Who cares whether I am well or ill?”
“What a spitfire she is,” thought the barrister. He always knew his cousin was angry with him when she addressed him as “Robert Audley.”
“You needn’t pitch into a fellow because he asks you a civil question, Alicia,” he said, reproachfully. “As to nobody caring about your health, that’s nonsense. I care.” Miss Audley looked up with a bright smile. “Sir Harry Towers cares.” Miss Audley returned to her book with a frown.
“What are you reading there, Alicia?” Robert asked, after a pause, during which he had sat thoughtfully stirring his tea.
“Changes and Chances.”
“A novel?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it by?”
“The author of Follies and Faults,” answered Alicia, still pursuing her study of the romance upon her lap.
“Is it interesting?”
Miss Audley pursed up her mouth and shrugged her shoulders.
“Not particularly,” she said.
“Then I think you might have better manners than to read it while your first cousin is sitting opposite you,” observed Mr. Audley, with some gravity, “especially as he has only come to pay you a flying visit, and will be off to-morrow morning.”
“To-morrow morning!” exclaimed my lady, looking up suddenly.
Though the look of joy upon Lady Audley’s face was as brief as a flash of lightning on a summer sky, it was not unperceived by Robert.
“Yes,” he said; “I shall be obliged to run up to London to-morrow on business, but I shall return the next day, if you will allow me, Lady Audley, and stay here till my uncle recovers.”
“But you are not seriously alarmed about him, are you?” asked my lady, anxiously.
“You do not think him very ill?”
“No,” answered Robert. “Thank Heaven, I think there is not the slightest cause for apprehension.”
My lady sat silent for a few moments, looking at the empty teacups with a prettily thoughtful face — a face grave with the innocent seriousness of a musing child.
“But you were closeted such a long time with Mr. Dawson, just now,” she said, after this brief pause. “I was quite alarmed at the length of your conversation. Were you talking of Sir Michael all the time?”
“No; not all the time?”
My lady looked down at the teacups once more.
“Why, what could you find to say to Mr. Dawson, or he to say to you?” she asked, after another pause. “You are almost strangers to each other.”
“Suppose Mr. Dawson wished to consult me about some law business.”
“Was it that?” cried Lady Audley, eagerly.
“It would be rather unprofessional to tell you if it were so, my lady,” answered Robert, gravely.
My lady bit her lip, and relapsed into silence. Alicia threw down her book, and watched her cousin’s preoccupied face. He talked to her now and then for a few minutes, but it was evidently an effort to him to arouse himself from his revery.
“Upon my word, Robert Audley, you are a very agreeable companion,” exclaimed Alicia at length, her rather limited stock of patience quite exhausted by two or three of these abortive attempts at conversation. “Perhaps the next time you come to the Court you will be good enough to bring your mind with you. By your present inanimate appearance, I should imagine that you had left your intellect, such as it is, somewhere in the Temple. You were never one of the liveliest of people, but latterly you have really grown almost unendurable. I suppose you are in love, Mr. Audley, and are thinking of the honored object of your affections.”
He was thinking of Clara Talboys’ uplifted face, sublime in its unutterable grief; of her impassioned words still ringing in his ears as clearly as when they were first spoken. Again he saw her looking at him with her bright brown eyes. Again he heard that solemn question: “Shall you or I find my brother’s murderer?” And he was in Essex; in the little village from which he firmly believed George Talboys had never departed. He was on the spot at which all record of his friend’s life ended as suddenly as a story ends when the reader shuts the book. And could he withdraw now from the investigation in which he found himself involved? Could he stop now? For any consideration? No; a thousand times no! Not with the image of that grief-stricken face imprinted on his mind. Not with the accents of that earnest appeal ringing on his ear.
Chapter 26
So Far and No Farther.
Robert left Audley the next morning by an early train, and reached Shoreditch a little after nine o’clock. He did not return to his chambers, but called a cab and drove straight to Crescent Villas, West Brompton. He knew that he should fail in finding the lady he went to seek at this address, as his uncle had failed a few months before, but he thought it possible to obtain some clew to the schoolmistress’ new residence, in spite of Sir Michael’s ill-success.
“Mrs. Vincent was in a dying state, according to the telegraphic message,” Robert thought. “If I do find her, I shall at least succeed in discovering whether that message was genuine.”
He found Crescent Villas after some difficulty. The houses were large, but they lay half imbedded among the chaos of brick and rising mortar around them. New terraces, new streets, new squares led away into hopeless masses of stone and plaster on every side. The roads were sticky with damp clay, which clogged the wheels of the cab and buried the fetlocks of the horse. The desolations — that awful aspect of incompleteness and discomfort which pervades a new and unfinished neighborhood — had set its dismal seal upon the surrounding streets which had arisen about and intrenched Crescent Villas; and Robert wasted forty minutes by his watch, and an hour and a quarter by the cabman’s reckoning, in driving up and down uninhabited streets and terraces, trying to find the Villase; whose chimney-tops were frowning down upon him black and venerable, amid groves of virgin plaster, undimmed by time or smoke.
But having at last succeeded in reaching his destination, Mr. Audley alighted from the cab, directed the driver to wait for him at a certain corner, and set out upon his voyage of discovery.
“If I were a distinguished Q.C., I could not do this sort of thing,” he thought; “my time would be worth a guinea or so a minute, and I should be retained in the great case of Hoggs vs. Boggs, going forward this very day before a special jury at Westminster Hall. As it is, I can afford to be patient.”
He inquired for Mrs. Vincent at the number which Mr. Dawson had given him. The maid who opened the door had never heard that lady’s name; but after going to inquire of her mistress, she returned to tell Robert that Mrs. Vincent had lived there, but that she had left two months before the present occupants had entered the house, “and missus has been here fifteen months,” the girl added emphatically.
