Birds of Prey Part 44

_Nov. 13th_. The above was written late at night, and under the influence of my black dog. What an ill-conditioned cur he is, and how he mouths and mangles the roses that bestrew his pathway, always bent upon finding the worm at the core!

I kicked the brute out of doors this morning, on finding a letter from my dear one lying in my plate. "Avaunt, aroint thee, foul fiend!" I cried. "Thou art the veritable poodle in whose skin Mephistopheles hides when bent on direst mischief. I will set the sign of the cross upon my threshold, and thou shalt enter no more."

This is what I said to myself as I tore open Charlotte's envelope, with its pretty little motto stamped on cream-coloured sealing-wax, "_Pensez a moi._" Ah, love; "while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe." I saw the eyes of my friend Horatio fixed upon me as I opened my letter, and knew that my innermost sentiments were under inspection.

Prudence demands all possible caution where the n.o.ble Captain is concerned. I cannot bring myself to put implicit faith in his account of his business at Ullerton. He may have been there, as he says, on some promoting spec; but our meeting in that town was, to say the least, a strange coincidence, and I am not a believer in coincidences--off the stage, where a gentleman invariably makes his appearance directly his friends begin to talk about him.

I cannot forget my conviction that Jonah Goodge was bought over by a rival investigator, and that Rebecca Haygarth's letters were tampered with; nor can I refrain from connecting that shapely but well-worn lavender glove with the person of my dandy friend, Horatio Paget. The disappearance of a letter from the packet intrusted to me by Miss Judson is another mysterious circ.u.mstance; nor can I do away with the impression that I heard the name Meynell distinctly p.r.o.nounced by Philip Sheldon the last time I was at the villa.

George Sheldon tells me the secret cannot by any possibility have been betrayed, unless by me; and I have been prudence itself.

Supposing my suspicions of Mr. Goodge to be correct, the letters extracted from Mrs. Rebecca's correspondence might tell much, and might even put Horatio on the track of the Meynells. But how should he get his first inkling of the business?

Certainly not from me or from George Sheldon. But might not his attention have been attracted by that advertis.e.m.e.nt for heirs-at-law to the Haygarthian estate which appeared in the _Times_?

These are questions with which the legal intellect of my Sheldon may best grapple. For myself, I can only drift with the resistless stream called life.

I was so unfortunate as to make my appearance in our common sitting-room five minutes after my patron. There had been time enough for him to examine the superscription and postmark of my letter. He was whistling when I went into the room. People who have been looking at things that don't belong to them always whistle.

I did not care to read Charlotte's first letter with those hawk's eyes fixed upon me. So I just glanced at the dear handwriting, as if running over an ordinary letter with the eye of indifference, and then put the doc.u.ment into my pocket with the best a.s.sumption of carelessness I was capable of. How I longed for the end of that tedious meal, over which Captain Paget lingered in his usual epicurean fashion!

My friend Horatio has shown himself not a little curious about my late absence from the joint domicile. I again resorted to the Dorking fiction,--my aged aunt breaking fast, and requiring much propitiation from a dutiful nephew with an eye to her testamentary arrangements. I had been compelled to endow my shadowy relative with a comfortable little bit of money, in order to account for my devotion; since the powerful mind of my Horatio would have refused to grasp the idea of disinterested affection for an ancient kinswoman.

There was an ominous twinkle in the Captain's sharp gray eyes when I gave this account of my absence, and I sorely doubt his acceptance of this second volume of the Dorking romance. Ah, what a life it is we lead in the tents of Ishmael, the cast-away! through what tortuous pathways wander the nomad tribes who call Hagar, the abandoned, their mother! what lies, what evasions, what prevarications! Horatio Paget and I watch each other like two cunning fencers, with a stereotyped smile upon our lips and an eager restlessness in our eyes, and who shall say that one or other of our rapiers is not poisoned, as in the famous duel before Claudius, usurper of Denmark? My dear one's letter is all sweetness and love. She is coming home; and much as she prefers Yorkshire to Bayswater, she is pleased to return for my sake--for my sake. She leaves the pure atmosphere of that simple country home to become the central point in a network of intrigue; and I am bound to keep the secret so closely interwoven with her fate. I love her more truly, more purely than I thought myself capable of loving; yet I can only approach her as the tool of George Sheldon, a rapacious conspirator, bent on securing the h.o.a.rded thousands of old John Haygarth.

Of all men upon this earth I should be the last to underrate the advantages of wealth,--I who have been reared in the gutter, which is Poverty's cradle. Yet I would fain Charlotte's fortune had come to her in any other fashion than as the result of my work in the character of a salaried private inquirer.

BOOK THE SEVENTH.

CHARLOTTE'S ENGAGEMENT.

CHAPTER I.

"IN YOUR PATIENCE YE ARE STRONG."

Miss Halliday returned to the gothic villa at Bayswater with a bloom on her cheeks, and a brightness in her eyes, which surpa.s.sed her wonted bloom and brightness, fair and bright as her beauty had been from the hour in which she was created to charm mankind. She had been a creature to adore even in the first dawn of infancy, and in her christening-hood and toga of white satin had been a being to dream of. But now she seemed invested all at once with a new loveliness--more spiritual, more pensive, than the old.

Might not Valentine have cried, with the rapturous pride of a lover: "Look at the woman here with the new soul!" and anon: "This new soul is mine!"

It was love that had imparted a new charm to Miss Halliday's beauty.

Diana wondered at the subtle change as her friend sat in her favourite window on the morning after her return, looking dreamily out into the blossomless garden, where evergreens of the darkest and spikiest character stood up stern and straight against the cold gray sky. Diana had welcomed her friend in her usual reserved manner, much to Charlotte's discomfiture. The girl so yearned for a confidante. She had no idea of hiding her happiness from this chosen friend, and waited eagerly for the moment in which she could put her arms round Diana's neck and tell her what it was that had made Newhall so sweet to her during this particular visit.

She sat in the window this morning thinking of Valentine, and languishing to speak of him, but at a loss how to begin. There are some people about whose necks the arms of affection can scarce entwine themselves. Diana Paget sat at her eternal embroidery-frame, picking up beads on her needle with the precision of some self-feeding machine.

The little gla.s.s beads made a hard clicking sound as they dropped from her needle,--a very frosty, unpromising sound, as it seemed to Charlotte's hyper-sensitive ear.

There had been an unwonted reserve between the girls since Charlotte's return,--a reserve which arose, on Miss Halliday's part, from the contest between girlish shyness and the eager desire for a confidante; and on the part of Miss Paget, from that gloomy discontent which had of late possessed her.

She watched Charlotte furtively as she picked up her beads--watched her wonderingly, unable to comprehend the happiness that gave such spiritual brightness to her eyes. It was no longer the childlike gaiety of heart which had made Miss Halliday's girlhood so pleasant. It was the thoughtful, serene delight of womanhood.

"She can care very little for Valentine," Diana thought, "or she could scarcely seem so happy after such a long separation. I doubt if these bewitching women who enchant all the world know what it is to feel deeply. Happiness is a habit with this girl. Valentine's attentions were very pleasant to her. The pretty little romance was very agreeable while it lasted; but at the first interruption of the story she shuts the book, and thinks of it no more. O, if my Creator had made _me_ like that! If I could forget the days we spent together, and the dream I dreamt!"

That never-to-be-forgotten vision came back to Diana Paget as she sat at her work; and for a few minutes the clicking sound of the beads ceased, while she waited with clasped hands until the shadows should have pa.s.sed before her eyes. The old dream came back to her like a picture, bright with colour and light. But the airy habitation which she had built for herself of old was no "palace lifting to Italian heavens its marble roof." It was only a commonplace lodging in a street running out of the Strand, with just a peep of the river from a trim little balcony. An airy second-floor sitting-room, with engraved portraits of the great writers on the newly-papered walls: on one side an office-desk, on the other a work-table. The unpretending shelter of a newspaper hack, who lives _a jour la journee_, and whose wife must achieve wonders in the way of domestic economy in order to eke out his modest earnings.

This was Diana Paget's vision of Paradise, and it seemed only the brighter now that she felt it was never to be anything more than a supernal picture painted on her brain.

After sitting silent for some little time, eager to talk, but waiting to be interrogated, Charlotte was fain to break silence.

"You don't ask me whether I enjoyed myself in Yorkshire, Di," she said, looking shyly down at the little bunch of charms and lockets which employed her restless fingers.

"Didn't I, really?" replied Diana, languidly; "I thought that was one of the stereotyped inquiries one always made."

"I hope you wouldn't make stereotyped inquiries of _me_, Diana."

"No, I ought not to do so. But I think there are times when one is artificial even with one's best friends. And you are my best friend, Charlotte. I may as well say my only friend," the girl added, with a laugh.

"Diana," cried Charlotte, reproachfully, "why do you speak so bitterly?

You know how dearly I love you. I do, indeed, dear. There is scarcely anything in this world I would not do for you. But I am not your only friend. There is Mr. Hawkehurst, whom you have known so long."

Miss Halliday's face was in a flame; and although she bent very low to examine the golden absurdities hanging on her watch-chain, she could not conceal her blushes from the eyes that were so sharpened by jealousy.

"Mr. Hawkehurst!" cried Diana, with unspeakable contempt. "If I were drowning, do you think _he_ would stretch out his hand to save me while you were within his sight? When he comes to this house--he who has seen so much poverty, and misery, and shame, and--happiness with me and mine--do you think he so much as remembers my existence? Do you think he ever stops to consider whether I am that Diana Paget who was once his friend and confidante and fellow-wayfarer and companion? or only a lay figure dressed up to fill a vacant chair in your drawing-room?"

"Diana!"

"It is all very well to look at me reproachfully, Charlotte. You must know that I am speaking the truth. You talk of friendship. What is that word worth if it does not mean care and thought for another? Do you imagine that Valentine Hawkehurst ever thinks of me, or considers me?"

Charlotte was fain to keep silence. She remembered how very rarely, in those long afternoons at Newhall farm, the name of Diana Paget had been mentioned. She remembered how, when she and Valentine were mapping out the future so pleasantly, she had stopped in the midst of an eloquent bit of word-painting, descriptive of the little suburban cottage they were to live in, to dispose of Diana's fate in a sentence,--

"And dear Di can stop at the villa to take care of mamma," she had said; whereupon Mr. Hawkehurst had a.s.sented, with a careless nod, and the description of the ideal cottage had been continued.

Charlotte remembered this now with extreme contrition. She had been so supremely happy, and so selfish in her happiness.

"O, Di," she cried, "how selfish happy people are!" And then she stopped in confusion, perceiving that the remark had little relevance to Diana's last observation.

"Valentine shall be your friend, dear," she said, after a pause.

"O, you are beginning to answer for him already!" exclaimed Miss Paget, with increasing bitterness.

"Diana, why are you so unkind to me?" Charlotte cried, pa.s.sionately.

"Don't you see that I am longing to confide in you? What is it that makes you so bitter? You must know how truly I love you. And if Mr.