into marble by the rigidity of her expression. The face in which he looked was the face of a woman whom death only could turn from her purpose.
“I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression,” she said, quietly; “I have stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers. My mother died when I was very young. My father has always been to me what you saw him to-day. I have had no one but my brother. All the love that my heart can hold has been centered upon him. Do you wonder, then, that when I hear that his young life has been ended by the hand of treachery, that I wish to see vengeance done upon the traitor? Oh, my God,” she cried, suddenly clasping her hands, and looking up at the cold winter sky, “lead me to the murderer of my brother, and let mine be the hand to avenge his untimely death.”
Robert Audley stood looking at her with awe-stricken admiration. Her beauty was elevated into sublimity by the intensity of her suppressed passion. She was different to all other women that he had ever seen. His cousin was pretty, his uncle’s wife was lovely, but Clara Talboys was beautiful. Niobe’s face, sublimated by sorrow, could scarcely have been more purely classical than hers. Even her dress, puritan in its gray simplicity, became her beauty better than a more beautiful dress would have become a less beautiful woman.
“Miss Talboys,” said Robert, after a pause, “your brother shall not be unavenged. He shall not be forgotten. I do not think that any professional aid which you could procure would lead you as surely to the secret of this mystery as I can lead you, if you are patient and trust me.”
“I will trust you,” she answered, “for I see that you will help me.”
“I believe that it is my destiny to do so,” she said, solemnly.
In the whole course of his conversation with Harcourt Talboys, Robert Audley had carefully avoided making any deductions from the circumstances which he had submitted to George’s father. He had simply told the story of the missing man’s life, from the hour of his arriving in London to that of his disappearance; but he saw that Clara Talboys had arrived at the same conclusion as himself, and that it was tacitly understood between them.
“Have you any letters of your brother’s, Miss Talboys?” he asked.
“Two. One written soon after his marriage, the other written at Liverpool, the night before he sailed for Australia.”
“Will you let me see them?”
“Yes, I will send them to you if you will give me your address You will write to me from time to time, will you not, to tell me whether you are approaching the truth. I shall be obliged to act secretly here, but I am going to leave home in two or three months, and I shall be perfectly free then to act as I please.”
“You are not going to leave England?” Robert asked.
“Oh no! I am only going to pay a long-promised visit to some friends in Essex.”
Robert started so violently as Clara Talboys said this, that she looked suddenly at his face. The agitation visible there, betrayed a part of his secret.
“My brother George disappeared in Essex,” she said.
He could not contradict her.
“I am sorry you have discovered so much,” he replied. “My position becomes every day more complicated, every day more painful. Good-bye.”
She gave him her hand mechanically, when he held out his; but it was cold as marble, and lay listlessly in his own, and fell like a log at her side when he released it.
“Pray lose no time in returning to the house,” he said earnestly. “I fear you will suffer from this morning’s work.”
“Suffer!” she exclaimed, scornfully. “You talk to me of suffering, when the only creature in this world who ever loved me has been taken from it in the bloom of youth. What can there be for me henceforth but suffering? What is the cold to me?” she said, flinging back her shawl and baring her beautiful head to the bitter wind. “I would walk from here to London barefoot through the snow, and never stop by the way, if I could bring him back to life. What would I not do to bring him back? What would I not do?”
The words broke from her in a wail of passionate sorrow; and clasping her hands before her face, she wept for the first time that day. The violence of her sobs shook her slender frame, and she was obliged to lean against the trunk of a tree for support.
Robert looked at her with a tender compassion in his face; she was so like the friend whom he had loved and lost, that it was impossible for him to think of her as a stranger; impossible to remember that they had met that morning for the first time.
“Pray, pray be calm,” he said: “hope even against hope. We may both be deceived; your brother may still live.”
“Oh! if it were so,” she murmured, passionately; “if it could be so.”
“Let us try and hope that it may be so.”
“No,” she answered, looking at him through her tears, “let us hope for nothing but revenge. Good-by, Mr. Audley. Stop; your address.”
He gave her a card, which she put into the pocket of her dress.
“I will send you George’s letters,” she said; “they may help you. Good-by.”
She left him half bewildered by the passionate energy of her manner, and the noble beauty of her face. He watched her as she disappeared among the straight trunks of the fir-trees, and then walked slowly out of the plantation.
“Heaven help those who stand between me and the secret,” he thought, “for they will be sacrificed to the memory of George Talboys.”
Chapter 24
George’s Letters.
Robert Audley did not return to Southampton, but took a ticket for the first up town train that left Wareham, and reached Waterloo Bridge an hour or two after dark. The snow, which had been hard and crisp in Dorsetshire, was a black and greasy slush in the Waterloo Road, thawed by the flaring lamps of the gin-palaces and the glaring gas in the butchers’ shops.
Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the dingy streets through which the Hansom carried him, the cab-man choosing — with that delicious instinct which seems innate in the drivers of hackney vehicles — all those dark and hideous thoroughfares utterly unknown to the ordinary pedestrian.
“What a pleasant thing life is,” thought the barrister. “What an unspeakable boon — what an overpowering blessing! Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy — really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensee to mar his enjoyment — without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious
