For the second time the steward made no reply. For the second time, Allan answered for him.
“He is a man with a foreign name,” said Allan. “He keeps a Sanitarium near Hampstead. What did you say the place was called, Mr. Bashwood?”
“Fairweather Vale, sir,” said the steward, answering his employer, as a matter of necessity, but answering very unwillingly.
The address of the Sanitarium instantly reminded Midwinter that he had traced his wife to Fairweather Vale Villas the previous night. He began to see light through the darkness, dimly, for the first time. The instinct which comes with emergency, before the slower process of reason can assert itself, brought him at a leap to the conclusion that Mr. Bashwood—who had been certainly acting under his wife’s influence the previous day—might be acting again under his wife’s influence now. He persisted in sifting the steward’s statement, with the conviction growing firmer and firmer in his mind that the statement was a lie, and that his wife was concerned in it.
“Is the major in Norfolk?” he asked, “or is he near his daughter in London?”
“In Norfolk,” said Mr. Bashwood. Having answered Allan’s look of inquiry, instead of Midwinter’s spoken question, in those words, he hesitated, looked Midwinter in the face for the first time, and added, suddenly: “I object, if you please, to be cross-examined, sir. I know what I have told Mr. Armadale, and I know no more.”
The words, and the voice in which they were spoken, were alike at variance with Mr. Bashwood’s usual language and Mr. Bashwood’s usual tone. There was a sullen depression in his face—there was a furtive distrust and dislike in his eyes when they looked at Midwinter, which Midwinter himself now noticed for the first time. Before he could answer the steward’s extraordinary outbreak, Allan interfered.
“Don’t think me impatient,” he said; “but it’s getting late; it’s a long way to Hampstead. I’m afraid the Sanitarium will be shut up.”
Midwinter started. “You are not going to the Sanitarium to-night!” he exclaimed.
Allan took his friend’s hand and wrung it hard. “If you were as fond of her as I am,” he whispered, “you would take no rest, you could get no sleep, till you had seen the doctor, and heard the best and the worst he had to tell you. Poor dear little soul! who knows, if she could only see me alive and well—” The tears came into his eyes, and he turned away his head in silence.