The clerk came back with the glass of water; it was rather a murky-looking fluid, but a few drops between Eleanor’s pale lips served to bring the life back to her.
She lifted her head with the proud resolution of a queen, and looked at the compassionate shipbroker with a strange smile. She had heard the old man’s suppositions about lovers and brothers. How far away his simple fancy led him from the bitter truth!
She held out her hand to him as she rose from her chair, erect and dauntless as a fair-haired Joan of Arc, ready to gird on the sword in defence of her king and country.
“I thank you very much, sir,” she said, “for what you have done for me to-day. My father was an old man—as old or older perhaps than yourself; and he died a very cruel death. I believe that your kindness of this day will help me to avenge him.”
CHAPTER XXIII
RESOLVED.
Launcelot Darrell had not sailed for Calcutta in the Princess Alice. This point once established, it was utterly vain for Richard Thornton to argue against that indomitable belief which had taken possession of Eleanor Vane’s mind, respecting the identity between the man who had won her father’s money at écarté, and Mrs. Darrell’s only son.
“I tell you, Richard,” she said, when the scene-painter argued with her, “that nothing but proof positive of Launcelot Darrell’s absence in India at the date of my father’s death would have dispossessed me of the idea that flashed upon me on the day I left Berkshire. He was not in India at that time. He deceived his mother and his friends. He remained in Europe; and led, no doubt, an idle, dissipated life. He must have lived by his wits, for he had no money from his mother—no one to help him—no profession to support him. What is more likely than that he went to Paris,—the paradise of scoundrels, I have heard you say, Richard,—under an assumed name? What more likely? Why, he was there! The man I saw on the boulevard, and the man I saw in the Windsor street, are one and the same. You cannot argue me out of that conviction, Richard Thornton, for it is the truth. It is the truth, and it shall be the business of my life to prove that it is so.”
“And what then, Eleanor?” Mr. Thornton asked, gravely. “Supposing you can prove this; by such evidences as will be very difficult to get at—by such an investigation as will waste your life, blight your girlhood, warp your nature, unsex your mind, and transform you from a candid and confiding woman into an amateur detective. Suppose you do all this,—and you little guess, my dear, the humiliating falsehoods, the pitiful deceptions, the studied basenesses, you must practise if you are to tread that sinuous pathway,—what then? What good is effected; what end is gained? Are you any nearer to the accomplishment of the vow you uttered in the Rue de l’Archevêque?”
“What do you mean, Richard?”
“I mean that to prove this man’s guilt is not to avenge your father’s death. Neither you nor the law has any power to punish him. He may or may not have cheated your poor father. At this distance of time you can prove nothing; except that he played écarté in the private room of a café, and that he won all your father’s money. He would only laugh in your face, my poor Nelly, if you were to bring such a charge as this against him.”