“What’s to prevent your taking it? We’re not going to stand upon ceremony with such a feller as this, are we, Mrs. Monckton? He stole the will from you, and if you can get the chance, you’ll return the compliment by stealing it from him. Fair play’s a jewel, my dear Mrs. M., and nothing could be fairer than that. So we’ll set to work at once; and I hope you’ll excuse the cold water, which was meant in kindness, I assure you.”
Eleanor smiled, and gave the major her hand.
“I’m sure it was,” she said. “I scarcely liked the idea of your coming with me, major, for fear you should do some mischief by being a little too impetuous. But I don’t know what I should have done without you.”
Major Lennard shrugged his shoulders with a deprecating gesture.
“I might have been useful to you, my dear,” he said, “if the feller had been all right and I could have punched his head; but one can’t get any credit out of a chap when he’s in that state,” added the major, pointing to the commercial traveller, who was taking journeys on his own account into the horrible regions of an intemperate man’s fancy.
“Now, the first thing we shall want, Mrs. Monckton,” said the major, “is a candle and a box of lucifers. We must have a light before we can do anything.”
It was not dark yet; but the twilight was growing greyer and greyer, and the shadows were gathering in the corners of the room.
Victor Bourdon lay glaring at his two visitors through the dusk, while the major groped about the mantelpiece for a box of lucifers. He was not long in finding what he wanted. He struck a little waxen match against the greasy paper of the wall, and then lighted an end of candle in a tawdry cheap china candlestick.
“Ease her, ease her!” cried the Frenchman; “I see the lights ahead off Normandy, on this side of the wind. She’ll strike upon a rock before we know where we are. What are they about, these English sailors? are they blind, that they don’t see the light?”
Major Lennard, with the candle in his hand, set to work to look for the missing document. He did not look very systematically, but as he pulled out every drawer and opened every cupboard, and shook out the contents of every receptacle, flinging them remorselessly upon the floor, he certainly looked pretty effectually. Eleanor, kneeling on the ground amongst the chaotic heap of clothes and papers, tattered novels, broken meerschaum pipes and stale cigar ends, examined every pocket, every book, and every paper separately, but with no result. The drawers had been ransacked, the cupboards disembowelled, a couple of portmanteaus completely emptied. Every nook and corner of the two small rooms had been most thoroughly searched, first by the major in a slap-dash and military manner; afterwards by Eleanor, who did her work with calmness and deliberation, though her heart was beating, and the hot blood surging in her over-excited brain. Every possible hiding-place in the two rooms had been examined, but the will had not been found.