He knew perfectly well,—but I understood the mental attitude which induced him to prefer that the information should seem to come from me.
‘I hope that it will prove to be Miss Lindon.’
‘Hope!’ He gave a sort of gasp.
‘Yes, hope,—because if it is I think it possible, nay probable, that within a few hours you will have her again enfolded in your arms.’
‘Pray God that it may be so! pray God!—pray the good God!’
I did not dare to look round for, from the tremor which was in his tone, I was persuaded that in the speaker’s eyes were tears. Atherton continued silent. He was leaning half out of the cab, staring straight ahead, as if he saw in front a young girl’s face, from which he could not remove his glance, and which beckoned him on.
After a while Lessingham spoke again, as if half to himself and half to me.
‘This mention of the shrieks on the railway, and of the wailing noise in the cab,—what must this wretch have done to her? How my darling must have suffered!’
That was a theme on which I myself scarcely ventured to allow my thoughts to rest. The notion of a gently-nurtured girl being at the mercy of that fiend incarnate, possessed—as I believed that so-called Arab to be possessed—of all the paraphernalia of horror and of dread, was one which caused me tangible shrinkings of the body. Whence had come those shrieks and yells, of which the writer of the report spoke, which had caused the Arab’s fellow-passengers to think that murder was being done? What unimaginable agony had caused them? what speechless torture? And the ‘wailing noise,’ which had induced the prosaic, indurated London cabman to get twice off his box to see what was the matter, what anguish had been provocative of that? The helpless girl who had already endured so much, endured, perhaps, that to which death would have been preferred!—shut up in that rattling, jolting box on wheels, alone with that diabolical Asiatic, with the enormous bundle, which was but the lurking place of nameless terrors,—what might she not, while being borne through the heart of civilised London, have been made to suffer? What had she not been made to suffer to have kept up that continued ‘wailing noise’?
It was not a theme on which it was wise to permit one’s thoughts to linger,—and particularly was it clear that it was one from which Lessingham’s thoughts should have been kept as far as possible away.