Robert Campbell took no notice of anything, that either the newspapers or his mother said. One day Isabel showed him a remark concerning "the unhappy life of that unfortunate gentleman, the late amiable Traquair Campbell, Esq." "You ought to stop such shameful allusions, Robert," she said, "they make mother furious."
He looked at her with eyes sad and suffering, and answered: "Neither you nor I, Isabel, can gainsay those words. They describe only too truly our father's position. He was amiable, and he was unhappy."
"But, Robert, the insinuation is, that mother was to blame for our father's unhappiness."
"She was. Such accusations are best unanswered. If we do not talk life into them, they will die in a few days."
To those who did not know Robert Campbell, he seemed at this time indifferent and unfeeling. In reality he was consumed by the two passions that had taken possession of him—the finding of his wife and son, and the making of money to keep up the search for them. He spent his days at the works, his evenings were devoted to interviewing his detectives, writing them instructions, or reading their reports. Shabby-looking men, in various disguises, haunted the hall and library of Traquair House, and every single one of them gave Mrs. Campbell a fresh and separate attack of anger. They were naturally against her, they believed everything wrong said of her, they talked slyly to the servants, and would scarcely answer her questions; they trespassed on her rights, and disobeyed her orders; and if she made a complaint of their behavior to her son, he looked at her indignantly and walked silently away. Speech, which had been her great weapon, and her great enjoyment, lost its power against the smouldering anger in her son's heart, and the speechless insolence of his "spying men."
Very soon after his sorrow had found him out he locked every drawer and closet in the rooms that had been Theodora's. It was a necessary action, but he had a bitter heartache in its performance. The carefully folded garments, with their faint scent of lavender, held so many memories of the woman he longed to see. The knots of pale ribbons, the neckwear of soft lace! Oh, how could such things hurt him so cruelly? In one drawer of her desk he found the stationery she had begged her own money to buy. She had not even taken the postage stamps. That circumstance set him thinking. She was leaving England, or she would have taken the stamps—perhaps not—they might have been left for the very purpose of inducing this belief. Who could tell?
Meantime nothing in the life of Traquair House changed or stopped, because Robert Campbell's life had been snapped into two parts. Mrs. Campbell soon recovered her pride and self-confidence. She told all her callers she "had received measureless sympathy, and as for her enemies, and what they said, she just washed her hands of them—poor, beggarly scribblers, and such like."
Isabel's behavior was a nearer and more constant annoyance. She spent the most of her time in her own room with maps and guidebooks and writing, and the pleasure she derived from these sources was a pleasure inconceivable to her mother. "You are past reckoning with, Isabel," she said fretfully one day, "what on earth are you busy about?"
"I am planning routes of travel, mother, putting down every place to stop at, what hotel to go to, what is worth seeing, and so on. I have four routes laid out already. I am hoping some day, when I have made all clear, you will go with me."
"Me! Me go with you! Not while I have one of my five senses left me."