“I am going to make a very singular request to-day,” said Tom one afternoon, when he called to see the ladies as usual. “It is to ask you to give up these very comfortable rooms and transfer yourselves and baggage to Alder Cottage, a pleasant little furnished house, not more than half a mile from here, which just now happens to be to let.”
“But my dear Mr. Bristow—” began Mrs. Garside.
“One moment, my dear Mrs. Garside,” interrupted Tom. “I have another request to make: that you will not at present ask me my reasons for counselling this removal. You shall have them in a week or ten days without asking. Can you trust me till then?”
“Implicitly,” answered Edith, with fervour. “When may we go and view our new home?”
“Now—to-morrow—any time. Only take the cottage, and don’t be more than a week before you are installed there.”
They were installed there in less than a week, despite Mrs. Garside’s mild protestations that she couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why that strange Mr. Bristow should want them to give up their comfortable apartments for a dull old house that looked for all the world as if it were haunted, and was built in such an out-of-the way place that to live there was really very little better than being buried alive. But Edith’s faith in Tom was not to be shaken. She felt sure that he would not have asked them to take up their quarters in Alder Cottage without having good reasons for proposing such a removal. What those reasons were she was naturally somewhat anxious to know, but she hid her impatience from Tom, and waited with smiling resignation till it should please him to tell her the secret which she felt sure was lying perdu in his brain. That there was a secret she could not doubt, because Tom had stipulated that she should not even hint to Lionel that the change of residence had been instigated by him.
Tom was not at all like his usual self about this time. He was restless and uneasy, and seemed to have lost all relish for the ordinary avocations of his everyday life. There were days when he seemed as if he would give anything to get away from the company of his own thoughts, when he would hunt up some acquaintances of former years, whom he would invite to his rooms, and keep there with pressing hospitality till far into the small hours of morning. At other times he would lie on the sofa for hours together, brooding in darkness and solitude; and his landlady, going in about midnight with a light, would find him lying there, broad awake, with a look in his eyes which told her that his thoughts were far away.
Strange to say, the person whom Tom Bristow most frequently invited to his rooms was Jabez Creede, Mr. Hoskyns’ dissipated clerk. As already stated, Tom had known Creede when he himself was a youth in the same office, but the two men were so dissimilar in every respect that that of itself did not seem sufficient to account for the intimacy which now existed between them—an intimacy which was evidently of Tom’s own seeking.
Creede, whose life seemed to be one chronic round of debt and dissipation, would have been friendly with anybody who would have used him as Tom used him—who would have played cribbage with him so badly that he, Creede, always rose from the table a winner; and who would have treated him to unlimited supplies of tobacco, and innumerable glasses of Irish whiskey, hot and strong.
Tom would never allow Creede to leave his rooms till he was intoxicated, not that the latter ever seemed particularly anxious to go before that happy consummation was arrived at. But Tom was so abstemious a mortal himself that the fact of his encouraging Creede to drink to excess was somewhat singular. “What a beast the fellow is!” he muttered, as he watched Creede go staggering down the street after one of their evenings together. “But he will answer my purpose better than any one else I could have chosen.”