Lotte had managed well. She had no debts, so it was not likely that there would be any active inquiries after her when she had left. Her late landlady, who liked all her lodgers to be the patterns of prudence and quietude, was not, after the two appearances of Mr. Bantom, altogether disturbed at losing the two young girls, especially as they had from the first declined her advances, repudiated her familiarity, and had at no time been seduced by her into the sin of gossiping.
She knew nothing about their private affairs, from first to last; she, therefore, did not trouble herself to inquire whither they were going, or why they had left her house. She wished, if anything, for inquirers, if there happened to be any, to conclude that she had herself given them warning.
Lotte wrote a note to her brother Charley, informing him that she had quitted her apartments, but that she had, at present, a motive for concealing the locality to which she had moved. She added, that in due time he would know the occasion for the mystery surrounding her movements; and she called upon him to have the same strong faith in her truth and virtue which he had hitherto entertained, and to which she felt she was, and always would be, justly entitled. She appended a postscript—that of course—it was affectionate, heartily loving in fact, but it was worded so mysteriously as to cause him the pain of forming some horrible surmises and conjectures, and it carried him post-haste to the abandoned residence. But he could learn only that she, together with her companion, her bird, and her flowers, had left the house, without leaving any clue even to the direction which she had taken.
After racking his brain for a motive for his sister’s strange conduct, or a suggestion which might help him to trace her out, it occurred to him that Harry Vivian might be able to furnish him with some intelligence respecting her inexplicable flight.
Lotte, in fervent language, had acquainted him with the services Hal had rendered her in the perilous moment when Wilton’s house was in flames, as well as later, when he suddenly met with her and saved her from destruction.
Charley was quite aware also, from subsequent circumstances, that Vivian had expressed a friendly anxiety for Lotte’s future welfare, and had betrayed an interest in her well being and doing since she had been at her late abode; it was not improbable that, on comparing notes with him, Vivian might be able to bring to light some matter which would enable the brother to follow and to find his sister, and to obtain from her some better reasons for her remarkable conduct than her note to him contained.
The premises at Clerkenwell were closed, and he made his way to Highbury.
Strange events still.
Mr. Harper’s son, the absent and unregretted, had returned home. A wild profligate and outcast he was in years gone by, when he quitted in ignominious flight his father’s roof and the land that gave him birth. He returned a ragged, dirty, discharged soldier from the East India Company’s service—discharged, too, in disgrace.
His sudden appearance, sufficiently in liquor to be brutish in his conduct, his demand to be received, and to make his father’s house his home—a drunken mad orgie on the night of his return, when valuable glass, pictures, ornaments, were wantonly and recklessly destroyed, produced in Mr. Harper a fit of apoplexy, and in two hours he was a corpse.