“I left the hotel, and left Mr. Darrell and the clerk together; but I didn’t go very far. I contrived somehow or other to be especially interested in that part of the exterior of the castle visible from the street in which the hotel is situated, and, in a manner, kept one eye upon the stately towers of the royal residence, and the other upon the doorway out of which Launcelot Darrell and Mr. Lawford’s clerk must by-and-by emerge. In about half-an-hour I had the satisfaction of seeing them appear, and contrived, most innocently, of course, to throw myself exactly in their way at the corner of the perpendicular street.
“I was amply rewarded for any trouble I had taken; for I never saw a face that so plainly expressed rage, mortification, disappointment, almost despair, as did the face of Launcelot Darrell, when I came against him at the street corner. He was as white as a sheet, and he scowled at me savagely as he passed me by. Not as if he recognized me; the fixed look in his face showed that his mind was too much absorbed by one thought for any consciousness of exterior things; but as if in his suppressed fury he was ready to go blindly against anybody or anything that came in his way.”
“But why, Richard, why was he so angry?” cried Eleanor, with her hands clenched and her nostrils quivering with the passage of her rapid breath. “What does it all mean?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, Mrs. Monckton, it means that Launcelot Darrell has been tampering with the clerk of the lawyer who drew up Mr. de Crespigny’s last will, and that he now knows the worst——”
“And that is——”
“The plain fact, that unless that will is altered the brilliant Mr. Darrell will not inherit a penny of his kinsman’s fortune.”
The second dinner-bell rang while Richard was speaking, and Eleanor ran away to make some hurried change in her toilette, and to appear in the drawing-room, agitated and ill at ease, ten minutes after Mr. Monckton’s punctilious butler had made his formal announcement of the principal meal of the day.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
ANOTHER RECOGNITION.
Lancelot Darrell came to Tolldale Priory upon the day after Richard’s visit to Windsor, and it was easy for Eleanor, assisted by her knowledge of what had transpired, to see the change in his manner. She spent an hour in the drawing-room that morning for the purpose of seeing this change, and thereby finding confirmation of that which Richard Thornton had told her. But the alteration in the young man’s manner must have been very obvious, for even Laura, who was not particularly observant of any shades of feeling that did not make themselves manifest by the outward expression of word or gesture, perceived that there was something amiss with her lover, and drove Launcelot Darrell well-nigh mad with her childish questionings and lamentations.
Why was he so quiet? Why was he so much paler than usual? Why did he sigh sometimes? Why did he laugh in that strange way? Oh, no, not in his usual way. It was no use saying that it was so. Had he a headache? Had he been sitting up late at night? Had he been drinking horrid wine that had disagreed with him? Had he been a naughty, naughty, cruel, false, treacherous boy, and had he been to some party that he hadn’t told his poor Laura about, drinking champagne and flirting with girls, and dancing, and all that? Or had he been working too much at his new picture?