“I have just returned from Australia.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the coachman, looking staggered; “that’s a good vays off ain’t it?”
“The other side of the world.”
“Gor bless me! A queer place, I’ve heerd. Full of conwicks. One of our guards was sent out there t’other day for abstracting of money from a wallis.”
This reference operating upon his sympathies, he entered into a story, as long as a newspaper account, of the trial; “how beautiful the counsill as hadvocated the pore fellow spoke, vich the court vos crowded vith coachmen, who groaned venhever the hadvocate as vos opposed to the guard began to speak, vich behaviour, though it warn’t p’raps quite correck, vasn’t to be stopped nohows, although the judge looks werry fierce, and the counsill kep’ on sayin’, ‘My lud, if this here noise ain’t stopped, I’ll throw the case up,’ vich was just the thing the coachmen vanted” (here he made as though he would poke Holdsworth in the ribs with the butt-end of his whip); “but, lor’ save yer, it was no go.”
Holdsworth paid no attention to this story, his mind being engaged in a desperate struggle with memory. Indeed, the word “Southbourne” had affected him as no other allusion had. Pale, dim phantoms of memory, comparable to nothing so much as the phosphorescent outlines which the eye may mark fluctuating in the black sea-water, rose and sank in his mind; and though whispering nothing to his breathless anxiety, clearly proving that the faculty which he had long believed dead was beginning to stir and awaken.
One by one the towns and villages named by the coachman had been passed, and now Southbourne was to come.
An indescribable anxiety, at once breathless and thrilling, suspending, it seemed to him, the very pulsations of his heart, making his breath come and go in quick, fierce respirations, possessed Holdsworth.
He held his hands tightly clasped; all colour had fled from his face, and his deep-sunk eyes glowed with unnatural fire.
Repeatedly he muttered to himself, “What does this portend?”