He sat looking at her for some minutes while she and Laura stood talking together a few paces from him. It was perhaps only a painter’s habit of looking earnestly at a pretty face that gave intensity to his gaze. He dropped his eyelids presently, and drew a long breath, that sounded almost like a sign of relief.
“An accidental likeness,” he muttered; “there are a hundred such likenesses in the world.”
He got up and walked back to the house, leaving the two girls together. Laura had a great deal to say about his handsome face, and the easy grace of his manner; but Eleanor Vane was absent and thoughtful. The mention of her father’s name had brought back the past. Her peaceful life, and all its quiet contentment, melted away like a curtain of morning mist that rises to disclose the ghastly horror of a battle-field; and the dreadful picture of the past arose before her; painfully vivid, horribly real. The parting on the boulevard; the long night of agony and suspense; the meeting with Richard on the bridge by the Morgue; her father’s torn, disjointed letter; and her own vengeful wrath; all returned to her. Every voice of her heart seemed to call her away from the commonplace tranquillity of her life to some desperate act of justice and retribution.
“What have I to do with this frivolous girl?” she thought; “what is it to me whether Launcelot Darrell’s nose is Grecian or aquiline, whether his eyes are black or brown? What a wretched, useless life I am leading in this place, when I should be hunting through the world for the murderer of my father.”
She sighed wearily as she remembered how powerless she was. What could she do to get one step nearer to the accomplishment of that single purpose, which she called the purpose of her life? Nothing! She remembered with a chill feeling of despair that however, in her moments of exaltation, she might look forward to some shadowy day of triumph and revenge, her better sense always told her that Richard Thornton had spoken the truth. The man whose treachery had destroyed George Vane had dropped into the chaos of on over-crowded universe, leaving no clue behind him by which he might be traced.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LAWYER’S SUSPICION.
Mr. Monckton came to Hazlewood upon the day after Launcelot Darrell’s arrival. The grave solicitor had known the young man before his departure for India, but there seemed no very great intimacy between them, and Mr. Darrell appeared rather to avoid any familiarity with his mother’s rich friend.
He answered Gilbert Monckton’s questions about India and indigo-planting with an air of unwillingness that was almost insolent.
“The last few years of my life have not been so very pleasant as to make me care to look back at them,” he said, bitterly. “Some men keep a diary of the experiences of each day—I found the experiences tiresome enough in themselves, and had no wish to incur the extra fatigue of writing about them. I told my uncle, when he forced a commercial career upon me, that he was making a mistake; and the result has proved that I was right.”
Mr. Darrell spoke with as much gentlemanly indifference as if he had been discussing the affairs of a stranger. He evidently thought that the mistakes of his life rested upon other people’s shoulders; and that it was no shame to him, but rather to his credit as a fine gentleman, that he had come home penniless and shabby to sponge upon his mother’s slender income.