Marilda was likewise much disappointed at hearing nothing; but discussion was trying to her, and she dreaded her cousins' sharp eyes so much, that it was a relief to her to escape them. Nor could they linger, for Wilmet was anxious about Lance, who was exceedingly miserable; and in his anxiety hardly knew what he was about, scarcely what he said.
If Wilmet wished him to feel what a narrow escape his had been, he broke into despair that he had not been with Edgar. The room and the room-mate that had seemed so disgusting to home-bred Felix, had fascinated him by their charming disregard of wearisome propriety, and their congenial eccentric liberty; and the picture of Edgar coming home in his distress to his sleepy, half-conscious comrade made him wretched. He treated regret like censure, and alarmed as much as scandalised Wilmet by longings to have been there to share the wanderings, which, even if they amounted to starvation, could not, he averred, be 'half so hateful as standing behind a counter.'
Perhaps he had never before been so near showing temper as in his arguments with Wilmet, and his determination to defend Edgar through thick and thin; and she was almost relieved when after the disappointment of finding that there was no news from Ferdinand, he collapsed into one of his attacks of headache. Nay, for weeks, though about again and at work, the lad was not well nor thoroughly himself; he seemed, like Cherry, to be always watching for tidings that never came, and unlike her, he made light of whatever could be construed into censure of any taste of Edgar's.
Felix, though unwilling to pain him, thought it might be wholesome to let him see for himself the facts of Edgar's life, and accepted his assistance in sorting the bagful of revelations of self-indulgence and dissipation, which he knew Lance's lips might defend, but never his conscience.
Judging as well as they could by the dates and charges, there had not been much amiss except carelessness of expenditure before Alice Knevett's defection, eighteen months back; but this had been succeeded by a launch into every sort of excitement, so increasingly painful and disgraceful, that Felix declared at times that it was profanation to let the proceeds of Geraldine's pure and high-minded art be spent in discharging such obligations. There were traces of an endeavour to pull up after Tom Underwood's legacy, which would have far more than cleared Edgar, if he had been satisfied to do more than merely pay 'on account,' and stave off difficulties, until the main body of the bequest had vanished between gambling and the crash of the National Minstrelsy.
Meantime the weeks of Edgar's silence and absence were running on to months, and nothing was known. Ferdinand Travis's quest had been an utter failure. Baden, Homburg, Spa, Munich, Paris, Florence, Rome, Monaco, had been searched in vain; ingenious advertisements in the second column of the 'Times' were unnoticed; and though there was no outward difference in the manner of the two who loved him best, each bore about a heavy yearning heartache and foreboding—the one, that there must be something, worse than was known, to lead so affectionate a person thus utterly to efface himself; the other, that some terrible unknown accident, lake-storm or glacier-crevasse, could alone account for such pitiless disregard of home suspense. His relics had been hidden away like those of the dead, with sad reverence; and his name was never mentioned except now and then in low sad tones in a tête-à-tête.