Chapter Sixty Eight.
An Irksome Imprisonment.
Succeeding his castigation, it was all of a week before Mr Swinton could make appearance upon the streets—during daylight.
The discoloration of his cheeks, caused by the horsewhip, was slow of coming out; and even the oyster kept on for twenty-four hours failed to eliminate the purple crescent under his eye.
He had to stay indoors—sneaking out only at night.
The pain was slight. But the chagrin was intolerable; and he would have given a good sum out of his spy pay to have had revenge upon the man who had so chastised him.
This was impossible; and for several reasons, among others, his ignorance of whom it was. He only knew that his chastiser had been a guest of Kossuth; and this from his having come out of Kossuth’s house. He had not himself seen the visitor as he went in; and his subordinate, who shared with him the duplicate duty of watching and dogging, did not know him. He was a stranger who had not been there before—at least since the establishment of the picket.
From the description given of his person, as also what Swinton had himself seen of it through the thick fog—something, too, from what he had felt—he had formed, in his own mind, a suspicion as to whom the individual was. He could not help thinking of Maynard. It may seem strange he should have thought of him. But no; for the truth is, that Maynard was rarely out of his mind. The affair at Newport was a thing not easily forgotten. And there was the other affair in Paris, where Julia Girdwood had shown an interest in the Zouaves’ captive that did not escape observation from her jealous escort.
He had been made aware of her brief absence from the Louvre Hotel, and conjectured its object. Notwithstanding the apparent slight she had put upon his rival in the Newport ball-room, he suspected her of a secret inclining to him—unknown to her mother.
It made Swinton savage to think of it; the more from a remembrance of another and older rivalry, in which the same man had outstripped him.