Birds of Prey

by M. E. Braddon

Here was a position for me, Valentine Hawkehurst, soldier of fortune, cosmopolitan adventurer, and child of the nomadic tribes who call Bohemia their mother country! Already blest with the sanction of my dear love's simple Yorkshire kindred, I was now assured of George Sheldon's favour; nay, urged onward in my paradisiac path by that unsentimental Mentor. The situation was almost too much for my bewildered brain. Charlotte an heiress, and George Sheldon eager to bring about my participation in the Haygarthian thousands!

And now I sit in my little room in Omega-street, pondering upon the past, and trying to face the perplexities of the future.

Is this to be? Am I, so hopeless an outsider in the race of life, to come in with a rush and win the prize which Fortune's first favourite might envy? Can I hope or believe it? Can the Fates have been playing a pleasant practical joke with me all this time, like those fairies who decree that the young prince shall pass his childhood and youth in the guise of a wild boar, only to be transformed into an Adonis at last by the hand of the woman who is disinterested enough to love him despite his formidable tusks and ungainly figure?

No! a thousand times no! The woman I love, and the fortune I have so often desired, are not for me. Every man has his own especial Fates; and the three sisters who take care of me are grim, hard-visaged, harder-hearted spinsters, not to be mollified by propitiation, or by the smooth tongue of the flatterer. The cup is very sweet, and it seems almost within my grasp; but between that chalice of delight and the lips that thirst for it, ah, what a gulf!

Nov. 13th. The above was written late at night, and under the influence of my black dog. What an ill-conditioned cur he is, and how he mouths and mangles the roses that bestrew his pathway, always bent upon finding the worm at the core!

I kicked the brute out of doors this morning, on finding a letter from my dear one lying in my plate. "Avaunt, aroint thee, foul fiend!" I cried. "Thou art the veritable poodle in whose skin Mephistopheles hides when bent on direst mischief. I will set the sign of the cross upon my threshold, and thou shalt enter no more."

This is what I said to myself as I tore open Charlotte's envelope, with its pretty little motto stamped on cream-coloured sealing-wax, "Pensez à moi." Ah, love; "while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe." I saw the eyes of my friend Horatio fixed upon me as I opened my letter, and knew that my innermost sentiments were under inspection. Prudence demands all possible caution where the noble Captain is concerned. I cannot bring myself to put implicit faith in his account of his business at Ullerton. He may have been there, as he says, on some promoting spec; but our meeting in that town was, to say the least, a strange coincidence, and I am not a believer in coincidences—off the stage, where a gentleman invariably makes his appearance directly his friends begin to talk about him.

I cannot forget my conviction that Jonah Goodge was bought over by a rival investigator, and that Rebecca Haygarth's letters were tampered with; nor can I refrain from connecting that shapely but well-worn lavender glove with the person of my dandy friend, Horatio Paget. The disappearance of a letter from the packet intrusted to me by Miss Judson is another mysterious circumstance; nor can I do away with the impression that I heard the name Meynell distinctly pronounced by Philip Sheldon the last time I was at the villa.

George Sheldon tells me the secret cannot by any possibility have been betrayed, unless by me; and I have been prudence itself.

Supposing my suspicions of Mr. Goodge to be correct, the letters extracted from Mrs. Rebecca's correspondence might tell much, and might even put Horatio on the track of the Meynells. But how should he get his first inkling of the business?