“Your brother’s?” cried the officer, with a blank look. “You mean, sir, the gentleman that was buried yesterday?”
“My brother, Mr. Trevanion, of Highcourt. I do not know how he can have been connected with the person you seek. It must have been some accidental link. I have already told you I never heard the name.”
The man was as much confused and startled as John himself. “If that’s so,” he said, “you have put us off the track, and I don’t know now what to do. We had heard,” he added, with a sidelong look of vigilant observation, “that there was a lady in the case.”
“I know nothing about any lady,” said John Trevanion, briefly.
“There’s no trusting to village stories, sir. We were told that a lady had disappeared, and that it was more than probable—”
“As you say, village stories are entirely untrustworthy,” said John. “I can throw no light on the subject, except that the address on the envelope (Everard, is it?) is in my brother’s hand. He might, of course, have a hundred correspondents unknown to me, but I certainly never heard of this one. I suppose there is no more I can do for you, for I am anxious to get back to Highcourt. You have heard, no doubt, that the family is in deep mourning and sorrow.”
“I am very sorry, sir,” said the official, “and distressed to have interrupted you at such a moment, but it is our duty to leave no stone unturned.” Then he lingered for a moment. “I suppose, then,” he said, “there is no truth in the story about the lady—”
John turned upon him with a short laugh. “You don’t expect me, I hope, to answer for all the village stories about ladies,” he said, waving his hand as he went on. “I have told you all I know.”
He quickened his pace and his companion fell back. But the officer was not satisfied, and John Trevanion went on, with his mind in a dark and hopeless confusion, not knowing what extraordinary addition of perplexity was added to the question by this new piece of evidence, but feeling vaguely that it increased the darkness all around him. He had not in any way associated the stranger whom he had met on the road with his sister-in-law. He had thought it likely enough that the young man, perhaps of pretensions too humble to get admittance at Highcourt, had lingered about in foolish youthful adoration of Rosalind, which, however presumptuous it might be, was natural enough. To hear now that the young man who had presumed to do Miss Trevanion a service was a criminal in hiding made his blood boil. But his brother’s handwriting threw everything into confusion. How did this connect with the rest, what light did it throw upon the imbroglio, in what way could it be connected with the disappearance of Madam? All these things surged about him vaguely as he walked, but he could make nothing coherent, no rational whole out of them. The park and the trees lay in a heavy mist. The day was not cold, but stifling, with a low sky, and heavy vapors in the air, everything around wet, sodden, dreary. Never had the long stretches of turf and distant glades of trees seemed to him so lonely, so deserted and forsaken. There was not a movement to be seen, nobody coming by that public pathway which had been so great a grievance to the Trevanions for generations back. John, though he shared the family feeling in this respect, would have gladly now seen a village procession moving along the contested path. The house seemed to him to lie in a cold enclosure of mist and damp, abandoned by everybody, a spot on which there was a curse. But this, of course, was merely fanciful; and he shook off the feeling. There was pain enough involved in its recent history without the aid of imagination.
There was plenty to do, however. Mr. Trevanion’s papers had to be put in order, his personal affairs wound up; and it was almost better to have no interruption in this duty, and so get over it as quickly as possible. There is something dreadful under all circumstances in fulfilling this office. To examine into the innermost recesses in which a man has kept his treasures, his most intimate possessions, the records, perhaps, of his affections and ambitions; to open his desk, to pull out his drawers, to turn over the letters which, perhaps, to him were sacred, never to be revealed to any eye but his own, is an office from which it is natural to shrink. The investigator feels himself a spy, taking advantage of the pathetic helplessness of the dead, their powerlessness to protect themselves. John Trevanion sat down in the library with the sense of intrusion strong upon him, yet with a certain painful curiosity too. He was afraid of discovering something. At every new harmless paper which he opened he drew a long breath of relief. The papers of recent times were few—they were chiefly on the subject of money, the investments which had been made, appeals for funds sent to him for the needs of the estate, for repairs and improvements, which it was evident Mr. Trevanion had been slow to yield to. It seemed from the letters addressed to him that most of his business had been managed through his wife, which was a fact his brother was aware of; but somehow the constant reference to her, and the evident position assigned to her as in reality the active agency in the whole, added a curious and bewildering pang to the confusion in which all this had closed. It seemed beyond belief that this woman, who had stood by her husband so faithfully, his nurse, his adviser, his agent, his eyes and ears, should be now a sort of fugitive, under the dead man’s ban, separated from all she cared for in the world. John stopped in the middle of a bundle of letters to ask himself whether he had ever known a similar case. There was nothing like it in the law reports, nothing even in those causes célèbres which include so many wonders. A woman with everything in her hands, her husband’s business as well as his health, and the governance of her great household, suddenly turned away from it without reason given or any explanation—surely the man must have been mad—surely he must have been mad! It was the only solution that seemed possible. But then there arose before the thinker’s troubled vision those scenes which had preceded his brother’s death—the bramble upon her dress, the wet feet which she had avowed, with—was it a certain bravado? And again, that still more dreadful moment in the park, on the eve of her husband’s funeral, when he had himself seen her meet and talk with some one who was invisible in the shadow of the copse. He had seen it, there could be no question on the subject. What did it mean? He got up, feeling the moisture rise to his forehead in the conflict of his feelings; he could not sit still and go for the hundredth time over this question. What did it mean?