The facts in support of this notion were not many, would have made very little impression, perhaps, in a court of justice, yet, though he struggled against a notion which appeared to his sober reason absurd and groundless, his fancy was taken captive, and dwelt upon the idea with a tormenting persistence.
In the first place he was a poet, and there seemed to him a curious fatality in all the circumstances connected with his presence at Borcel End. He had gone there by the merest accident, guided by that will-o’-the-wisp of a child, tramping miles across a barren moor, intruding himself on an unwilling hostess. Then on the very first night of his habitation beneath that lonely roof he had been visited by one who, if not a wanderer from the shadow-world, was at least a ghost of the past; one who had outlived life’s joys and hopes, almost its cares and sorrows. This appearance of Muriel’s had at once awakened his interest in her. But for this midnight visit, and the chance meeting in the hazel copse, he might have come and gone a dozen times without being aware of Muriel Trevanard’s existence.
This idea of Destiny was, of course, a mere fanciful reason.
To-night in the silence, having gone over every word of Mrs. Trevanard’s story in his note-book, he placed on record those other circumstances which had impressed him in relation to this question.
1. The fact that Justina Elgood was said to have been born at Seacomb, a curiously out-of-the-way corner of the earth.
2. Her age exactly corresponded with the age of Muriel’s daughter, were she living.
3. The particularly uncommon name of Justina, a family name of the Trevanards.
4. The description of the man who had called himself Eden; a fluent speaker, a man who seemed accustomed to public speaking.
5. Matthew Elgood had lost an infant daughter at Seacomb. The fact stood recorded in the register. These Edens had also lost a child.
Very little certainly, all this, when set down formally upon paper, but the idea floating in Maurice’s mind seemed to have a stronger foundation than these meagre facts. Whence the fancy came he knew not, yet it seemed to him that for a long time he had been sceptical as to Justina’s relationship to Matthew Elgood. There was so evident a superiority in the daughter to the supposed father. They were creatures of a different clay.