CHAPTER XXVIII.
If Roy had seemed unsympathetic as they drove home it was not because he did not feel keenly. He was indeed afraid to show how keenly he felt, and he would have given almost anything to have been able honestly to say that he, too, believed in some unexplained mystery which should entirely free his friend from reproach. But he could not honestly believe in such a thing—it would have been as easy to him to believe in the existence of fairies and hobgoblins. Since no such thing as magic existed, and since Darnell had never been an assistant of Maskelyne and Cooke, he could not believe that he had anything to do with the five-pound note. Assuredly no one but Frithiof could have taken it out of the till and carefully pinned it to the lining of his waistcoat pocket. The more he thought over the details of the story, the more irrational seemed his sister’s blind faith. And yet his longing to share in her views chafed and irritated him as he realized the impossibility.
His mind was far too much engrossed to notice Cecil much, and that, perhaps, was a good thing, for just then in her great dejection any ordinarily acute observer could not have failed to read her story. But Roy, full of passionate love for Sigrid, and of hot indignation with James Horner for having been the instrument of bringing about all this trouble, was little likely to observe other people.
Why had he ever gone to Paris? he wondered angrily, when his father or James Horner could have seen to the business there quite as well. He had gone partly because he liked the change, and partly because he was thankful for anything that would fill up the wretched time while he waited for Sigrid’s definite reply to his proposal. But now he blamed himself for his restlessness, and was made miserable by the perception that had he chosen differently all would have now been well.
He slept little that night, and went up to business the next morning in anything but a pleasant frame of mind, for he could hardly resist his longing to go straight to Sigrid, and see how things were with her. When he entered the shop Darnell was in his usual place at the left-hand counter, but Frithiof was arranging some songs on a stand in the center, and Roy was at once struck by a change that had come over him; he could not define it, but he felt that it was not in this way that he had expected to find the Norwegian after a trouble which must have been so specially galling to his pride. “How are you?” he said, grasping his hand; but it was impossible before others to say what was really in his heart, and it was not till an hour or two later that they had any opportunity of really speaking together. Then it chanced that Frithiof came into his room with a message.
“There is a Mr. Carruthers waiting to speak to you,” he said, handing him a card; “he has two manuscript songs which he wishes to submit to you.”
“Tell him I am engaged,” said Roy. “And that as for songs, we have enough to last us for the next two years.”
“They are rather good; he has shown them to me. You might just glance through them,” suggested Frithiof.
“I shall write a book some day on the sorrows of a music-publisher!” said Roy. “How many thousands of composers do you think there can be in this overcrowded country? No, I’ll not see the man; I’m in too bad a temper; but you can just bring in the songs, and I will look at them and talk to you at the same time.”
Frithiof returned in a minute, carrying the neat manuscripts which meant so much to the composer and so little, alas! to the publisher. Roy glanced through the first.