It was the first moment of rest and quiet he had known since the morning of the previous day, when he and his mother, alarmed but comparatively calm, had gone to see Mrs. Hilyard, who was now, like himself, wandering, with superior knowledge and more desperate passion, on the same track. To sit in this house in the suspicious silence, hearing the distant thrill of voices which might guide or foil him in his search; to think who it was whom he had engaged to help him in his terrible mission; to go over again in distracted gleams and snatches the brief little circle of time which had brought all this about, the group of figures into which his life had been absorbed,—rapt the young man into a maze of excited musing, which his exhausted frame at once dulled and intensified. They seemed to stand round him, with their faces so new, yet so familiar—that needle-woman with her emphatic mouth—Mildmay—Lady Western—last of all, this man, who was not Susan’s lover—not Susan’s destroyer—but a man to be trusted “with life—to death!” Vincent put up his hands to put away from him that wonderful circle of strangers who shut out everything else in the world—even his own life—from his eyes. What were they to him? he asked, with an unspeakable bitterness in his heart. Heaven help him! they were the real creatures for whom life and the world were made—he and his poor Susan the shadows to be absorbed into, and under them; and then, with a wild, bitter, hopeless rivalry, the mind of the poor Dissenting minister came round once more to the immediate contact in which he stood—to Fordham, in whose name his sister’s life had been shipwrecked, and by whom, as he divined with cruel foresight, his own hopeless love and dreams were to be made an end of. Well! what better could they come to? but it was hard to think of him, with his patrician looks, his negligent grace, his conscious superiority, and to submit to accept assistance from him even in his sorest need. These thoughts were in his mind when Mr. Fordham hastily re-entered the room. A thrill of excitement now was in the long, lightly-falling step, which already Vincent, with the keen ear of rivalry almost as quick as that of love, could recognise as it approached. The stranger was disturbed out of his composure. He shut the door and came up to the young man, who rose to meet him, with a certain excited repugnance and attraction much like Vincent’s own feelings.
“You are quite right,” he said, hastily; “I find letters have been coming here for some months, addressed as if to me, which Mildmay has had. The man of the house is absent, or I should never have heard of it. I don’t know what injury he may have done you; but this is an insult I don’t forgive. Stop! I have every reason to believe that he has gone,” said Fordham, growing darkly red, “to a house of mine, to confirm this slander upon me. To prove that I am innocent of all share of it—I don’t mean to you—you believe me, I presume?” he said, with a haughty sudden pause, looking straight in Vincent’s face—“I will go——” Here Mr. Fordham stopped again, and once more looked at Vincent with that indescribable mixture of curiosity, dislike, resentment, and interest, which the eyes of the young Nonconformist repaid him fully,—“with you—if you choose. At all events, I will go to-night—to Fordham, where the scoundrel is. I cannot permit it to be believed for an hour that it is I who have done this villany. The lady you mentioned, I presume, knows?”—he added, sharply—“knows what has happened, and whom you suspect? This must be set right at once. If you choose, we can go together.”
“Where is the place?” asked Vincent, without any answer to this proposition.
Fordham looked at him with a certain haughty offence: he had made the offer as though it were a very disagreeable expedient, but resented instantly the tacit neglect of it shown by his companion.
“In Northumberland—seven miles from the railway,” he said, with a kind of gratification. “Once more, I say, you can go with me if you will, which may serve us both. I don’t pretend to be disinterested. My object is to have my reputation clear of this, at all events. Your object, I presume, is to get to your journey’s end as early as may be. Choose for yourself. Fordham is between Durham and Morpeth—seven miles from Lamington station. You will find difficulty in getting there by yourself, and still greater difficulty in getting admission; and I repeat, if you choose it, you can go with me—or I will accompany you, if that pleases you better. Either way, there is little time to consider. The train goes at eight or nine o’clock—I forget which. I have not dined. What shall you do?”
“Thank you,” said Vincent. It was perhaps a greater effort to him to overcome his involuntary repugnance than it was to the stranger beside him, who had all the superior ease of superior rank and age. The Nonconformist turned away his eyes from his new companion, and made a pretence of consulting his watch. “I will take advantage of your offer,” he said, coldly, withdrawing a step with instinctive reserve. On these diplomatic terms their engagement was made. Vincent declined to share the dinner which the other offered him, as one duellist might offer hospitality to another. He drove away in his hansom, with a restrained gravity of excitement, intent upon the hour’s rest and the meal which were essential to make him anything like a match for this unexpected travelling companion. Every morsel he attempted to swallow when in Carlingford under his mother’s anxious eyes, choked the excited young man, but now he ate with a certain stern appetite, and even snatched an hour’s sleep and changed his dress, under this novel stimulant. Poor Susan, for whom her mother sat hopelessly watching with many a thrill of agony at home! Poor lost one, far away in the depths of the strange country in the night and darkness! Whether despair and horror enveloped her, or delirious false happiness and delusion, again she stood secondary even in her brother’s thoughts. He tried to imagine it was she who occupied his mind, and wrote a hurried note to his mother to that purport; but with guilt and self-disgust, knew in his own mind how often another shadow stood between him and his lost sister—a shadow bitterly veiled from him, turning its sweetness and its smiles upon the man who was about to help him, against whom he gnashed his teeth in the anguish of his heart.
CHAPTER XX.
THEY were but these two in the railway-carriage; no other passenger broke the silent conflict of their companionship. They sat in opposite corners, as far apart as their space would permit, but on opposite sides of the carriage as well, so that one could not move without betraying his every movement to the other’s keen observation. Each of them kept possession of a window, out of which he gazed into the visible blackness of the winter night. Two or three times in the course of the long darksome chilly journey, a laconic remark was made by one or the other with a deadly steadiness, and gravity, and facing of each other, as they spoke; but no further intercourse took place between them. When they first met, Fordham had made an attempt to draw his fellow-traveller into some repetition of that first passionate speech which had secured his own attention to Vincent; but the young Nonconformist perceived the attempt, and resented it with sullen offence and gloom. He took the stranger’s indifference to his trouble, and undisguised and simple purpose of acquitting himself, as somehow an affront, though he could not have explained how it was so; and this notwithstanding his own consciousness of realising this silent conflict and rivalry with Fordham, even more deeply in his own person than he did the special misery which had befallen his house. Through the sullen silent midnight the train dashed on, the faint light flickering in the unsteady carriage, the two speechless figures, with eyes averted, watching each other through all the ice-cold hours. It was morning when they got out, cramped and frozen, at the little station, round which miles and miles of darkness, a black unfathomable ocean, seemed to lie—and which shone there with its little red sparkle of light among its wild waste of moors like the one touch of human life in a desert. They had a dreary hour to wait in the little wooden room by the stifling fire, divided between the smothering atmosphere within and the thrilling cold without, before a conveyance could be procured for them, in which they set out shivering over the seven darkling miles between them and Fordham. Vincent stood apart in elaborate indifference and carelessness, when the squire was recognised and done homage to; and Fordham’s eye, even while lighted up by the astonished delight of the welcome given him by the driver of the vehicle who first found him out, turned instinctively to the Mordecai in the corner who took no heed. No conversation between them diversified the black road along which they drove. Mr. Fordham took refuge in the driver, whom he asked all those questions about the people of the neighbourhood which are so interesting to the inhabitants of a district and so wearisome to strangers. Vincent, who sat in the dog-cart with his face turned the other way, suffered himself to be carried through the darkness by the powerful horse, which made his own seat a somewhat perilous one, with nothing so decided in his thoughts as a dumb sense of opposition and resistance. The general misery of his mind and body—the sense that all the firmament around him was black as this sky—the restless wretchedness that oppressed his heart—all concentrated into conscious rebellion and enmity. He seemed to himself at war, not only with Mr. Fordham who was helping him, but with God and life.
Morning was breaking when they reached the house. The previous day, as it dawned chilly over the world, had revealed his mother’s ashy face to Vincent as they came up from Lonsdale with sickening thrills of hope that Susan might still be found unharmed. Here was another horror of a new day rising, the third since Susan disappeared into that darkness which was now lifting in shuddering mists from the bleak country round. Was she here in her shame, the lost creature? As he began to ask himself that question, what cruel spirit was it that drew aside a veil of years, and showed to the unhappy brother that prettiest dancing figure, all smiles and sunshine, sweet honour and hope? Poor lost child! what sweet eyes, lost in an unfathomable light of joy and confidence—what truthful looks, which feared no evil! Just as they came in sight of that hidden house, where perhaps the hidden, stolen creature lay in the darkness, the brightest picture flashed back upon Vincent’s eyes with an indescribably subtle anguish of contrast; how he had come up to her once—the frank, fair Saxon girl—in the midst of a group of gypsies—how he found she had done a service to one of them, and the whole tribe did homage—how he had asked, “Were you not afraid, Susan?” and how the girl had looked up at him with undoubting eyes, and answered, “Afraid, Arthur?—yes, of wild beasts if I saw them, not of men and women.” Oh Heaven!—and here he was going to find her in shame and ruin, hidden away in this secret place! He sprang to the ground before the vehicle had stopped, jarring his frozen limbs. He could not bear to be second now, and follow to the dread discovery which should be his alone. He rushed through the shrubbery without asking any question, and began to knock violently at the door. What did it matter to him though its master was there, looking on with folded arms and unsympathetic face? Natural love rushed back upon the young man’s heart. He settled with himself, as he stood waiting, how he would wrap her in his coat, and hurry her away without letting any cold eye fall upon the lost creature. Oh, hard and cruel fate! oh, wonderful heart-breaking indifference of Heaven! The Innocents are murdered, and God looks on like a man, and does not interfere. Such were the broken thoughts of misery—half-thought, half-recollection—that ran through Vincent’s mind as he knocked at the echoing door.
“Eugh! you may knock, and better knock, and I’se undertake none comes at the ca’,” said the driver, not without a little complacence. “I tell the Squire, as there han’t been man nor woman here for ages; but he don’t believe me. She’s deaf as a post, is the housekeeper; and her daughter, she’s more to do nor hear when folks is wanting in—and this hour in the morning! But canny, canny, man! he’ll have the door staved in if we all stand by and the Squire don’t interfere.”