I flew to the bed and drew back the curtains.
The bed was empty.
My wife was gone!
Here Clide's journal breaks off. A long gap ensues, and we must fill it up from the recollections of others. The scene that followed the discovery of his young wife's flight was not to be described. First, it was incredulity [pg 744] that filled the old Moat. “Gone! Fled! Nonsense!” protested Admiral de Winton, walking up and down the corridor, where he had rushed out in semi-nocturnal attire when Stanton had burst into his room with the dreadful intelligence. The old sailor was scarcely to be recognized in the déshabillé of his coatless and wigless person, as he blustered loudly, his hands in his pockets, zigzagging to and fro as if he were pacing the quarter-deck and expostulating angrily with a surly crew.
Sir Simon Harness was calmer. He did not contradict his friend's vehement assertion that it was all a trick of Isabel's to terrify us; he even made a show of pooh-poohing the notion of a flight as absurd, ridiculous, not to be entertained for a moment. But there was not that heartiness in his voice or manner that carries conviction to others. Mrs. de Winton also made a semblance of chiming in with the admiral's view, but it was a palpable failure. Mr. Simpson was the only one who did not try to act his part in the kindly comedy. He was fully convinced that it was no comedy, but a most miserable drama that was beginning for the son of his old friend and client. He had mistrusted Isabel from the first moment he fixed his keen, legal vision on her. Mrs. de Winton had, it is true, inoculated him beforehand with a good share of her own mistrust, and he came to the scrutiny with a jaundiced eye; prejudiced, and predetermined not to be fascinated or beguiled out of his severest judgment. He regarded hers as a case of which he was to take a strictly legal view, and which was to be investigated, sifted, and proved before he would endorse it. It was a very odd case on the face of it; but Benjamin Simpson had had many odd cases to deal with in the course of his experience, and he flattered himself he was not to be baffled by a child scarcely out of her teens. She might be very clever, and succeed in hoodwinking a rich young gentleman into marrying her, on the strength of a fictitious story of misery and a still more fictitious one of heiresship; but she was not likely to stand Simpson's cross-examination long without breaking down. Such ungallant reflections as these had been passing through the lawyer's brain while he sipped his claret and watched the fair face that sat opposite to him at the dinner-table, glancing at him with eyes that flashed more brightly than her jewels. He had made up his mind, as he looked at her, that she was a delusion; she would disappear sooner or later. The news of her flight was therefore only a surprise by its suddenness. Clide was rushing all over the basement story, calling out Isabel's name into every room, while Mrs. de Winton and her own and Isabel's maid were pursuing a similar search in the upper part of the house. The rambling old mansion was echoing from end to end with opening and shutting of doors and cries of the fugitive's name; but no answer was heard except the echoes of the voices and the doors.
“My dear boy,” said the admiral, pausing on his imaginary quarterdeck, as Clide came up the stairs, “I'll stake my head on it, the sly little puss is playing a game of hide-and-seek with us, and laughing fit to kill herself in some cupboard or other, while we are kicking up this row; take my word for it, the best thing we can do is to go quietly to our own beds, and before long she'll come out of her hiding-place.”
Clide muttered an impatient “stuff and nonsense!” Was she likely to perish herself such a night as this [pg 745] playing hide-and-seek for their amusement—she that could not bear a breath of cold? Even crossing through a fireless room she would shiver like an aspen. The admiral grunted something about “deserving to be whipped,” and turned to his zigzag promenade again.
Stanton and some of the other men-servants had gone out to scour the park and the gardens; they had been absent now long enough to have discovered something, if there was anything to discover, but the stars made no answer to their calling. “Madame! Mistress!” they shouted, till at last they gave it up, and retraced their steps to the house. Clide had been going to the window in a restless way, looking out into the night, and listening as if he expected to hear the silence send him back some sign. It was impossible to say whether he believed the least bit in the hide-and-seek theory, whether he had a lingering hope of hearing Isabel call out to him or appear from some corner, or whether he was just in that condition of mind that precludes alike sitting still or doing something. He might be excited by hope, or he might be stupefied by despair. He was as white as ashes, and came and went with the quick, unsteady gait of a man who has lost his self-command, and is swayed only by the force of some terrible emotion. Clide's face was a fine, manly one; it would have been noble but for the weakness of the chin and a certain tremulous movement of the lower lip—perhaps of both; for the upper one was shaded by a light-brown moustache that prevented you seeing whether it had the firmness that would have redeemed the lower one. The eyes were expressive, rather sleepy when the face was in repose; but they woke up with flashes of lightning when he was excited, and transfigured the whole countenance into one of energy and power. There was no need to be a physiognomist to judge of the character of such a face. The most unskilled observer could read it like a book. There were all the elements of a stormy life there—passive strength, and passions that needed only a spark to kindle them into a flame; a man who, as he was taken, would be as easily led as a lamb or as intractable as a young hyena. He had started in life with the fixed purpose of steering clear of storms, of saving himself trouble and avoiding fuss. Poor Clide! Life, he fancied, had a lake of oil at the entrance of the wide sea where storms blew and waves roared angrily, and he had made up his mind to anchor in the lake, and never venture beyond its peaceful margin.
The servants had come back—those that had been scouring the park—and the others, who had been slamming doors all through the house, were congregating in twos and threes upon the stairs leading to the broad landing off which their young mistress' room stood, its door wide open, with a dismal, vacant air about it already.