“Well!” he exclaimed, “I have reason to thank her for this important piece of information. She has herself admitted a previous attachment. So far my doubts are cleared up, and I feel perfectly certain that the anonymous information is correct. It now remains for me to find out who the object of this attachment is. I have no doubt that he is in the neighborhood; and, if so, I shall know how to manage him.”
He then mounted his horse, and rode into Ballytrain, with what purpose it is now unnecessary, we trust, to trouble the reader at farther length.
CHAPTER V. Sir Thomas Gourlay fails in unmasking the Stranger
—Mysterious Conduct of Fenton
When Sir Thomas Gourlay, after the delay of better than an hour in town, entered the coffee-room of the “Mitre,” he was immediately attended by the landlord himself.
“Who is this new guest you have got, landlord,” inquired the baronet—“They tell me he is a very mysterious gentleman, and that no one can discover his name. Do! you know anything about him?”
“De'il a syllable, Sir Tammas,” replied the landlord, who was a northern—“How ir you, Counsellor Crackenfudge,” he added, speaking to a person who passed upstairs—“There he goes,” proceeded Jack the landlord—“a nice boy. But do you know, Sir Tammas, why he changed his name to Crackenfudge?”
Sir Thomas's face at this moment, had grown frightful. While the landlord was speaking, the baronet, attracted by the noise of a carriage passing, turned to observe it, just at the moment when his daughter was bowing so significantly to the stranger in the window over them, as we have before stated. Here was a new light thrown upon the mystery or mysteries by which he felt himself surrounded on all hands. The strange guest in the Mitre inn, was then, beyond question, the very individual alluded to in the anonymous letter. The baronet's face had, in the scowl of wrath, got black, as mine host was speaking. This expression, however, gradually diminished in the darkness of that wrathful shadow which lay over it. After a severe internal struggle with his tremendous passions, he at length seemed to cool down. His face became totally changed; and in a few minutes of silence and struggle, it passed from the blackness of almost ungovernable rage to a pallid hue, that might not most aptly be compared to the summit of a volcano covered with snow, when about to project its most awful and formidable eruptions.
The landlord, while putting the question to the baronet, turned his sharp, piercing eyes upon him, and, at a single glance, perceived that something had unusually moved him.