“Oh, Gilbert!” she said, clasping her hands about her husband’s arm and looking up in his face, “you’ll take me back to England at once, won’t you?”
“Yes, my dear,” Mr. Monckton answered, with a sigh. “I’ll do whatever you wish.”
There was a jealous pain at his heart as he spoke. His wife was pure, and true, and beautiful; but this strange purpose of her life divided her from him, and left his own existence very blank.
CHAPTER LVIII.
THE DAY OF RECKONING.
Launcelot Darrell and his mother had inhabited Woodlands for a little more than a fortnight. The painters, and paper-hangers, and upholsterers had done a great deal to alter the handsome country-house; for Mr. Darrell had no wish to be reminded of his dead uncle; and familiar chairs and tables have an unpleasant faculty of suggesting tiresome thoughts, and recalling faded faces that had better be forgotten. Almost all the old furniture had been swept away, therefore, and the young man had behaved very generously to his maiden aunts, who had furnished a small house in Windsor with the things that Launcelot had banished from Woodlands. These poor disappointed ladies had located themselves in a quiet little cul-de-sac, squeezed in between the hilly street and the castle, with the idea that the wild dissipations of a town life would enable them to forget their wrongs.
So Launcelot Darrell and his mother reigned at Woodlands instead of the maiden sisters; and Parker, the butler, and Mrs. Jepcott, the housekeeper, waited upon a new master and mistress.
The young man had chafed bitterly at his poverty, and had hated himself and all the world, because of those humiliations to which a man who is too idle to work, and too poor to live without work, is always more or less subject. But, alas! now that by the commission of a crime he had attained the great end of his ambition, he found that the game was not worth the candle; and that in his most fretful moments before Maurice de Crespigny’s death, he had never suffered as much as he now suffered, daily and hourly.
The murderers of the unfortunate Mr. Ware ate a hearty supper of pork chops while their victim lay, scarcely cold, in a pond beside the high road; but it is not everybody who is blessed with the strength of mind possessed by those gentlemen. Launcelot Darrell could not shake off the recollection of what he had done. From morning till night, from night till morning, the same thoughts, the same fears, were perpetually pressing upon him. In the eyes of every servant who looked at him; in the voice of every creature who spoke to him; in the sound of every bell that rang in the roomy country-house, there lurked a something that inspired the miserable terror of detection. It haunted him in every place; it met him at every turn. The knowledge that he was in the power of two bad, unscrupulous men, the lawyer’s clerk and Victor Bourdon, made him the most helpless of slaves. Already he had found what it was to be in the power of a vicious and greedy wretch. The clerk had been easily satisfied by the gift of a round sum of money, and had levanted before his employer returned from America. But Victor Bourdon became insatiable. He was a gamester and a drunkard; and he expected to find in Launcelot Darrell’s purse a gold mine that was never to be exhausted.
He had abandoned himself to the wildest dissipation in the worst haunts of London after Maurice de Crespigny’s death; and had appeared at Woodlands at all times and seasons, demanding enormous sums of his miserable victim. At first terror sealed Launcelot Darrell’s lips, and he acceded to the most extravagant demands of his accomplice; but at last his temper gave way, and he refused that “paltry note for a thousand francs,” to which the Frenchman alluded in his interview with Eleanor. After this refusal there was a desperate quarrel between the two men, at the end of which the commercial traveller received a thrashing, and was turned out of doors by the master of Woodlands.
The young man had been quite reckless of consequences in his passion; but when he grew a little calmer he began to reflect upon the issue of this quarrel.