CHAPTER XIII
THE GREAT SURPRISE
For many weeks, journeying from camp on slope of the Himalayas, without much to vary monotonous daily routine, the survey party arrives at Calcutta. All are paid, and the expedition is disbanded.
To Oswald Langdon, choosing some congenial life pursuit now is a serious problem. Liberal pay for service just ended places him beyond the necessity of immediate employment. His faculties might find agreeable exercise in the legal forum, but this seems interdicted by menacing voices and spectral beckonings. Whichever way he turns there loom past wraiths, restless as ghosts of unburied Grecian slain. These must find soothing specific, ere he tastes elixir of life's destiny.
But how proceed to lay these menacing forms? What has been done to ferret out this crime? Who is suspected? Has the body of Alice Webster been discovered? Possibly the strange disappearances have ceased to excite comment. Even Sir Donald Randolph and Esther may remember these only as unpleasant reminiscences.
Father and mother! What of them?
An unutterable homesickness overwhelms him. Looking with mute appeal toward the sky, a star twinkles with softened light. Blending with ominous shadows of a receding cloud, this tender radiance seems prophetic. Oswald feels a chastened sense, but strange assurance.
Two persons pass the hotel. The walk and general appearance of both seem familiar. They are engaged in hurried conversation. No other two men ever duplicated such combinations of voice, walk, gesture, and general appearance. His Northfield and London foes are near.
Pierre and Paul did not see Oswald, but hurried by. On the previous day they had quit the prison. The Calcutta press contained no reference to their release. Having arrived in Calcutta only three days ago, Oswald knows nothing of the arrests. He has no desire to meet either of these rascals, but will go about his own affairs. He feels tempted to assume a disguise and learn something of their purposes, but recoils at such practices.
With all this uncertainty checking and thwarting his aspirations, Oswald cannot easily assume a false guise. True, at Dick Bray's, he donned an old hat and duster, but these were expedients of hunted self-defense, discarded soon as aboard ship.