am going to a doctor to-morrow morning, for I want to get into duty again, and should be vexed if anything stopped it."

"Have you ever done duty?"

"Of course; for a twelvemonth. I had my title in the diocese of Ely. I am in full orders now, and hope to be at work in November."

A doubt came over Mrs. Dundyke as she looked at his slender hands and his hollow cheek, whether he would ever work again. Robert Carr rose to bid her good-bye.

"Can I be of any service to you in any way?" he said, in a low, earnest tone, as he held her hand in his. "You cannot tell what a strange impression this tale has made upon me; and I feel as if I should like to go to Geneva, and prosecute the search still."

"You are very kind," she said; "but indeed there is nothing else that can be done. The environs of Geneva were scoured, especially on the side where, as I have told you, two gentlemen were seen who bore the resemblance to my husband and Mr. Hardcastle."

"I don't like that Mr. Hardcastle," cried the young man; "no, I don't. He ought not to have gone away, and left you in the midst of your distress. It was an unfeeling thing to do."

"He could not help it. He said he had urgent business at Genoa."

"The business should have waited, had it been mine. Well, if I can do anything for you, Mrs. Dundyke, now or later, do let me. If what you say is correct—that we are related—I have a right to help you."

"Thank you very much. And remember," she added, in a voice almost as low as a whisper, "that should you ever be in—in—trouble, or distress, or need a friend in any way, you have only to come to me."

What was in Mrs. Dundyke's mind as she spoke? What made her say it? She was thinking of that shock which might be looming for him in the future, it was hard to say how near or how distant. And she felt that she could love this young man almost like a son.

"I will see you again, Mrs. Dundyke, before I leave town," were his last words.

But he did not. When he reached his lodgings that night, he found a telegraphic despatch awaiting him from Rotterdam, saying that his father was taken dangerously ill.

And the Reverend Robert Carr hastened to Dover by the first train, en route for Holland.

[CHAPTER VI.]
NEWS FOR WESTERBURY.

It cannot be denied that the present time, this first day after coming home, was one of peculiar pain to Mrs. Dundyke. She would have to go over the sad and strange story again and again, and there was no help for it. The chief partners in Fenchurch-street naturally required the particulars; the few friends she had, the household servants, wished to hear them, and there was only herself to tell the tale.

By ten o'clock, on the morning after her arrival, the second partner of the house, who wore rings and a moustache, and had altogether been an object of envy to the unfortunate common-councilman, was sitting with Mrs. Dundyke. She had not put on widow's weeds; she would not yet; she had said to Mary Prattleton, with a burst of grief, that a widow's cap would take the last remnant of lingering hope out of her. She wore a rich black silk gown, trimmed with much crape, but the cap and bonnet of the widow she assumed not.

Mr. Knowles, a kind-hearted man, who did not want for good sense, dandy though he was in dress, sat twirling his sandy moustache, the very gravest concern pervading his countenance. Mrs. Dundyke, who had never seen this gentleman more than once or twice, sat in humility, struggling with her grief. His social position was of a different standing from what poor Mr. Dundyke's had ever been.

"You see, Mrs. Dundyke, one hardly knows how to act, or what to be at," he remarked, after they had talked for some time, and she had related to him the details (always excepting any suspicion she might once have entertained of Mr. Hardcastle) as closely as she could. "Apart from the grief, the concern for your husband personally, it is altogether so awkward an affair, in a business point of view: we don't know whether we are to consider him as dead or alive."

She shook her head.

"There is little hope that he is alive, sir."

"Well, it would really seem like it. But what can have become of him?"

"There was the lake, you know."

"Yes."

A pause. Presently Mr. Knowles went on.

"When the letter came from that clergyman—Prattleton, wasn't his name?—saying that Mr. Dundyke was missing, and asking for the particulars of the money we had forwarded to him, we could not understand it. 'Missing!' cried old Mr. Knowles, who happened to have come to Fenchurch-street that day, 'one talks of a child being missing, but not of a man.' And when Mr. Prattleton's second letter came to us, giving some of the facts, I assure you we could with difficulty give credence to them."

"There is one little point I did not know of, sir; the sending to you for a fifty-pound note. My husband told me he was sending for the thirty pounds, but he did not say anything of the other. I cannot think why he sent for it."

Mr. Knowles took out his pocket-book.

"I happen to have Mr. Dundyke's letter, which was preserved quite accidentally, not being a strictly business one. You see, he only asks for the fifty pounds in a postscript, as if it were an afterthought. In fact, he says as much:" and Mrs. Dundyke's eyes filled as she looked on the well-known characters.

"P.S. Upon second thoughts, I doubt whether the 30l. will be enough for me. Be so good as to send me a 50l. note in addition to it; in halves as the other."

"Which accordingly we did," resumed Mr. Knowles, as Mrs. Dundyke returned him the letter. "And that note, you say, has not been traced?"

"No, sir, it has not."

"Well, it is altogether most strange. Of course whoever found the pocket-book (if the supposition that it was picked up on the bank of the lake be correct) may be keeping the fifty-pound note by him, but the probability is that he would have got rid of it at once, as he did the others."

"The most singular point to my mind throughout, sir, is the finding of the pencil-case in Mr. Hardcastle's room," said Mrs. Dundyke. "I can't get over that."

"Can't you? It appears to me easily explainable. The supposition that Mr. Dundyke took it out with him that morning must be a mistake. Mr. Hardcastle probably borrowed it from him at breakfast."

"I am quite sure, sir, he did not. I saw my husband put the pencil in its place in the pocket-book, and return the pocket-book to his pocket."

"Then he must have taken it out again when outside the room, and perhaps dropped it. Mr. Hardcastle may have picked it up, and carried it up to the chamber and forgotten it. There are many ways of accounting for that; but it is a pity the pencil was not found before Mr. Hardcastle's departure."

Mrs. Dundyke opened her lips to ask how then could her husband have written the pencilled note afterwards—that he never carried but that one; but she was weary with reiterating the same thing over and over again; and, after all, what Mr. Knowles said was possible. He might have dropped the pencil afterwards; Mr. Hardcastle might have picked it up and carried it to his room; and it certainly might have happened, it was not impossible, that her husband, contrary to custom, had a second pencil in his pocket.

"Shall we send the twenty-pound order to Hardcastle's house and get it cashed for you?" Mr. Knowles asked, when he was leaving. "I fancy that young Hardcastle is not very steady. He is a great deal on the continent, and I have heard he gambles."

Mrs. Dundyke thanked him and handed him the order. "Perhaps you would let the clerk inquire for Mr. Hardcastle's address at the same time, sir?" she said; "and whether he is still at Genoa. I should like to write and ask how he did find the pencil."

But when the order on Hardcastle and Co. was presented—as it was that same day—the house in Leadenhall-street declined to pay it, disclaiming all knowledge of the drawer. Upon the clerk's saying that it had been given by the nephew of Mr. Hardcastle, senior, to Mrs. Dundyke, in liquidation of money borrowed at Geneva, the firm shrugged their shoulders, and recommended the clerk to apply personally to that gentleman, at his residence at Kensington. This information was conveyed to Mrs. Dundyke, and she at once said she should like to go herself.

She went up to Mr. Hardcastle's the next day, and the old gentleman received her very courteously. He was a venerable man with white hair, and was walking up and down the room, which opened to a conservatory. Mrs. Dundyke did not state any particulars at first; she merely said that she had an order on the house in Leadenhall-street for twenty pounds, money borrowed by his nephew; that the house had declined to pay it, and had referred it to him.

"Borrowed money?" he repeated, in a sharp tone, as if the words visibly annoyed him.

"Yes, sir," he borrowed it of my husband; "his remittances did not arrive from England."

Mr. Hardcastle put on his spectacles, and she noticed that his hands trembled, she thought with agitation. "I have a nephew," he said, "who lives principally upon the continent; a thankless scapegrace he is, and has caused me a world of trouble. He has not been in England for eighteen months now, and I hope he will not come to it in a hurry; but he is always threatening it."

Mrs. Dundyke was surprised. "He told us, sir, that he had come from London recently; in fact, he said—he certainly implied—that he took a principal and active part in your house in Leadenhall-street."

"All boast, madam, all boast. He has not anything to do with it, and we would not let him have. I wonder he should say that, too! He is tolerably truthful, making a confession of his shortcomings, rather than hiding them."

"Is he at Genoa still, sir?"

"At where?" asked Mr. Hardcastle, looking at Mrs. Dundyke through his spectacles, which he had been all the time adjusting.

"He went on to Genoa, sir, from Geneva. I asked whether he was there still."

"He has not been at Geneva or at Genoa," said Mr. Hardcastle; "latterly, at any rate."

"Yes he has, sir; he was at Geneva when we got to it in July, and he stayed some time. He then went on to Genoa."

"Then he has deceived me," said Mr. Hardcastle, in a vexed tone. "I don't know why he should; it does not matter to me what place he is in. What is this, madam—the order? This is not his handwriting," hastily continued Mr. Hardcastle, at the first glance, as he unfolded the paper.

"I saw him write it, sir," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"Madam, it is no more like his writing than it is like yours or mine," was the testy answer. "And—what is this signature, B. Hardcastle? My nephew's name is Thomas."

There was a momentary silence. Mr. Hardcastle sat looking at the written order, knitting his brow in reflection.

"Madam, I do not think he could have been at Geneva when this was dated," he resumed; "I had a letter from him just about this time, written from Brussels. Stay, I will get it."

He opened a desk in the room and produced the letter. Singular to say, it bore date the 10th of August, the very day that the order was dated. The post-marks, both in Brussels and London, agreed with the date.

"It is impossible that it could have been he who wrote this order, madam, as you must perceive. Being in Brussels, he could not have been in Geneva. That this letter is in my nephew's handwriting, I assure you on my honour. You may read it; it is about family affairs, but that does not matter."

Mrs. Dundyke read the letter: it was not a long one. And then she looked in a dreamy sort of way at Mr. Hardcastle.

"Madam, I fear you must have been imposed upon."

"Have you two nephews, sir?"

"I never had but this one in my life, ma'am; and I have found him one too many."

"His wife is a showy woman, very pale, with handsome features," persisted Mrs. Dundyke, in a tone as dreamy as her gaze. Not that she disbelieved that venerable old man, but it all seemed so great a mystery.

"His wife! my nephew has no wife: I don't know who'd marry him. I tell you, ma'am, you have been taken in by some swindler who must have assumed his name. Though egad! my nephew's little better than a swindler himself, for he gets into debt with everybody who will let him."

Mrs. Dundyke sat silent a few moments, and she then told her tale—told everything that had occurred in connexion with her husband's mysterious fate. But when she came to hint her suspicions of Mr. Hardcastle's having been his destroyer, the old gentleman was visibly shocked and agitated.

"Good heavens! no! Spendthrift though he is, he is not capable of that awful crime. Madam, how do you suppose your husband lost his life? In a struggle? Did they quarrel?"

"I know nothing," answered poor Mrs. Dundyke.

"A quarrel and struggle it may have been. Mr. Hardcastle was a powerful man."

"A what? A powerful man, did you say, this Mr. Hardcastle?"

"Very powerful, sir; tall and strong. Standing nearly six feet high, and as dark as a gipsy."

"Thank Heaven for that relief!" murmured Mr. Hardcastle. "My nephew is one of the smallest men you ever saw, ma'am, short and slight, with fair curls: in fact, an effeminate dandy. There's his picture," added the old gentleman, throwing open the door of an inner room, "and when he next comes to England, and he is threatening it now, as you read in that letter, you shall see him. But, meanwhile, I will refer you to fifty persons, if you like, who will bear testimony that he is, in person, as I describe. There is no possible identity between them. Once more, thank Heaven!"

Mrs. Dundyke returned to her home. The affair seemed to wear a darker appearance than it had yet worn. And again her suspicions reverted to the man who had called himself Mr. Hardcastle.

We must now turn to Westerbury. That generally supine city was awakened out of its lethargy one morning, by hearing that Death had claimed Marmaduke Carr. On the very night that his grandson was at Mrs. Dundyke's, he was dying: and in the morning, Westerbury heard that he was dead.

On the same day, the instant the news was conveyed to them, Squire Carr and his son and heir came over with all the speed that the train could bring them, and went bustling to the house of the dead man. There they found Mr. Fauntleroy, the solicitor to the just deceased Mr. Carr. He was a tall, large man, this lawyer; a clever practitioner, a fast-living man, and, by the way, the same scapegrace who had done that injury, in the shape of money, to Peter Arkell. But Mr. Fauntleroy had settled down since then, and had made an enormous deal of money; and he held some sway in Westerbury.

"Here's a pretty go!" cried Mr. Fauntleroy, in his loud, blustering tones. "To think that he should die off like this, and nobody know of it!"

"I never knew he was ill," said the squire. "I should, of course, have come over if I had."

"Oh, he has been ill—that is to say, ailing—a good month now," returned the lawyer. "And when these aged healthy men begin to droop, their life is not worth much."

"Well, what's to be done now?" cried Squire Carr.

"Nothing of consequence until we hear from the son. I sent down to the carpenter this morning about the shell, but I shall do nothing more until we hear from Mr. Carr in Holland. I wrote a line to him the moment I heard what had happened, and was in time to get it off by the day mail. He will come over, there's no doubt."

"You knew his address, then?" cried Valentine. It was the first word he had spoken, and he had stood, with his little mean figure, rather behind his father, and his little mean light eyes furtively scanning the lawyer's countenance.

"I believe I know it," replied Mr. Fauntleroy. "There has been an address in our books as long as I have had anything to do with the office, 'Robert Carr, Messrs. something (I forget the name), Rotterdam.' I once asked Mr. Carr if it was his son's correct address, and he said it was, for all he knew. That is the address I have written to."

"Are you sure that the old man did not make a will?" asked the squire, alluding to his relative, Marmaduke.

"I am sure that I never made one for him," returned Mr. Fauntleroy. "Will? no, not he! The very mention of the subject used to anger him? Where was the use of his making a will, he said. His son would inherit just as well without a will as with one: he was heir-at-law."

Squire Carr's covetous heart gave vent to a resentful sigh. They were the very self-same words that Mr. Carr had used to him so many years ago, on the same topic. That old Marmaduke had not made a will, he felt as certain as that he should go to his own bed that night, but he could not help harping upon the contrary hope. As to Valentine, he could almost have found in his heart to forge one, had such doings not been unfashionable.

"Well, I must say Marmaduke might have remembered that he had other relatives besides that runagate son," grumbled the squire. "Had he been mine, I'd have cut him off with a shilling."

"Not a bit on't, Carr," laughed the lawyer, in his coarse way. "You'll not leave your chattels away from your own progeny; not even from the roving sheep, Ben."

Now it was a singular coincidence, amid the many small coincidences of this history, that Marmaduke Carr's son Robert should die at the same time as his father. But so it was. The exile of many, many years died without ever having seen his father, or sought for a word of reconciliation with him: he had died suddenly in a fit, before his father, but not above an hour or two; and without seeing one of his three children, for all were away from home when it occurred.

In reply to Mr. Fauntleroy's letter there arrived a short note, written by a lady who signed herself "Emma Carr, neé D'Estival." The language was English, and good English, too; but the handwriting was unmistakably French. In acknowledging the receipt of Mr. Fauntleroy's letter, it stated that "her husband" was from home; and it gave the information that Mr. Carr was dead—had died after a few hours' illness.

Nothing could exceed the commotion that this news excited at Squire Carr's. Robert Carr dead! then they were the heirs-at-law. They beset the office of Mr. Fauntleroy; they took the conduct of affairs into their own hands; they ordered the funeral, and they fixed the day of interment. Not by any means a remote day; scarcely decently so, according to English notions of keeping the dead. It was hot weather, Valentine remarked; and that was true: but Westerbury said they wanted to get the poor old man under ground that they might ransack the house, and see what valuables were in it. Mr. Fauntleroy was rather taken aback at these proceedings; at the summary wrestling of affairs out of his hands; and he had promised himself some nice little pickings out of all this, the funeral and the acting for Robert Carr, and one thing or another; but he did not see his way clear to hinder it. If Robert Carr was dead, and the old man had left no will, Squire Carr was undoubtedly the heir-at-law.

It was not, however, to be quite smooth sailing. On their return home from the funeral—and the only stranger invited to it was Mr. Arkell, he and Mr. Fauntleroy, with the two Carrs forming the mourners—Mr. Fauntleroy produced from his pocket a letter which he had received that morning. It was from the Reverend Robert Carr, the son of the deceased gentleman in Holland, requesting Mr. Fauntleroy to take all necessary arrangements upon himself for the interment of old Mr. Carr, his grandfather, and regretting that he was prevented journeying to attend it, in consequence of the melancholy circumstances already known to Mr. Fauntleroy. It desired that the style of the funeral should be handsome, in accordance with the fortune and position of the deceased. It was signed Robert Carr.

"Robert Carr!" contemptuously ejaculated the squire. "What a fool he must be to write in that strain to us!"

Mr. Fauntleroy chuckled over the letter; especially over that part of it ordering a suitable funeral. In his opinion, and in the opinion of Westerbury generally, the funeral of Mr. Carr had not been suitable. There were no mutes, no pall-bearers, no superfluous plumes, no anything: none but a mean-minded man would have ordered such a one.

Mr. Fauntleroy wrote back to the Reverend Robert Carr. He gave him a statement of the case in a dry, lawyery sort of way, and told him that Squire Carr being, under the apparent circumstances, heir-at-law, had taken possession of the affairs and property. This elicited a most indignant reply from Robert Carr. There could not be the slightest doubt that his father and mother were married, he said, and he should be in Westerbury as speedily as he could to maintain his own rights.

"Does he think he can impose upon us, this young fellow of a parson?" cried Squire Carr, when the letter was shown him. "He will be for making out next that his mother, that Hughes girl, was my cousin's wife. Let him prove it. Old birds are not caught with chaff."

And Squire Carr took out letters of administration.

[CHAPTER VII.]
ROBERT CARR'S VISIT.

Mrs. Arkell sat in her drawing-room with a visitor. She was listening to what struck her as being the very strangest tale she had ever heard or dreamt of. The Reverend Mr. Prattleton, who had reached home the previous night, had come this afternoon to tell her of the disappearance of Mr. Dundyke.

"Your sister wished me to give you the particulars as soon as I got home," he observed. "There was little, if any, acquaintance between you and Mr. Dundyke," he said, "but she felt sure you would feel concern for him, now he was dead, and would like to hear the details. It is a sad thing; I may say an awful thing."

"I never heard of such a thing," exclaimed Mrs. Arkell, forgetting her contempt for the Dundykes in the moment's interest. "It appears incredible that such a thing could happen. Do you really think he was murdered, Mr. Prattleton?"

"No, no; I don't think that," said the minor canon. "Of course there is the possibility; but I incline to the belief that he must have fallen into the lake, leaving his pocket-book on the shore. Indeed, I feel convinced of it, and I think Mrs. Dundyke felt so at last. In the first uncertainty and suspense, I hardly know what horrible things she did not fancy."

"But surely all proper search was made for him!"

"Of course it was. I am not sure that the police took so much interest in it, all of us being foreigners, and temporary sojourners in the town, as they would have done if a native had been missing. It was with difficulty they were persuaded to take a serious view of the case. The gentleman had only gone off somewhere else, they thought, without telling his wife. However, they did their best to find traces of him; but it proved useless."

"What could have taken them to Geneva?" exclaimed Mrs. Arkell.

"A desire for change and recreation, I suppose. The same that took me—that takes us all."

"But——those common working-people don't require change," had been on Mrs. Arkell's tongue; but she altered the words. Mrs. Dundyke was her sister, and unfortunately she could not deny it. "But——Geneva was very far to go."

"Not very, in these days of travelling. It is twenty years, Mrs. Arkell, since I was on the continent, and one seems to get about there ten times as quick as formerly. It's true I took the rail this time as much as I could; the Dundykes, on the contrary, preferred the old diligences, wherever they were to be had."

"Did you see Mr. Dundyke?"

"No," said the minor canon. "He had disappeared—is it not a strangely sounding word?—before we reached Geneva."

"What a mercy that it was not after it!" thought Mrs. Arkell, remembering the graces of manner of the ill-fated common-councilman. "Mrs. Dundyke has returned home, you say?"

"Oh, yes. When all hope was gone, we left Geneva. She went on home direct, but we stayed in Paris. I very much wished to call upon her as we came through London, but we had remained beyond our time, and I could not. I assure you, Mrs. Arkell, I do not know when I have met with anyone that so won on my regard and on Mary's, as your sister."

Mrs. Arkell raised her eyes in pure surprise. Her sister, humble Betsey Dundyke, win upon anybody's regard! It struck her that the clergyman must be saying it out of some notion of politeness; he could surely never mean it. The fact was, Mrs. Arkell had so long been accustomed to regard her sister in a disparaging point of view, that she could not look upon her in any other light.

"She was always a poor, weak sort of girl, between ourselves, Mr. Prattleton. Otherwise you know she never could have made such a marriage. The man was most inferior; dreadfully inferior."

"Indeed! Then I think he must have got on well," said Mr. Prattleton. "He was to have been one of the sheriffs, I believe, next year."

Mrs. Arkell superciliously drew down her still pretty lips. "A great many of those civic London people are quite inferior tradesmen," she said; "at least I have heard so. I only hope poor Betsey has enough left to keep her from want. When these business people die, it often happens that all they have dies with them, and—oh, William, Mr. Prattleton has brought us the strangest news! Mr. Dundyke—Betsey's husband, you know—is either murdered or drowned."

She had broken off thus on the entrance of her husband. Mr. Arkell, as he shook hands with the clergyman, listened in amazement little less great than his wife's, and asked question upon question, greatly interested. You see there was sufficient—what shall I say?—uncertainty, about the matter still, to make them look upon it more as an uncleared-up mystery, than a certain tragedy, and perhaps the chief feeling excited in all minds when they first heard it, was that of marvel. In the midst of Mr. Prattleton's explanations, the college clock struck three, and the bell rang out for afternoon service. It was the minor canon's signal.

"I must go," he said, as he rose; "it is my week for chanting. Mr. Wilberforce took the duty for me the two first days. I did intend to get home on Saturday last, but somehow the time slipped on."

Mr. Arkell was going into the town, and he walked with Mr. Prattleton as far as the large cathedral gates; for the minor canon went round to the front way that afternoon, as it lay in the road for Mr. Arkell. Lounging about in an idle mood, now against the contiguous railings, now against a post of the great doorway, in a manner not often seen at cathedral doors, and not altogether appropriate to them, was a rather tall, bilious-looking young man, with fair hair. He did not see them; his head was turned the other way.

"Can't you find anything better to do, George?"

The words came from the clergyman, and the young man turned with a start. It was George Prattleton, the half-brother of the minor canon, but very, very much younger. Mr. George held a good civil appointment in India, but he was now home on sick leave, and his days were eaten up with ennui. He made the Rev. Mr. Prattleton's his home, who good-naturedly allowed him to do it; but he was inclined to be what the world calls fast, and, except at the intervals (somewhat rare ones) when he had plenty of money in his pocket, he felt that the world was a wearisome sort of place, of no good to anybody. A good-natured, inoffensive young fellow on the whole; free from actual vice; but extravagant, incorrigibly lazy, and easily imposed upon. He generally called his brother "Mr. Prattleton." The difference in their ages justified it, and they had not been brought up together.

"I was deliberating whether I should go in to service this afternoon," said George—a sort of excuse for lounging against the door-post, as he shook hands with Mr. Arkell.

"By way of passing away the time!" cried the clergyman, some covert reproof in his tone.

"Well—yes," returned George, who was by no means unwilling to confess to his shortcomings. "It is a bore, having nothing to do."

"When you first came home you brought a cartload of books with you, red-hot upon studying Hindustanée. I wonder how many times you have opened them!"

Mr. Prattleton passed into the cathedral as he spoke. It was time he did, for the bell had been going twelve minutes. George pulled a rueful face as he thought of his Hindustanée.

"I tried it for six whole days after I came home, Mr. Arkell—I give you my word I did; but I couldn't get on at all by myself, and there is not a master to be had in the town. I shall set to it in right earnest before I go out again."

Mr. Arkell laughed. He rather liked the good-natured young man, and Travice he knew was fond of him.

"But, George, you should remember one thing," he said: "idleness does not get a man on in the world. You have a fine career before you out yonder, if you only take the trouble to secure it."

"I know that, Mr. Arkell; and I assure you not a fellow in all the three presidencies is steadier than I am, or works harder than I do, when I am there. It is only here, where I have no work before me, that I get into this dawdling way."

Mr. Arkell left him, passed out of the cathedral inclosure, and continued his way up the town. George Prattleton remained where he was, wondering what on earth he could do with himself. It was too late to go in to service, for the bell had ceased, the organ was pealing out, and he caught a glimpse, across the great body of the cathedral, of the white surplices of the dean and two of the chapter, as they whisked in at the cloister door. George Prattleton believed time must be given to mortals as a punishment for their sins. He had not a sixpence in his pocket; he owed so much at the billiard-rooms that he did not like to show his face there; he was in debt to all the tobacconists of the place; he had borrowed money from private friends; and altogether he rather wished for an earthquake, or something of that light nature, by way of a diversion to the general stagnation of the sultry afternoon.

Mr. Arkell meanwhile reached the house of lawyer Fauntleroy, for that was the place he was bound for. Mr. Fauntleroy was not his solicitor, but he had a question to ask him on a matter unconnected with professional business. As he was turning out of the office again, he nearly ran against a stranger in deep mourning, who was looking up, as though he wanted to find the number of the house. He was a slight, delicate-looking young man; and it instantly struck Mr. Arkell that he had seen his face before, or one like it.

"I beg your pardon," said the stranger, taking his hat more completely off than an Englishman generally does to one of his own sex, "can you tell me whether this is Mr. Fauntleroy's?"

"It is Mr. Fauntleroy's. I think—I think you are the son of Robert Carr!" impulsively cried Mr. Arkell, as the resemblance to the exiled and now dead friend of his boyhood flashed across his memory.

It was no other. The Reverend Robert Carr had hastened to Westerbury as soon as family arrangements and his own health permitted him. A few moments of conversation, and Mr. Arkell turned back with him to introduce him to Lawyer Fauntleroy, thinking at the same time that he had rarely seen anyone look so thin, so pale, so shadowy as Robert Carr.

It was a handsome house, this of Lawyer Fauntleroy's—and if you object to the term "Lawyer Fauntleroy," as old-fashioned, you must not blame me for using it. Westerbury rarely called him anything else; does not call him anything else now, if it has occasion to recal him or his doings. The offices were on either side of the door, as you entered; Mr. Fauntleroy's private room, a large, well fitted-up apartment, being on the right; a small ante-room led to it, generally the sanctum of the managing clerk.

Mr. Fauntleroy was at leisure, and the whole affair in all its details, past and present, was related to Robert Carr. Mr. Arkell remained also. It was not a pleasant office to have to seek to convince this young man of his own illegitimacy, never a doubt of which had arisen in his mind.

"My mother not married!" he repeated, a streak of suspicious crimson—suspicious when taken in conjunction with that hacking cough, those shadowy hands—"indeed you would not entertain such a thought had you known her. She was, I believe, of inferior family, but in herself she was a lady, and her children had cause to love and bless her. Not married! Why, are you aware, Mr. Fauntleroy, that my father was a partner in one of the first merchant's houses in Rotterdam, and that my mother held her own, and was visited, and respected as few are, so long as she lived?"

Lawyer Fauntleroy shook his head. He was a man who took practical views of most things, utterly scorning theoretical ones.

"I don't doubt your word, Mr. Carr, that your mother was a most estimable lady; I remember her myself, an uncommon pretty girl; but that does not prove that she was married."

Mr. Carr's eyes flashed. "Not prove it! Do you think, being what I tell you she was, a good, religious woman, that she would have lived with my father unless they had been married?"

"I have known such cases," cried the lawyer, with his dry practicalness, if there is such a word. "One of the first men in this city—if you except the clergy and that set—Haughton was his name, and plenty of money he had, and lived in style, as Mr. Arkell here can tell you, his sons sticking themselves above everybody, his wife and daughters setting the fashions—well, Mr. Carr, when he died, it was discovered that his wife was not his wife; that his children were nothing in the eyes of the law. Westerbury was electrified, I can tell you, and bestows hard names upon old Haughton to this day, for having so imposed upon them."

"You should not put such a case on a parallel with ours," said the young clergyman, in pained reproof.

"But, my good sir, it is on a parallel; so far, at all events. I tell you this family were looked upon as superior, as everything that was moral; not a word could be urged against the wife (as we'll call her for the argument's sake); she was respected and visited; and not until old Haughton died, and his will came to be read, did the secret ooze out. He left his money to them, but he could not leave it in the usual straightforward way. By the way," added the lawyer briskly, as a thought struck him; "in what manner was your father's will worded? How was your mother styled in it?"

"You forget that my mother has been dead for some time. The will was made only two years ago. It was a perfectly legally-drawn-up will, according to the Dutch laws; there can be no doubt of that."

"Do you remember how you are described in it, and your brothers and sisters?" persisted Mr. Fauntleroy.

"I have but one brother and one sister; we are described in what I suppose is the usual manner, by our Christian names, Robert, Thomas, and Mary Augusta, the sons and daughter of Robert Carr. It is something to that effect; I did not take particular notice of the wording."

"I wonder what the law is, over there, with regard to legitimacy?" mused Mr. Fauntleroy, his eyes seeing an imaginary Holland in the distance. "But, Mr. Carr, this is waste of time," he added, rousing himself; "the plain case round which the question will revolve, is not so much whether your father and mother were married, as whether it can be proved that they were. The law, in a case like this, requires proof actual—and very right that it should."

"I suppose there will not be the slightest difficulty in proving it," said Robert Carr, resenting the very suggestion.

"Can you prove it? Do you know where it took place?"

The young man shook his head. "I never heard where. It can be readily found out."

"Did you ever question your father upon the point?"

"No; it was not likely I should, seeing that my attention was never drawn to any doubt of the sort."

"Well, Westerbury has never entertained any doubt the other way," said the lawyer. "It is not agreeable to say these things to your face, Mr. Carr; but there's no help for it; and the sooner the question is set at rest for you, one way or the other, the better. I should not think there's a single person living still in Westerbury, who recollects the circumstances as they took place, that would believe your father married Miss Hughes after she went away with him."

"It is probable they were married before they did go away," spoke Robert Carr, hating more than he liked to show the being compelled to this discussion.

"That, I can answer for, they were not. When they left here she was Martha Ann Hughes."

"Mr. Fauntleroy is right so far," interposed Mr. Arkell. "They were not married when they left Westerbury: on that point there can be no mistake. The question that remains is, were they married subsequent to it?"

"They must have been," said Robert Carr.

"But there is no must in the case," dissented the lawyer. "The probabilities are that they were not: the belief is such."

"I do not see why you should persistently seek to cast this opprobrium on my father and mother, Mr. Fauntleroy!" exclaimed Robert Carr, his hollow face lighting up with reproach.

"Bless you, my good sir, I don't seek to cast it," said the lawyer, good-humouredly. "Facts are facts. If you can prove that Robert Carr married Miss Hughes, and your own legal birth with it, you will take the property; but if you can't prove it, Squire Carr must keep possession, and things will remain as they are. Where's the use of shutting our eyes to the truth?"

"There can be no doubt whatever of the marriage. I am sure of it; I would stake all my hopes upon it here and—I was going to say—hereafter."

"But you so speak only according to your belief, sir? You have no shadow of proof."

"True; but——"

"Just so," interrupted Mr. Fauntleroy, in his decisive and rather overbearing manner. "All the proofs lie on the other side—negative proofs, at any rate. They went away together without being married; that is certain—and, by the way, they hoaxed my friend here, William Arkell, into helping them off; and I believe his father never forgave him for it. Neither were there wanting subsequent proofs—negative ones, perhaps, as I say—that they remained unmarried; at any rate, for some years. Rely upon one thing, Mr. Robert Carr: that old Marmaduke, just dead, would have left his money away from his son unless he had been thoroughly certain that no marriage took place. He had sworn to disinherit his son if he married Miss Hughes, and he was a man to keep his word."

"Excuse me," said Robert Carr: "you do not perceive that this very fact may have been the motive that induced my father to keep his marriage a secret."

"I perceive it very well. But it is a great deal more probable that there never was a marriage. Weigh all the circumstances well, Mr. Carr; without prejudice: though, of course, it is difficult for you to do so. Over and over again your father was heard to say that he had no intention of marrying the girl——"

"You forget that you are speaking to me of my mother," interrupted Robert Carr.

"Well, yes, I did," acknowledged the lawyer. "It is difficult to speak to a son upon these things; but I think, Mr. Carr, you had better hear them. Mr. Arkell there, who was your father's intimate acquaintance, can testify how positively he disclaimed, even to him, any intention of marriage. Next came the——"

"Allow me," interposed the clergyman, his haughty tone bespeaking how painful all this was to him. "I presume no suspicion was cast upon my mother's name while she was in Westerbury?"

"Not a breath of it. Blame was cast, though, on her and her sisters for allowing the visits of Robert Carr: as is usual in all cases where there is much disparity in the social standing of the parties. Next came the elopement, I was about to say. They went direct to London, where they stayed together——"

"The marriage must have taken place there," again interrupted Robert Carr.

"I believe not," said Mr. Fauntleroy, dryly. "Marmaduke Carr took care to acquaint himself with particulars, and it was ascertained that they did not remain in London long enough to allow of it. The law, more particular then than it is now, required a residence of three weeks in a place, before a marriage could be solemnized, and they left for Holland ere the expiration of a fortnight. It was our house—my father then being its head—which sought out these particulars for old Marmaduke. No; rely upon it there was no marriage in London."

His tone plainly said, "Rely upon it there was no marriage, there or elsewhere." Mr. Carr was about to speak, but the lawyer raised his hand and continued.

"Some little time after they had settled in Rotterdam, John Carr—Squire Carr now—went over and saw them. There's no doubt his visit was a fishing one, hoping to find out that a marriage had taken place; for in that case, Marmaduke Carr would have wanted another heir than his son. I am sure that John, close-fisted as he was known to be, would have given a hundred pounds out of his pocket to be able to come back and report that they were married; but he could not. He was obliged to confess not only that his cousin and Miss Hughes were not married, but that Robert had told him he never should marry her. And, indeed, it was hardly to be supposed that he would then."

"But——"

"A moment yet, if you please, Mr. Carr. Some considerable time after this, and when I think there was one child born—which must have been you, sir—Mr. Carr got to see a letter written by Martha Ann Hughes to her sister Mary. I think he got the sight of it through you, Mr. Arkell?"

"Through my father. Mary Hughes was at work at our house, and Tring, our maid, brought the letter on the sly to my mother. My father, I remember, said he should like to show it to Marmaduke Carr; and he did so."

"Ay. Well, Mr. Carr, nothing could have been plainer than that letter. Mary Ann Hughes acknowledged that she had no hope of Robert's marrying her; but he was kind to her, she said, and she was as happy as anyone well could be under her unfortunate circumstances. Indeed, I fear you have no room for hope."

"Where is that letter?" asked the clergyman.

"It's impossible to say. Destroyed most likely long ago. None of your mother's family are remaining in Westerbury."

"Are they all dead?"

"Dead or dispersed. The brother went off to America or somewhere; and the second sister, Mary, died: it was said she grieved a great deal about her sister, your mother. The eldest sister married a young man of the name of Pycroft, and they also emigrated. Nothing has been heard of any of them for years."

"You must permit me to maintain my own opinion, Mr. Fauntleroy," pursued Robert Carr; "and I shall certainly not allow anyone to interfere with my grandfather's property. If the other branch of the family—Squire Carr and his sons—wish to put forth any pretensions to it, they must first prove their right."

Mr. Fauntleroy laughed. He was amused at the clergyman's idea of law.

"The proof lies with you, Mr. Carr," he said; "and not with them. They cannot prove a negative, you know; and they say that no marriage took place. It is for you to prove that it did. Failing that proof, the property will be theirs."

"And meanwhile? While we are searching for the proof?" questioned Robert Carr, after a pause.

"Meanwhile they retain possession. I understand that Mrs. Lewis has already come over and taken up her abode in the house."

"Who is Mrs. Lewis?" asked the clergyman.

"Squire Carr's widowed daughter. She has been living at home since her husband died. I was told this morning that she had come to the house with the intention of remaining."

Mr. Fauntleroy's information was correct. Mrs. Lewis had come to Marmaduke Carr's house, and was fully resolved to stop in it, fate and the squire permitting. Mr. Lewis had died about a year before, and left her not so well off as she could have wished. She had a competency; but she had not riches. She broke up her household in the Grounds, and went on a long visit to her father's, to save housekeeping temporarily; leaving her two boys, who were on the foundation of the college school, as boarders at the house of Mr. Wilberforce.

[CHAPTER VIII.]
GOING OVER TO SQUIRE CARR'S.

Mr. Arkell put his arm within Robert Carr's, as they walked away together. It would be difficult to express how very much he felt for this young man. His father's fault was not his, and Mr. Arkell, at least, would not be one to visit it upon him. For a few yards their steps were taken in silence; but the clergyman spoke at last, his eye dilating, his voice vehement.

"If they had only known my mother as I knew her, they would see how improbable is this tale that they are telling! I do not care what their suspicions are, what their want of proof; I know that my mother was my father's wife."

"Indeed I hope it will prove so," said Mr. Arkell, rather at a loss what else to say.

"She was modest, gentle, good, refined; she was respected as few are respected. There never was a trace of shame upon her brow. Could her children have been trained as she trained hers, if—if—I can hardly trust myself to speak of this. It is a cruel calumny."

Perhaps so. But, looking at it in its best light; allowing that they were really married; the calumny was alone the fault of this young man's father. If he could have removed the stigma, he should have done it. Did this poor young man begin to think so? Did unwilling doubts arise, even to him? Scarcely, yet. But the lines grew hard in his face as they walked along, and his troubled eyes looked out straight before him into space, seeing nothing.

"I wish you would give me the whole history of the past yourself, Mr. Arkell, now that I can listen quietly. I was hardly in a state to pay attention just now; somehow I distrusted that old lawyer."

"You need not have done that. He was your grandfather's man of business; and, though a little rough, he is sufficiently honest."

"Is he not acting for Squire Carr?"

"I think not. I am sure not."

"Will you give me the history of the past, quietly? as correctly as you can remember it."

Mr. Arkell did so; telling, with a half laugh, the ruse Robert Carr had exercised in getting his father's carriage to take them away, and the hot water he, William, got into in consequence. He told the whole affair from its earliest beginning to its ending, concealing nothing; he mentioned how Mary Hughes had happened to be at work at his mother's house that day; and the dreadful distress she experienced, as soon as the matter was made known to her; he even told how severe in its judgment on the fugitives was Westerbury.

"And were you severe upon them also?" asked Robert Carr.

"Just at first. That is, I believed the worst. But afterwards my opinion changed, and I thought it most likely that Robert married her in London. I thought that for some time. In fact, until I saw the letter that you heard Mr. Fauntleroy speak of, as having been written by your mother to her sister Mary."

"You saw that letter yourself, then?"

"Yes, my father showed it to me. Not in any gossiping spirit, but as a convincing proof that the opinion I had held was wrong, and his was right. He had been very greatly vexed at the whole affair, and would never listen to me when I said I hoped and thought they were married. It was, as Mr. Fauntleroy observed, a plain, convincing letter; and from the moment I saw it, I felt sure that there had been no marriage, and would be none. I am so grieved to tell you this, my dear young friend; but I might not be doing my duty if I were to suppress it."

Robert Carr's face turned a shade paler.

"I see exactly how it is," he said: "that it is next to impossible for you, or anyone else, to believe there was a marriage; all the circumstances telling against it. Nevertheless, I declare to you, Mr. Arkell, on my sacred word as a clergyman, that I am as certain a marriage did take place, as that there is a heaven above us."

Mr. Arkell did not think so, and there ensued a pause.

"Your father died rather suddenly, I believe," he said to Robert Carr.

"Very suddenly. He was taken with a sort of fit; I really cannot tell you its exact nature, for the medical men differed, but I suppose it was apoplexy. They agreed in one thing, that there was no hope from the first; and he never recovered consciousness. I was in London when they telegraphed to me, but when I got home he had been for some hours dead."

"I will send to the hotel for your portmanteau," said Mr. Arkell; "you must be our guest while you stay. My son will be delighted. He is about your own age."

"Thank you, no; you are very kind, but I would rather be alone just now," was Robert Carr's answer. "This is not a pleasant visit for me, and I am in poor health, besides. I shall not stay here long; I must enter upon a search for the register of the marriage. But I should like to pay a visit to the Carr's before I leave, and I am too fatigued to go back to-day."

"To pay a visit to the Carr's?" Mr. Arkell echoed.

"Yes. Why should I not? They are my relatives, and I do not see that there need be ill blood between us. As to the property, they have no real right to it whatever, and I hope I shall speedily produce proof that it is mine, and so put an end to any heartburning. I suppose," he added, reverting to the one subject, "that you are quite sure the marriage did not take place before they left Westerbury?"

"You may put that idea entirely aside," replied Mr. Arkell. "There's no doubt that their going away was in consequence of a bitter quarrel Robert had with his father; that it was unpremeditated until the night previous to their departure. In Westerbury they were not married, could not have been; but perhaps they were in London. It is true, I believe, they did not stay there anything like three weeks—and you heard what Mr. Fauntleroy said; but I suppose it is possible to evade the law, which exacts a residence of that length of time in a place, before the ceremony can be performed."

"Yes, there's no doubt they were married in London," concluded Robert Carr. "I must ascertain what parish they stayed in there; and the rest will be easy."

Not another word was said. Robert Carr walked on in silence, and Mr. Arkell did not interrupt it. Mr. Arkell took him into his house. In the dining-room, the old familiar room you have so often seen, sat a lady, languidly looking over a parcel of books just come in. By her side, leaning over her chair, grasping the books more eagerly than she, the stranger saw a young man of about his own age—tall, slender, gentlemanly—with a face of peculiar refinement, and a sweet smile.

"Now, I wonder what they mean by their negligence? The two books I ordered are not here. I wish they knew what it was to have these fine starry nights, and be without a book of reference; they——"

"Travice," interrupted Mr. Arkell, "I have brought you a visitor, the son of a once close friend of mine. My wife, Mrs. Arkell. Charlotte, this is Mr. Robert Carr, Mr. Carr's grandson."

Mrs. Arkell turned and received him with a curtsey and a dubious look. Always inclined to judge on the uncharitable side, she had had nothing but indifferent scorn to cast to the rumour that Robert Carr's children were going to lay claim to the property, just as she had scorned Robert Carr himself in the old days. She knew that this must be one of the children.

Travice went up at once and shook him warmly by the hand, his pleasant face smiling its own welcome. "I have often heard my father speak of yours," he said; "I am so pleased to see you."

Very little was said in the presence of Mrs. Arkell, touching the business that had brought Robert Carr to Westerbury; but one subject led to another, and Robert Carr told, as one of the strange occurrences of the world, that which had made so strong an impression on himself—the story of the disappearance of Mr. Dundyke. He told it as to strangers; and not, until he had related his own meeting with them at Grenoble, and his visit to Mrs. Dundyke on the night of her return to London, did he find that Mrs. Arkell was her sister. It was Travice Arkell's impetuosity that brought it out then; Mrs. Arkell had been better pleased that it should remain a secret.

"We have heard it all," said Travice; "and Mrs. Dundyke is my aunt and my godmother. She and my mother are sisters."

"I was not aware of it," said Robert Carr. "Is it not a strange tale?"

"Strange!" repeated Travice, "I never heard of anything half so strange. I have been waylaying Mr. Prattleton as he came out of college, wanting to hear more than my mother could tell me. I wish I had been at Geneva!"

"So do I," said Robert Carr.

Robert Carr remained to dinner. He still expressed a wish to make himself known to his relatives, the Carrs; and Mr. Arkell offered to drive him to Eckford on the following morning. A railway now went near the place; but the seven miles' drive was pleasanter than the ten of rail, and Squire Carr's house was a good mile and a half from the Eckford station. So it was arranged.

"Travice," said Mr. Arkell, as Robert Carr took his departure, "I was glad to see your reception of this gentleman. Be to him a friend in any way that you can. It may be, that he will not find too many of them in Westerbury."

Mrs. Arkell tossed her head. "I am rather surprised that you should bring him here, and introduce him on this familiar footing. The past history of the father is not a passport for the son. I should not have cared so much had Charlotte and Sophy been away."

"Charlotte and Sophy! He'll not poison them. What are you thinking of, Charlotte? He has been reared a gentleman; he is a clergyman of the Church of England. Whatever may have been the truth of the past, he is not to blame for it."

Travice Arkell was full of sympathy. "How ill he looks!" he exclaimed; "though he seems to think nothing of it, and says it is the result of a hurt. Is it not curious that he should have met with Mrs. Dundyke? He says his mother was in some way related to the Dundykes."

"There, that will do, Travice," interposed Mrs. Arkell. "I shall dream of that Geneva lake to-night, and of seeing dead men in it. But, William," she added in a lower tone to her husband, "what a misfortune it will be for Betsey, should she have nothing left to live upon! She would have to go out as a housekeeper, or something of that sort."

Squire Carr's residence was a low, rambling, red-brick building, with a quantity of outhouses lying around it, and an avenue of oaks leading almost up to the low-porched entrance door. Pacing before this porch, a clay pipe in his mouth, and his dark hair uncovered to the September sun, was Benjamin Carr. He seemed in a moody study, from which the sound of wheels aroused him, and he saw Mr. Arkell driving up in his open carriage, a stranger sitting with him, and the groom in the back seat. Benjamin Carr wore a short velveteen shooting-coat—it set off his tall form to advantage; and Robert Carr thought what a fine man he was.

"Why, Benjamin, I did not know you were at home."

"I got here a day or two ago," returned Benjamin, putting aside his pipe, and shaking hands with Mr. Arkell. "The squire's slice of luck brought me. One of the girls wrote me word of it; so I've come to see whether I can't drop in for a few of the pickings."

It was an awkward answer, considering that Robert Carr was listening; perhaps he did not understand it. Mr. Arkell made rather a bustle of getting out, and of standing aside for Robert, telling his groom to take the horse round to the stables. "Is your father in, Benjamin?" he asked.

"For all I know. I have seen none of them since breakfast. Valentine's gone over to Eckford, I believe; but—here's the squire."

The squire, attracted by the sounds of the arrival, was peeping forth from the house door. He wore a shabby old coat, and his poor shrunken clothes looked altogether too small even for his miserable little figure. Robert Carr was struck with the contrast to his fine son.

A word or two of explanation from Mr. Arkell, delivered in a low tone, a prolonged, astonished stare from Benjamin, and the squire, in a bewilderment of surprise, was shaking hands with Robert Carr.

"It is the first visit I have made to my father's native place, and though unpleasant circumstances have brought me, I do not see that they need be any reason for my shunning my relatives; I daresay we only wish, on both sides, all that is fair and right," began Robert Carr. "I expressed a wish to come and see you, sir, and Mr. Arkell kindly offered to drive me over."

Had the squire followed his first impulse, he might possibly have ordered Mr. Robert Carr off his premises again; for he could only look upon him as a secret enemy, who had very nearly wrested from him a brave inheritance. But his policy throughout life had been to conciliate, no matter at what expense of hypocrisy. It was the safest course, he held; and he pursued it now. Besides, if there was one man that the squire did not care to stand altogether a sneak before, it was William Arkell with his well-known uprightness.

The squire led the way to his study, turning over in his mind what secret end Robert Carr could hope to answer by coming over and spying into the enemy's quarters. That he had come as a spy, or in some character as base, it was out of the squire's nature to do other than believe. Benjamin followed, in a state of wonder. As they went along the stone passage, Robert Carr caught sight of some pretty girls peeping here and there like scared pheasants; but the squire raised his finger meaningly, and they scuttered away.

The visit was not a pleasant one, after all; and perhaps it was a mistake to have made it. The restraint was too visibly evident. Robert himself spoke of the inheritance—spoke openly, as one honourable, or we may as well say, indifferent, man would discuss it with another. There could be no possible doubt that his father and mother were married, he said; and he hoped the property of all sorts would be allowed to rest in abeyance until the fact was ascertained, which might be done in a week's time.

The squire was rather taken aback, especially at the easy, confident tone; not a boasting tone—one of quiet, calm surety. "Why, how do you think to ascertain it?" he asked.

"I shall search the registers of the London churches."

The squire burst into a laugh. Had Robert Carr told him he was going to search the moon, it could not have struck upon his ear as a more absurd proceeding. Squire Carr was as sure that there had been no marriage as that the sun was then shining on his visitor's head; he had been sure of it, to his cost, all these long years.

"Well," said he, "you'll do as you like, of course, but don't go to much expense over it."

"Why?"

"Because you will never find what you are looking for, and it's a sin to throw away good money. I asked your father myself whether he had been married to the girl in London, and he told me he had not, that he had never been inside a church in London in his life; he told me also that he never should marry her. He spoke on his honour, and therefore I know he spoke the truth."

There was an unpleasant silence. Robert Carr began to feel that the topic could not be pursued.

"Look here, Mr. Carr," resumed the squire, in his piping voice: "you, as a university man, must be in a degree a man of the world, and must know that what's fair for the goose is fair for the gander. Had Marmaduke Carr's son lived and come over here to take possession, he would have taken it, uninterfered with by us; it would have been his own, and we should have wished him joy. But he did not live, he died; he died, in the eyes of the law, childless, and I am the inheritor. As good tell me you lay claim to this house of mine here, as to the property I have just come into of my uncle Marmaduke's."

"You will not allow it to lie in abeyance for a while?"

"Most certainly not. Nobody else would: and you must be a very young man to ask it. I have the law on my side: you cannot in England act contrary to the law, Mr. Carr."

"Well, I daresay you think you are right," said Robert Carr in a tolerant spirit. "Let us drop the subject. I did not, I assure you, come here to enter upon it; I came to make acquaintance with you, my relatives, and to say, but in no spirit of anger or contention, that I intend to establish and maintain my rights. We need not be enemies, or speak as such."

"Very well," said the squire, "I'll ask you one thing, and then we'll drop it, as you say; and it was not I who began it, mind. How came you to think of advancing your claim to my uncle Marmaduke's property? What put it in your head?"

"I believe it to be my property—that I have succeeded to it, with my brother and sister, in consequence of the death of my father. You must understand, Squire Carr, it is only now, since this question arose, that I have heard there was any doubt cast upon our birth."

"I see. Robert kept it from you. He was a simpleton for his pains; and you must not mind my being plain enough to say it. Next to the wrong itself, the worst wrong that parents can inflict is the keeping it a secret from their children. And now let us go to luncheon. I told them to lay it. Never mind about its being early: you shall not go back without first taking something to eat."

"If you go away without partaking of our bread and salt, we shall think you bear us malice," said Benjamin, courteously, as he walked on to the dining-room with the clergyman.

Mr. Arkell was following, but the squire laid his finger on his arm to detain him. "Don't let him do it," he whispered.

"Do what?" asked Mr. Arkell.

"All this searching of registers and stuff that he talks of. Mind! I am not speaking in a selfish spirit, as I might if I were afraid of it,"—and for once the squire's earnest tones, and eyes, raised full in Mr. Arkell's face, proved that he was really speaking truth. "I am sorry for the young man; he is evidently a gentleman, and he looks sickly; and his father has done an ill part by him in letting this come upon him as a blow. There's not the smallest probability that they were married; I know what Robert said to me, and I would stake my life that they were not. If he searches every register in the three kingdoms, he'll never find its record; and it is a pity he should spend his money, and his time, and his hopes over it. Don't let him do it."

"That he will do it, I am quite certain," was the reply of Mr. Arkell. "He seems perfectly to reverence the memory of his mother; and it is as much to vindicate her fame that he will make the search, as for the sake of the inheritance. Robert Carr was grievously to blame to let it come to this. He ought to have set the question at rest, one way or the other, before his death."

"The fact is, Robert overreached himself," said Squire Carr. "I can see it plainly. He did not marry the girl, because it would have been the means of forfeiting his father's property—for old Marmaduke would have kept his word. He wanted to come into that property, and then to have made a will and left it to these children, relying on their foreign birth and residence to keep always the fact of their illegitimacy from them. But he died suddenly, you see, before he had come into it, and therefore the property goes from them. Robert overreached himself."

Mr. Arkell nodded his head. His opinion coincided with Squire Carr's.

[CHAPTER IX.]
A STARTLED LUNCHEON-TABLE.

The luncheon was laid in a low room, with a beam running across the ceiling; the walls, once bright with red flock paper and much gilding, were soiled and dull now, after the manner of a great many of our dining-rooms. Squire Carr took the head of the table. He apologised for the fare: cold veal, ham (which Benjamin, who sat at the foot of the table, carved), and salad. The squire's daughters did not appear at it. There were too many of them, he said to Robert; but Mrs. Lewis, who had just come over from Westerbury by the train, did. She was a big woman, with little eyes like the squire's, and a large face—the latter very red just now, through her mile-and-a-half walk in the sun from Eckford. She turned her back on the young clergyman when he said grace, as though he had no business there. Benjamin had whispered to her who he was, and the search of the marriage register books that was in prospect; and Mrs. Lewis resented it visibly. She had no mind to give up that bijou of a house just entered upon. She believed she should have trouble enough with her father to keep it, without another opponent coming into the field.

"What brings you over to-day, Emma?" asked the squire of Mrs. Lewis, as the meal proceeded. "Anything turned up?"

A rather ambiguous question, the latter one, to uninitiated ears; but the squire had been burning to put it, and Mrs. Lewis understood. He looked covertly at her for a moment with his blinking eyes, and then dropped them again.

"I only came over to see Ben, papa," she answered. "The news reached me this morning that he had come home. I have not had time to do anything yet."

Now, the fact was, Squire Carr had placed his daughter, knowing her admirable ferreting propensities, in Marmaduke Carr's house for one sole purpose—that of visiting its every hole and corner. "There may be a will," the squire had said to himself, in his caution, several times since the death. "I don't think there is; I could stake a great deal that there is not, for Marmaduke was not likely to make one; but it's as well to be on the safe side, and such things have been heard of as wills hid away in houses." And when the squire saw Mrs. Lewis, whom he had not expected that day, he began to fear that something of the sort had "turned up." The relief was great.

"Oh, to see Ben. You'll see enough of him, I expect, before he's off again."

"Are you going to make a long stay here, this time, Ben?" asked Mr. Arkell.

"Yes, I think I shall. Will you take some more ham, Emma?"

"Your name is the same as my wife's," observed the young clergyman, with a smile, as he passed Mrs. Lewis's plate for more ham: for it was Squire Carr's pleasure that servants did not wait at luncheon.

"Is it? It is a very ugly one," roughly replied Mrs. Lewis, who could not recover her equanimity in the presence of this gentleman. "I can't think how they came to give it me, for my part. I have a prejudice against the name 'Emma.' The woman bore it whom, of all the women I have known in the world, I most disliked."

"It was your mother's name, my dear," said the squire.

"And I think a charming name," said Robert Carr. "I am not sure but it was Emma D'Estival's name that first attracted me to her."

The squire looked up with a sort of start. He remembered the letter written by "Emma Carr, née D'Estival." Of course! she was this young man's wife.

"You look young to have a wife," was all the squire said.

"You look, to me, as if you had no business with one at all," added Mrs. Lewis with blunt plainness. "Sickly men should be cautious how they marry, lest they leave their wives widows. I have been so left. I threw aside my widow's cap only last week."

Robert Carr explained to them what his hurt had been, and how his chest had suffered at times since. He was aware he looked unusually ill just now, he said; but he had looked just as much so about a year and a half before—had coughed also. He should get well now, he supposed, like he did then. For one thing, speaking of his present looks, this matter was harassing him a good deal, and there had been his father's sudden death.

"Oh, by the way, Mr. Arkell, let me ask you something," exclaimed Mrs. Lewis suddenly. "I have heard the strangest thing. That a gentleman, a Mr. Dundas, or some such name, had been drowned or murdered, or something, at Geneva; a relative of your wife's. What is the truth of it?"

"That is the truth, as far as we can learn it," replied Mr. Arkell. "It was Mr. Dundyke, the husband of Mrs. Arkell's sister. You saw her once, I know, at my mother's house, a great many years ago; she was Miss Betsey Travice then——"

"But about the murder?" interrupted Mrs. Lewis. "Was he murdered? Roland ran home from Mr. Wilberforce's for a minute last night, and I heard it from him. I think he said the young Prattletons told him. I know he was quite up in arms about it. What is it?"

Mr. Arkell pointed to Robert Carr. "That gentleman can tell you better than I can," he said. "He heard the particulars from Mrs. Dundyke herself. I only heard them from Mr. Prattleton secondhand."

"I suppose you want me to tell the story, instead of yourself," said Robert Carr, with a glance and a smile at Mr. Arkell. "Mr. Prattleton was on the spot, and instituted the search, so his information cannot be secondhand."

They began it between them, but Mr. Arkell gradually ceased, and left it to Robert Carr. It appeared to take a singular hold on the squire's interest. He had just asked his son for more ham, but was too absorbed to send his plate for it. Ben held the slice between his knife and fork, and had to let it drop at last.

"Then he was not murdered!" exclaimed Mrs. Lewis. "It was only a case of drowning, after all!"

"Of drowning," assented Robert Carr. "At least that is the most probable supposition."

"It may rather be called at present a case of mysterious disappearance, as the sensational weekly papers would phrase it," interposed Mr. Arkell, speaking again. "Mrs. Dundyke at one time felt convinced that a murder had been committed, as Mr. Prattleton tells me, and afterwards modified her opinion. Now she feels her doubts renewed again."

"What a shocking thing!" exclaimed Mrs. Lewis. "And who does she think murdered him—if he was murdered?"

"The Mr. Hardcastle of whom mention has been made. Mrs. Dundyke has discovered that he was an impostor."

"Has she!" exclaimed Robert Carr.

"Mr. Prattleton heard from her by last evening's post, and he came in late, and showed me her letters," said Mr. Arkell. "This man, Hardcastle, had passed himself off as being a partner of the great Hardcastle house in Leadenhall-street—a nephew of its head and chief—whereas he turns out to be entirely unknown to them."

"And she thinks he did the murder?" quickly cried Mrs. Lewis, who was possessed of all a woman's curiosity on such subjects.

"She thinks the suspicions look very dark against him," said Mr. Arkell. "I confess I think the same."

"But I thought Mr. Carr, here, said she had completely exonerated this Mr. Hardcastle!" cried the squire. "Be quiet, Emma; you would let nobody speak but yourself, if you had your way."

"So I believe she did exonerate him," returned Mr. Arkell; "but in all cases the same facts wear so different an aspect, according to their attendant surroundings. When Mr. Hardcastle was supposed to be Mr. Hardcastle, one of the chief partners of the great East India house, the nephew of its many-years' chief, it was almost impossible to suppose that he could have committed the murder, however little trifling circumstances might seem to give point to the suspicion. But when we know that this man was not Mr. Hardcastle, but an impostor—probably a chevalier d'industrie, travelling about to see what prey he could bring down—those same trifling circumstances change into alarming facts, every one of which bears its own significance."

"I don't clearly understand what the facts were," said the squire. "He borrowed money, didn't he?"

"He borrowed money—twenty pounds; he would have borrowed a hundred, but Mr. Dundyke had it not with him. He, poor Mr. Dundyke, was utterly taken in by them from the first—never had a shadow of suspicion that anything was wrong; Mrs. Dundyke, on the contrary, tells Mr. Prattleton that she had. She feels quite sure that their running account at the hotel, for which she knows they were pressed, was paid with that twenty pounds, or part of it; and she says they——"

"In saying 'they,' of whom do you speak besides Mr. Hardcastle?" asked the squire.

"Of his wife. And Mrs. Dundyke did not like her. But let us come to the day of the disappearance. On that morning, as they sat at breakfast, Mr. Dundyke told Mr. Hardcastle that he was about to leave; and that some money he had written for, notes for thirty pounds, had come that morning—were inclosed in two letters which Mr. Hardcastle saw him receive and put in his pocket. Mrs. Dundyke says that she shall never forget the strangely eager glance—something like a wolf's when it scents prey—that he cast on Mr. Dundyke at mention of the thirty pounds. Mr. Dundyke went out alone, and hired a boat, as you have heard; and they afterwards saw him on the lake bearing away to the spot where he landed; Mr. Hardcastle saw him, and then walked away. Nothing more was seen of either of them until dinner-time, six o'clock, when Mr. Hardcastle returned; he came creeping into the house as if he wished to shun observation, travel-soiled, dusty, his face scratched, his hand hurt—just as if he had been taking part in some severe struggle; and Mrs. Dundyke is positive that his face turned white when she rushed up and asked where her husband was."

"Did she suspect him then?"

"Oh dear no; not with the faintest suspicion. That same night she heard a fearful quarrel between Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle; weepings, lamentings, reproaches from Mrs. Hardcastle, ill-language from him; and twice she heard her husband's name mentioned. She told Mr. Prattleton subsequently that it was just as though the fact of the murder had been then disclosed to Mrs. Hardcastle, and she, the wife, had received it with a storm of horror and reproach. But the most suspicious circumstance was the pencil-case."

"What was that?" came the eager question from the squire and his daughter, for this had not yet been named.

"Well, what Mr. Prattleton tells me is this," said Mr. Arkell. "When Mr. Dundyke went out in the boat he had his pencil-case with him; Mrs. Dundyke saw him return it to his pocket-book the last thing before leaving the breakfast-room, and put the book in his pocket. It was the same pocket-book in which he had just placed the letters containing the bank-notes. The pencil-case was silver; it had been given to Mr. Dundyke by my cousin Mildred, and had his initials upon it; Mrs. Dundyke says he never carried any other—had not, she feels convinced, any other with him that morning. After he had landed on the opposite side of the lake, he must have made use of this pencil to write the note, which note he sent back to the hotel by the boatmen. So that it appears to be a pretty certain fact that, whatever evil overtook Mr. Dundyke, this pencil must have been about him. Do you follow me?"

"Yes, yes," answered the squire, testily. He did not like the narrative to be interrupted by so much as a thread.

"Good. But this same pencil-case was subsequently found in Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle's room at the hotel."

"What!" exclaimed Benjamin Carr, looking up as if startled to sudden interest.

"The droll question is, how did it come there?" continued Mr. Arkell. "It was found in the room the Hardcastles had occupied at the hotel. They had left there some days; had gone on, they said, to Genoa. Mr. Prattleton's daughter was put in this room after their departure, and the silver pencil-case was picked up from behind the drawers. Mr. Prattleton and Mrs. Dundyke were in the chamber at the time, and the latter was dreadfully agitated; she quite startled him, he says, by saying that Mr. Hardcastle must have murdered her husband."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Squire Carr. "I see. The pencil-case which was lost with Mr. Dundyke reappeared in their room! How very strange! I should have had the man apprehended."

"The hypothesis of course is, that Mr. Hardcastle had in some manner possessed himself of the things the missing man had about his person," pursued Mr. Arkell. "Mr. Prattleton thought at the time that this could perhaps have been explained away. I mean the finding of the pencil-case—that Mr. Dundyke might have dropped it on going out from breakfast, and the other have picked it up; but since the arrival of Mrs. Dundyke's letter yesterday, he says he does not like the look of it at all."

"And the bank-notes that Mr. Dundyke had undoubtedly about his person were found to have been changed the subsequent day in Geneva," spoke up Robert Carr. "The money-changer thought they had been changed by a man whose appearance agreed with that of Mr. Hardcastle. And then there was the testimony of the Swiss peasant."

"What was the testimony?" asked the squire.

"A peasant, or small farmer, testified that he saw two gentlemen together walking away from the direction of the lake on the day of the disappearance; and in describing them, he exactly described the persons and dress of Mr. Hardcastle and Mr. Dundyke. I told Mrs. Dundyke," added the clergyman, "that I did not like her account of this Mr. Hardcastle; and she had expressed to me no suspicion of him then."

"And why did they not cause him to be apprehended?" asked the squire. "There could not well be a clearer case. I have committed many a man upon half the evidence. What sort of a man was he in person, this Hardcastle?"

"A tall, strong man, very dark; a fine man, Mrs. Dundyke says. I should think," added the clergyman, ranging his eyes around, lest haply he might find anyone in the present company to illustrate his meaning by ever so slight a likeness, as we are all apt to do in trying to describe a stranger—"I should think——"

Robert Carr stopped; his eyes were resting on the white face of Benjamin Carr. Those sallow, dark faces when they turn white are not pleasant to look upon.

"I should think," he continued, "that he must have been some such a man as your son here, sir. Yes, just such another; tall, strong, dark——"

"How dare you?" shouted Benjamin Carr, with a desperate oath. "How dare you point at me as the—the—as Mr. Hardcastle?"

The whole table bounded to their feet as if electrified. Benjamin had risen to his full height; his eyes glared on the clergyman; his fist was lifted menacingly to his face. Had he gone out of his senses? Some of them truly thought so. That he had momentarily allowed himself to lose his presence of mind, there could be no question.

"What on earth has taken you, Ben?"

The words came from Mrs. Lewis. Her brother's demeanour had been puzzling her. He had sat, with that one slight interruption mentioned, with his head down, looking sullen, as if he took no interest in the narrative; and she had seen his face grow whiter and whiter. She supposed it to be caused by the story; and said to herself, that she should not have thought Ben was chicken-hearted.

The squire followed suit. "Have you taken leave of your senses, sir? What's the matter with you? What is it, I say?"

"Your visitor offended me, sir," replied Benjamin Carr, slowly sitting down in his chair again, and beginning to recollect himself. "How dare he say that I bear a resemblance to this Hardcastle?"

"He never did say it," angrily returned the squire. "If you cause such a startling interruption at my table again, I shall request you to think twice before you sit down to it."

Mrs. Lewis was staring at her brother with a sort of wondering stare. Mr. Arkell could not make him out; and the young clergyman stood perfectly confounded. Altogether, Benjamin Carr was under a sea of keen eyes; and he knew it.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon if my words offended you," began Robert Carr. "I meant no offence. I only wished to convey an impression of what this Mr. Hardcastle was like—a tall, fine, dark man, as described to me. I never saw him. The same description would apply to thousands of men."

"I thought you did intend offence," said Benjamin Carr in a distinct tone. "Your words and manner implied it, at any rate."

"Don't show yourself a fool, Benjamin," cried out the squire. "I shall begin to think you are one. The clergyman no more meant to liken you to the man, than he meant to liken me; he was only trying to describe the sort of person. What has taken you? You must have grown desperately thin-skinned all on a sudden."

"Can't you let it drop?" said Benjamin, angrily. The squire sent up his plate as he spoke, for the ham that had been waiting all this while; perhaps by way of creating a divertissement; and Ben lifted the slice with a jerk, and then jerked the knife and fork down again. Mrs. Lewis, who had never come out of the prolonged stare, apparently arrived now at the solution of the problem.

"I know what it is, Ben," she quietly said. "This Hardcastle must be an acquaintance of yours. You know you do pick up all sorts of——"

"It is a lie," interrupted Ben, regardless of his good manners.

"Papa"—turning to the squire—"rely upon it I am right. Ben no doubt fell in with this Hardcastle on his travels, grew intimate with him, and now does not like to hear him aspersed."

"Be quiet, Emma," cried Ben, but his voice was lowered now, as if with concentrated passion, or policy. "You talk like a fool."

"Well, perhaps I do," retorted Mrs. Lewis, "but I think it is as I say for all that. You would not put yourself out like this for nothing. I dare say you did know the man; it was just the time that you were at Geneva."

"I was not at Geneva."

"You were at Geneva," she persisted. "You know you wrote home from thence."

"Why yes, of course you did, Ben," added the squire. "Valentine showed us the letter: you said you were hard up in it. But that's nothing new."

"I swear that I never saw this Hardcastle in my life," said Ben Carr, his white face turning to a dusky red. "What time did this affair happen?" he continued, suddenly addressing Mr. Arkell. "If I had been in Geneva at the time, I must have heard of it."

"I can tell you," said Robert Carr. "Mr. and Mrs. Dundyke went to Geneva the middle of July, and this must have happened about the second week in August."

Benjamin Carr poured himself out a glass of wine as he listened. He was growing cool and collected again.

"Ah, I thought I could not have been there. I went to Geneva the latter part of June. I and a fellow were taking a walking tour together. We stayed there a few days, and left it for Savoy the first week in July. I think I did write to Valentine while I was there. All these people, that you speak of, must have arrived afterwards."

"Then did you not see this Mr. Hardcastle, Ben?" asked his sister.

"I tell you, no! I never saw or heard of him in my life."

"Then why need you have flown out so?"

"Well, one does not like to be compared to a—murderer. Some of you had been calling him one."

No more was said. But the hilarity (if there had been any) of the meeting was taken away, and Robert Carr rose to leave. He had a little business to do in Westerbury yet, he said, and must go back that night to London. The squire was the only one who showed courtesy in the farewell. Benjamin was sullenly resentful still; Mrs. Lewis haughty and indifferent.

"Is he quite in his right mind?" Robert Carr asked of Mr. Arkell, as they drove out of the avenue.

"Who?—Benjamin Carr? Oh yes, he is right enough. He is as sharp as a needle."

"Then what could have caused him to break out in the manner he did? I never was so taken to in my life."

"I don't know," said Mr. Arkell; "it is puzzling me still. But for his very emphatic denial, I should assume it to be as Mrs. Lewis suggested—that he must have got acquainted with this Hardcastle, and did not like to hear any ill of him."

"Is he a married man?"

"No. Not any of the squire's children have married, except Mrs. Lewis. And she's a widow, as you heard her say."

"I suppose she is the daughter that has entered into possession of my grandfather's house?"

"She is. Hoping, no doubt, to stay there."

"Tell me, Mr. Arkell," resumed Robert Carr after a pause, for he could not forget the recent occurrence, "did you see anything offensive in my allusion?"

"Certainly not. Neither would anyone else. I say I cannot make out Benjamin Carr."

Before starting for London that night, Robert Carr paid a visit to Mr. Fauntleroy. It was after office hours, but that gentleman received him in his drawing-room. One of Mr. Fauntleroy's daughters, a buxom damsel on the same large scale as her father, was thumping through some loud piece on the piano. She satisfied her curiosity by a good look at the intruder, as all Westerbury would like to have done, for his name had been in men's mouths that day, and then retired with a good-humoured smile and nod, carrying her piece of music.

"Bab!" called out the lawyer.

Miss Fauntleroy came back. "Did you speak, pa?"

"Don't go strumming that in the next room. This gentleman has perhaps called to talk on matters of business."

She threw down the music with a laugh: gave another good-natured nod to Robert, and finally quitted the room.

"Mr. Fauntleroy, I have come—but I ought first to apologize for calling at this hour, but I am going off at once to London—I have come to ask if you will act for me as my legal adviser?"

Mr. Fauntleroy made a momentary pause. "Do you mean generally, or in any particular cause?"

"I mean in this, my cause. I require some solicitor to take it up at once, and serve a notice of ejectment on Squire Carr, from the possession of the property he has assumed. I suppose that would be the first legal step; but you will know what to do better than I. As the many years solicitor to my grandfather, I thought you might perhaps have no objection to become mine."

"I have no objection in the world," said Mr. Fauntleroy. "But, my good sir—and this, mind you, is disinterested advice—I would recommend you to pause before you enter on any such contest. There's not a shadow of chance that the property can be wrested from Squire Carr, so long as your father's marriage remains a doubt. It is his by law."

"I do not think there is a shadow of doubt that the proofs of the marriage will be found, and speedily. I go up to London to search. Meanwhile you will be so kind as act just as you would act were the proofs in your hand. I will not allow Squire Carr to retain, by ever so short a time, the property unmolested, or to fancy he retains it," continued the young man, in some emotion. "Every hour that he does so is a reflection on my mother's name."

"But—yes, that's all very well, very dutiful—but where's the use of entering on a contest certain to be lost?"

"It is certain to be gained; I know the proofs will be forthcoming."

"The most prudent plan will be to wait until they are," returned the lawyer. He was not usually so considerate for his clients; but this, as he looked upon it, was a hopeless case, one that nobody, many degrees removed from a fool, would venture upon.

"No," said Robert Carr, "I will not wait a day. Be so kind as take proper steps at once, Mr. Fauntleroy."

"Very well; if you insist upon it. It will cost money, you know."

"That shall be placed in your hands as soon as I can send the necessary instructions to Rotterdam. What sum shall you require?"

"Oh, suppose you let me have fifty pounds at first. Before that's expended, perhaps—perhaps some decision may have been come to."

Had Mr. Fauntleroy spoken the words on his tongue, they would have run, "perhaps you will have come to your senses."

"I will spare no expense on this cause; any money you want, you shall have, only my right must be maintained against the other branch of the family. Do you understand me, Mr. Fauntleroy?"

"I do; and I must ask you to understand me, and to remember later that I did not advise this. If the proofs of the marriage shall come to light, why, then of course the tables will be turned."

"By the way," said Robert Carr, "I have never asked what amount of money my grandfather has left?"

"Not much less than the value of twenty thousand pounds, taking it in the aggregate. He did not live up to his income, and it accumulated. There are several houses; the one he resided in is a beautiful little place. You have not been inside it?"

"No; I met Mrs. Lewis to-day, at the squire's, and I thought she might have invited me to see it," added Robert Carr. "But she did not."

"No danger; they'll keep you at arm's length, if they can. Well, Mr. Carr, you will not forget what I say, that I do not advise you to enter on this contest. And should you, after a day or two's reflection, think better of it, there's no harm done. Just drop me a line to say so, that's all. I won't charge you for my advice."

"You must think I am of a changeable nature," returned the young clergyman, half resentfully.

"I should think you a sensible man."

Robert could not smile, he was too serious. "And if you receive the money from me, instead of the letter you suggest, you will immediately commence this action; is that an understood thing between us, Mr. Fauntleroy?"

"It is," said Mr. Fauntleroy; "it will cost a mint of money, mind you, if it goes on to trial."

Robert Carr said no more; he was satisfied. As he went down the richly-carpeted stairs, two large female heads, and two coarsely-handsome, good-natured faces were propelled over the balustrades, to gaze after him: the heads and the faces of the Miss Fauntleroys.

[CHAPTER X.]
A MISSIVE FOR SQUIRE CARR.

Domestic relations did not progress very pleasantly at Squire Carr's. It was the old story; the old grievance; the one that had disturbed the internal economy of the home ever since Benjamin became a grown man: Benjamin required money, and the squire protested he had it not to give. Ben, he said, wanted to ruin him.

This time Ben had come home particularly out at elbows, metaphorically speaking; literally, he was, in regard to clothes, rather better off than usual. Ben had quitted his home the previous April, with a very fair sum of money in his pocket, drawn from the squire; where he had spent the time since was not very clear, unless he had been, as the squire expressed it, dodging about the continent; two or three letters having been received from him at long intervals, dated from different parts of it. Ben was not accustomed to be particularly communicative on the subject of his own wanderings; and all he said now was, that he had made a "pedestrian tour." One other thing was a vast deal more clear—that he had brought back empty pockets.

He was now worrying the squire to advance him funds for a visit to Australia, where he should be sure to make his fortune. Three or four fellows, whom he knew, were going, he said; they had a fine prospect before them, and he had the opportunity offered him of joining them. The worrying had begun on the very evening subsequent to the visit of Mr. Arkell and Robert Carr; a week or more had gone on since; and Ben systematically continued his importunities. The squire turned a stone-deaf ear. Ben had once before got money from him to make his fortune in Australia; and had come home after a two years' absence without a shirt to his back: Squire Carr must live to be an older man than he was now, before he forgot that. Valentine Carr put in his voice against it; he had for a long while been angrily resentful at these sums of money being advanced to Ben, far larger ones, he suspected, than the reigning powers allowed to come to his knowledge; and he was now raising his voice in opposition. He was the heir; and the estate, he said, was already impoverished too much.

One cloudy Saturday morning, close, hot, and unhealthy, Valentine Carr was mounting his horse to go to Westerbury. They had breakfasted early; breakfast was always taken early at the squire's, but especially so on Saturdays, the market day at Westerbury. Squire Carr was standing by his son, giving him various directions.

"You'll see how prices run to-day, Valentine; but mark you, I'll not sell a sheaf of the old corn if the market's flat. And the new you need not think of soliciting offers for, for I shall not sell yet awhile. The barley market ought to be brisk to-day; some of the maltsters, I hear, are already preparing to steep; and you may, perhaps, get rid of some loads. Have you the samples?"

Valentine Carr dived with one hand into his capacious pocket, by way of answer, and just showed some three or four little bags tied round with tape.

"You'll get first prices, mind, or you won't sell. Not a farmer in all the county can show better barley this year than ours. Do you hear?"

"I know," ungraciously returned Valentine. "I believe you think I'm a child still. I can't ride off to market without you, but you go on at me in this fashion: and it's nigh upon thirty years now since I went first."

"I know my own business better than anybody, and I can't afford to let things go below their value," rejoined the squire. "A halfpenny a bushel would make a difference to me now, and I should feel it. I'm shorter of money than I ought to be."

"Money goes in many ways that it ought not to go in," said Valentine, gathering up his bridle with a sniff. And the squire knew that it was a side-thrust at Ben. "Anything more?"

"You had better call on Emma, and ask whether she has made a list of the plate and pictures. If she has not, you may tell her that I shall come over next week and go over the things for myself. She might have sent it to me days ago. I'll not have so much as a plated spoon omitted, and so I told her. That's all."

Valentine Carr touched his horse and rode at a quick trot down the avenue. When the squire looked round, he found Benjamin—who had just got down to breakfast—at his side.

"We shall have a nasty, hot, muggy day, Ben!"

"Yes," said Ben, "we get these days sometimes in September. Father, if you won't let me have the two hundred, will you let me have one? I don't want to lose this chance, and my friends will have sailed. They are putting in three hundred each, but——"

"How many times are you going to tell me that?" interrupted the squire. "I don't believe it; no, I don't believe you have any friends who are possessed of three hundred to put. It is of no use your bothering, Ben; I haven't got the money to spare."

"Not got it to spare, when you have just come in to twenty thousand pounds!" returned Ben, not, however, venturing to speak in any tone but a conciliating one. "I only wish I had come in to a tithe of it! It was a slice of good luck that you never expected, squire, and you might be generous enough to help me once again."

In truth, the good luck had been so entirely unlooked for, that Squire Carr could not find in his heart to snub Ben for saying so, quite as fiercely as he might otherwise have done. "It was just a chance, Ben, Robert Carr's dying as he did."

"A very good chance for us. Look here, father: I can't stop on here, nagged at by Valentine, out of purse, out of your favour——"

"Whose fault is it that you are out of my favour?" interrupted the squire, taking off his old drab wide-awake to straighten a dent in the brim.

"Well, I suppose it's mine," acknowledged Ben. "What is a hundred pounds to the twenty thousand you have come into? A drop of water in the ocean."

"And if you got the hundred pounds and started with it, you'd be writing home in three months for another hundred! It has always been the case, Ben."

The words seemed to imply symptoms of so great a concession, compared to the positive refusal hitherto accorded him, that Ben Carr's hopes went up like a sky-rocket. He saw the hundred pounds in his possession and himself ploughing the deep waters, as vividly as though the picture had been presented to him in a magic mirror.

"It is a chance that I have never had, squire. These men are steady, industrious, practical fellows, who will keep me to my work, whether I will or not. They go out to make money, and I shall make some. Who knows but I may return home with a fortune to match this, just come to you?"

"Ben, you harp upon this money of Marmaduke's; but let me tell you that I don't know what I should have done without it. I have had nothing but drains upon me for years: you've been one of them."

"The old hypocrite!" thought Ben, "he's rolling in money, besides this new windfall. Well, sir," he said aloud, "I shall write——"

"Who's this?" interrupted the squire, who did not see so well as he once did.

It was the postman. Letters were not frequent at the squire's, as they are at many houses. The man was coming up the avenue, in the distance as yet. Squire Carr walked towards him and stretched out his hand for the letters.

The postman gave him two. One was a large, blue, formidable-looking packet, addressed to himself; the other was a perfumed, mignonne, three-cornered sort of missive, for Benjamin Carr, Esq.