“You’ll not oppose Egerton?”
“Tooth and nail, tooth and nail!” cried Dick, clapping his hands to his ears, and fairly running out of the room.
There passed over Harley’s countenance that change so frequent to it,—more frequent, indeed, to the gay children of the world than those of consistent tempers and uniform habits might suppose. There is many a man whom we call friend, and whose face seems familiar to us as our own; yet, could we but take a glimpse of him when we leave his presence, and he sinks back into his chair alone, we should sigh to see how often the smile on the frankest lip is but a bravery of the drill, only worn when on parade.
What thoughts did the visit of Richard Avenel bequeath to Harley? It were hard to define them.
In his place, an Audley Egerton would have taken some comfort from the visit, would have murmured, “Thank Heaven! I have not to present to the world that terrible man as my brother-in-law.” But probably Harley had escaped, in his revery, from Richard Avenel altogether. Even as the slightest incident in the daytime causes our dreams at night, but is itself clean forgotten, so the name, so the look of the visitor, might have sufficed but to influence a vision, as remote from its casual suggester as what we call real life is from that life much more real, that we imagine, or remember, in the haunted chambers of the brain. For what is real life? How little the things actually doing around us affect the springs of our sorrow or joy; but the life which our dulness calls romance,—the sentiment, the remembrance, the hope, or the fear, that are never seen in the toil of our hands, never heard in the jargon on our lips,—from that life all spin, as the spider from its entrails, the web by which we hang in the sunbeam, or glide out of sight into the shelter of home.
“I must not think,” said Harley, rousing himself with a sigh, “either of past or present. Let me hurry on to some fancied future. ‘Happiest are the marriages,’ said the French philosopher, and still says many a sage, ‘in which man asks only the mild companion, and woman but the calm protector.’ I will go to Helen.”
He rose; and as he was about to lock up his escritoire, he remembered the papers which Leonard had requested him to read. He took them from their deposit, with a careless hand, intending to carry them with him to his father’s house. But as his eye fell upon the characters, the hand suddenly trembled, and he recoiled some paces, as if struck by a violent blow. Then, gazing more intently on the writing, a low cry broke from his lips. He reseated himself, and began to read.
CHAPTER XI.
Randal—with many misgivings at Lord L’Estrange’s tone, in which he was at no loss to detect a latent irony—proceeded to Norwood. He found Riccabocca exceedingly cold and distant; but he soon brought that sage to communicate the suspicions which Lord L’Estrange had instilled into his mind, and these Randal was as speedily enabled to dispel. He accounted at once for his visits to Levy and Peschiera. Naturally he had sought Levy, an acquaintance of his own,—nay, of Audley Egerton’s,—but whom he knew to be professionally employed by the count. He had succeeded in extracting from the baron Peschiera’s suspicious change of lodgment from Mivart’s Hotel to the purlieus of Leicester Square; had called there on the count, forced an entrance, openly accused him of abstracting Violante; high words had passed between them,—even a challenge. Randal produced a note from a military friend of his, whom he had sent to the count an hour after quitting the hotel. This note stated that arrangements were made for a meeting near Lord’s Cricket Ground, at seven o’clock the next morning. Randal then submitted to Riccabocca another formal memorandum from the same warlike friend, to the purport that Randal and himself had repaired to the ground, and no count had been forthcoming. It must be owned that Randal had taken all suitable precautions to clear himself. Such a man is not to blame for want of invention, if he be sometimes doomed to fail.