“Nothing of this kind ever happened before, I suppose,” said Robert, gravely. “No, it’s altogether a singular kind of business, not likely to come about every day. You’ve been enjoying yourself this evening I see, Mr. White. You’ve done a good stroke of work to-day, I’ll wager — made a lucky hit, and you’re what you call ‘standing treat,’ eh?”
Robert Audley looked straight into the man’s dingy face as he spoke. The locksmith was not a bad-looking fellow, and there was nothing that he need have been ashamed of in his face, except the dirt, and that, as Hamlet’s mother says, “is common;” but in spite of this, Mr. White’s eyelids dropped under the young barrister’s calm scrutiny, and he stammered out some apologetic sort of speech about his “missus,” and his missus’ neighbors, and port wine and sherry wine, with as much confusion as if he, an honest mechanic in a free country, were called upon to excuse himself to Robert Audley for being caught in the act of enjoying himself in his own parlor.
Robert cut him short with a careless nod.
“Pray don’t apologize,” he said; “I like to see people enjoy themselves. Good-night, Mr. White good-night, ladies.”
He lifted his hat to “the missus,” and the missus’ neighbors, who were much fascinated by his easy manner and his handsome face, and left the shop.
“And so,” he muttered to himself as he went back to his chambers, “‘with that she walked off as graceful as you please.‘Who was it that walked off; and what was the story which the locksmith was telling when I interrupted him at that sentence? Oh, George Talboys, George Talboys, am I ever to come any I nearer to the secret of your fate? Am I coming nearer to it now, slowly but surely? Is the radius to grow narrower day by day until it draws a dark circle around the home of those I love? How is it all to end?”
He sighed wearily as he walked slowly back across the flagged quadrangles in the Temple to his own solitary chambers.
Mrs. Maloney had prepared for him that bachelor’s dinner, which, however excellent and nutritious in itself, has no claim to the special charm of novelty. She had cooked for him a mutton-chop, which was soddening itself between two plates upon the little table near the fire.
Robert Audley sighed as he sat down to the familiar meal, remembering his uncle’s cook with a fond, regretful sorrow.
“Her cutlets a la Maintenon made mutton seem more than mutton; a sublimated meat that could scarcely have grown upon any mundane sheep,” he murmured sentimentally, “and Mrs. Maloney’s chops are apt to be tough; but such is life — what does it matter?”
He pushed away his plate impatiently after eating a few mouthfuls.
“I have never eaten a good dinner at this table since I lost George Talboys,” he said. “The place seems as gloomy as if the poor fellow had died in the next room, and had never been taken away to be buried. How long ago that September afternoon appears as I look back at it — that September afternoon upon which I parted with him alive and well; and lost him as suddenly and unaccountably as if a trap-door had opened in the solid earth and let him through to the antipodes!”
Mr. Audley rose from the dinner-table and walked over to the cabinet in which he kept the document he had drawn up relating to George Talboys. He unlocked the doors of his cabinet, took the paper from the pigeon-hole marked important, and seated himself at his desk to write. He added several paragraphs to those in the document, numbering the fresh paragraphs as carefully as he had numbered the old ones.
“Heaven help us all,” he muttered once; “is this paper with which no attorney has had any hand to be my first brief?”
He wrote for about half an hour, then replaced the document in the pigeon-hole, and locked the cabinet. When he had done this, he took a candle in his hand, and went into the room in which were his own portmanteaus and the trunk belonging to George Talboys.
He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, and tried them one by one. The lock of the shabby old trunk was a common one, and at the fifth trial the key turned easily.
“There’d be no need for any one to break open such a lock as this,” muttered Robert, as he lifted the lid of the trunk.
He slowly emptied it of its contents, taking out each article separately, and laying it carefully upon a chair by his side. He handled the things with a respectful tenderness, as if he had been lifting the dead body of his lost friend. One by one he laid the neatly folded mourning garments on the chair. He found old meerschaum pipes, and soiled, crumpled gloves that had once been fresh from the Parisian maker; old play-bills, whose biggest letters spelled the names of actors who were dead and gone; old perfume-bottles, fragrant with essences, whose fashion had passed away; neat little parcels of letters, each carefully labeled with the name of the writer; fragments of old newspapers; and a little heap of shabby, dilapidated books, each of which tumbled into as many pieces as a pack of cards in Robert’s incautious hand. But among all the mass of worthless litter, each scrap of which had once had its separate purpose, Robert Audley looked in vain for that which he sought — the packet of letters written to the missing man by his dead wife Helen Talboys. He had heard George allude more than once to the existence of these letters. He had seen him once sorting the faded papers with a reverent hand; and he had seen him replace them, carefully tied together with a faded ribbon which had once been Helen’s, among the mourning garments in the trunk. Whether he had afterward removed them, or whether they had been removed since his disappearance by some other hand, it was not easy to say; but they were gone.
Robert Audley sighed wearily as he replaced the things in the empty box, one by one, as he had taken them out. He stopped with the little heap of tattered books in his hand, and hesitated for a moment.
“I will keep these out,” he muttered, “there maybe something to help me in one of them.”
George’s library was no very brilliant collection of literature. There was an old Greek Testament and the Eton Latin Grammar; a French pamphlet on the cavalry sword-exercise; an odd volume of Tom Jones with one half of its stiff leather cover hanging to it by a thread; Byron’s Don Juan, printed in a murderous type, which must have been invented for the special advantage of oculists and opticians; and a fat book in a faded gilt and crimson cover.
Robert Audley locked the trunk and took the books under his arm. Mrs. Maloney was clearing away the remains of his repast when he returned to the sitting-room. He put the books aside on a little table in a corner of the fire-place, and waited patiently while the laundress finished her work. He was in no humor even for his meerschaum, consoler; the yellow-papered fictions on the shelves above his head seemed stale and profitless — he opened a volume of Balzac, but his uncle’s wife’s golden curls danced and trembled in a glittering haze, alike upon the metaphysical diablerie of the Peau de Chagrin, and the hideous social horrors of “Cousine Bette.” The volume dropped from his hand, and he sat wearily watching Mrs. Maloney as she swept up the ashes on the hearth, replenished the fire, drew the dark damask curtains, supplied the simple wants of the canaries, and put on her bonnet in the disused clerk’s office, prior to bidding her employer good-night. As the door closed upon the Irishwoman, he arose impatiently from his chair, and paced up and down the room.
“Why do I go on with this,” he said, “when I know that it is leading me, step by step, day by day, hour by hour, nearer to that conclusion which, of all others, I should avoid? Am I tied to a wheel, and must I go with its every revolution, let it take me where it will? Or can I sit down here to-night and say I have done my duty to my missing friend, I have searched for him patiently, but I have searched in vain? Should I be justified in doing this? Should I be justified in letting the chain which I have slowly
