The rooms looked very lonely and desolate as he glanced around them, while throwing open the wooden shutters ere he did so--lonely and desolate as all rooms and houses invariably appear which have remained unused and shut up for some considerable space of time. And they seemed even more so than they would otherwise have done, because of her whom he had left sitting by what was now a cold and empty hearth. Where, he asked himself, where was she? Yet he would soon know--in an instant; he could hear the woman's pattens clattering up the bare cold steps of the stairs and along the hall--he would soon know.
She came in a moment later, one hand full of kindlings and paper to make a fire, the other grasping some letters--half a dozen--a dozen. And amongst them there must be one--more than one from her--he could see the English frank--also the red post-boy stamped in the corner. She had written.
He snatched as gently as might be the little parcel from the woman's hand, ran the letters rapidly through his own--and recognised in a moment that there were none, was not one, from her. Not one! Three were from his mother, another was in a woman's writing which he did not recognise, another from his compatriot, from him who had witnessed his marriage. But from her--nothing!
He let the servant lay and light the fire while he stood by looking down into the fast kindling flames and holding the letters in his hand listlessly, then, when she rose from her knees and glanced at him inquiringly, he shook his head gently.
"No," he said, in answer to her questioning eyes. "No. She has not written yet. Not yet. Leave me now if you will. These at least must be attended to."
When she had gone from out the room, after turning back ere she did so to cast a swift glance at him, a glance which led her to passing her apron across her eyes after she had gained the passage, he sat down in the deep fauteuil by the fire in which he had so often sat since he had lived there--the fauteuil in which his wife of a day had sat before him on their wedding night--and brooded long ere he opened the letters which lay to his hand.
"What does it mean?" he murmured to himself. "What? Were Vandecque and that creeping snake, Desparre, whom I saw lurking in the porch of a house ere I was vanquished, on their way here when we met? Did they come on here afterwards? Yet, even so, what could they do to her? Nothing! The law punishes not those women who disobey their parents or guardians by marrying against their wish, but, instead, the man who marries them. It could do nothing to her. If she went from here she went of her own free will, even though cajoled by Vandecque into doing so. As for Desparre, what harm could he do? She hated him; she married me when she might have married him. No! No! It is Vandecque I must seek. Vandecque! At once. At once. Now. Yet, to begin with, these letters."
Those from his mother were the first to which he turned; before all else he, this married yet wifeless man, sought news of her. Her love, at least, never faltered; never! And, he reflected sadly, it was the only woman's love he was ever likely to know. There could be no other now that he was wedded to one who had disappeared from out his life an hour after his back was turned.
"Yet, stay," he mused, as these thoughts sped swiftly through his troubled mind. "Stay. She may have followed my injunctions and have made her way to England. The news I seek may be here, in these."
But, even as he so thought, something, some fear or apprehension, told him that it was not so, and that his mother had no information to give him of his wife.