"There, you hear!" said Captain Hector Coles, triumphantly, and confident that the knowledge of such a maternal indorsement must work in his favor.
"You did, did you?" and the right hand of Margaret went suddenly inside the thick shawl that wrapped her from the winds of the peak—and unseen by the Captain a locket—that fatal locket—glittered before the mother's eyes. "Will you promise, and keep that promise, that Captain Hector Coles shall not say one more word to me of love or marriage, while we remain together? If not, as God sees me you know the consequences!"
Mrs. Burton Hayley's face was very white at that moment, but the next she said: "Oh yes, I promise!" and then with a groan, grasping the surprised Captain by the arm: "Captain, if you do not wish to see me drop dead, leave that wild, mad girl to herself! She is crazy, but I cannot help it!"
Captain Hector Coles looked from one to the other, in added surprise, but found no explanation; then he muttered something that was not a second love-declaration; and the next moment Margaret Hayley stood alone, isolated as the peak that bore her, and with a heart almost as cold in the dull leaden weight that seemed to lie within her bosom, as the storm-beaten rocks of which that peak was composed.
Thereafter Captain Hector Coles never spoke to her of love again!
CHAPTER XXI.
The Bearer of a Disgraced Name, in England—A Strange Quest and a Strange Unrest—Hurrying over to Ireland—Too Late for the Packet—The little Despatch-steamer—Henry Fitzmaurice, the Journalist—An Unexpected Passage—The Peril of the Emerald, and the end of all Quests save one.
Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time, * * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on the twentieth day of July, with the place of his residence attached. Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, because the lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the lawyer, as the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming, sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their dens of hiding?