How strange it sounded to English ears now!
He wrote to his solicitors to settle a sum stated—a handsome annuity on Alison, if she was found—one that would keep her every way independent alike of her father and Lord Cadbury, if he fell by the hand of the latter—instructions which made those quiet and very acute legal practitioners, Messrs. Taype, Shawrpe, and Scrawly, open their eyes very wide indeed, when the letter reached them at Gray's Inn Square.
His reveries were not very rose-coloured, as he might be a dead man long before this time to-morrow, he thought, while looking at the clock; however, it did not impair his appetite, and he and Victor Gabion spent the evening at the Café Grisor, in the Rue Von Shoonhoven, listening to the grand organ which is played by machinery, while enjoying their wine and cigars, far into the small hours of the morning.
Yet we may be sure that there are few men, if they told truth, but would acknowledge that they felt a very unpleasant emotion when thinking that when another round of the clock was achieved their part in this world might be over—ended and done with!
In the morning he was in a brighter mood, and, though infuriated against Cadbury, had no desire to kill, but only to wound him, to the end that he might wring from him the secret of what he had done with Alison. He was a good marksman—had been a musketry instructor—and with rifle and revolver had done some great things among the big game and hill tribes in India.
A revelation was all he wanted. On his own life, save in so far as Alison Cheyne was concerned, he set little store. How short seemed the minutes he used to spend with her under the old beeches at Chilcote, or when in Laura Dalton's at the Grange. Short and few, and how much alone he used to feel when not with her!
Now how much more alone he felt, when he seemed to have so mysteriously and painfully lost her!
After some coffee, backed by a chasse—i.e., dashed with cognac—he and Gabion—with the latter's case of pistols—departed before sunrise in a voiture for the citadel—a pretty long drive, through winding and tortuous streets, crossing between the great shipping basins at the Quai Hambourg, and ere long the houses were left behind, and the great grassy embankments of the fortress rose before them.
Every feature of the scenery, every detail of what he saw, however petty and trivial, impressed itself curiously upon the mind of Bevil Goring on this eventful morning.
A group of old peasant women, with wide dark-blue or black cloaks and coal-scuttle bonnets, gossiping in the roadway; children at cottage doors; Flemish labourers, with hard and earnest types of face, leisurely filling their huge pipes with tobacco; a boy sitting on a gate, munching a straw, and dreaming perhaps of the future; the view of the vast Scheldt, curving in a mighty sweep round the flat green Tête de Flandres, with all its steamers and other shipping.