Elster's Folly: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"Because had he remained in it he'd be sure to have come bothering me to employ him again; unless, indeed, he has found some one else to do it."

"Well," said Mr. Carr, rising, "will you do me this favour? If you come across the man again, or learn tidings of him in any way, let me know it at once. I do not want him to hear of me, or that I have made inquiries about him. I only wish to ascertain where he is, if that be possible. Any one bringing me this information privately will find it well worth his while."

He went forth into the busy streets again, sick at heart; and upon reaching his chambers wrote a note for a detective officer, and put some business into his hands.

Meanwhile Lord Hartledon remained in London. When the term for which they had engaged the furnished house was expired he took lodgings in Grafton Street; and there he stayed, his frame of mind restless and unsatisfactory. Lady Hartledon wrote to him sometimes, and he answered her. She said not a word about the discovery she had made in regard to the alleged action-at-law; but she never failed in every letter to ask what he was doing, and when he was coming home—meaning to Hartledon. He put her off in the best way he could: he and Carr were very busy together, he said: as to home, he could not mention any particular time. And Lady Hartledon bottled up her curiosity and her wrath, and waited with what patience she possessed.

The truth was—and, perhaps, the reader may have divined it—that graver motives than the sensitive feeling of not liking to face the Ashtons were keeping Lord Hartledon from his wife and home. He had once, in his bachelor days, wished himself a savage in some remote desert, where his civilized acquaintance could not come near him; he had a thousand times more reason to wish himself one now.

One dusty day, when the excessive heat of summer was on the wane, he went down to Mr. Carr's chambers, and found that gentleman out. Not out for long, the clerk thought; and sat down and waited. The room he was in looked out on the cool garden, the quiet river; in the one there was not a soul except Mr. Broom himself, who had gone in to watch the progress of his chrysanthemums, and was stooping lovingly over the beds; on the other a steamer, freighted with a straggling few, was paddling up the river against the tide, and a barge with its brown sail was coming down in all its picturesque charm. The contrast between this quiet scene and the bustling, dusty, jostling world he had come in from, was grateful even to his disturbed heart; and he felt half inclined to go round to the garden and fling himself on the lawn as a man might do who was free from care.

Mr. Carr indulged in the costly luxury of three rooms in the Temple; his sitting-room, which was his work-room, a bedroom, and a little outer room, the sanctum of his clerk. Lord Hartledon was in the sitting-room, but he could hear the clerk moving about in the ante-room, as if he had no writing on hand that morning. When tired of waiting, he called him in.

"Mr. Taylor, how long do you think he will be? I've been dozing, I think."

"Well, I thought he'd have been here before now, my lord. He generally tells me if he is going out for any length of time; but he said nothing to-day."

"A newspaper would be something to while away one's time, or a book," grumbled Hartledon. "Not those," glancing at a book-case full of ponderous law-volumes.