very quiet and unfrequented, ordered some brandy and cold water of a girl who was seated at work behind the bar, and then went into the parlour — a low-ceilinged, wainscoted room, whose walls were adorned here and there with auctioneers’ announcements of coming sales of live and dead stock, farm-houses, and farming implements, interspersed with railway time-tables.
Mr. Joseph Wilmot had this room all to himself. He seated himself by the open window, took up a country newspaper, and tried to read.
But that attempt was a most dismal failure. In the first place, there was very little in the paper to read: and in the second, Joseph Wilmot would have been unable to chain his attention to the page upon which his eyes were fixed, though all the wisdom of the world had been concentrated upon that one sheet of printed paper.
No; he could not read. He could only think. He could only think of this strange chance which had come to him after five-and-thirty weary years. He could only think of his probable meeting with Henry Dunbar.
He entered the village public-house at a little after one, and he stayed there throughout the rest of the day, drinking brandy-and-water — not immoderately: he was very careful and watchful of himself in that matter — taking a snack of bread and cold meat for his dinner, and thinking of Henry Dunbar.
In that he never varied, let him do what he would.
In the railway carriage, at the Basingstoke inn, at the station, through the long sleepless night at the public-house by the water, in the tailor’s shop, even when he was most occupied by the choice of his clothes, he had still thought of Henry Dunbar. From the time of his meeting the old clerk at the Waterloo terminus, he had never ceased to think of Henry Dunbar.
He never once thought of his brother: not so much even as to wonder whether the stroke had been fatal — whether the old man was yet dead. He never thought of his daughter, or the anguish his prolonged absence might cause her to suffer.
He had put away the past as if it had never been, and concentrated all the force of his mind upon the one idea which possessed him like some strong demon.
Sometimes a sudden terror seized him.
What if Henry Dunbar should have died upon the passage home? What if the Electra should bring nothing but a sealed leaden coffin, and a corpse embalmed in spirit?
No, he could not imagine that! Fate, darkly brooding over these two men throughout half a long lifetime, had held them asunder for five-and-thirty years, to fling them mysteriously together now.
It seemed as if the old clerk’s philosophy was not so very unsound, after all. Sooner or later — sooner or later — the day of retribution comes.
When it grew dusk, Joseph Wilmot left the little inn, and walked back to Southampton. It was quite dark when he entered the High Street, and the tailor’s shop was closing.
“I thought you’d forgotten your parcel, sir,” the man said; “I’ve had it ready for you ever so long. Can I send it any where for you?”
“No, thank you; I’ll take it myself.”
With the brown-paper parcel — which was a very bulky one — under his arm, Joseph Wilmot left the tailor’s shop, and walked down to an open pier or quay abutting on the water.
On his way along the river shore, between the village public-house and the town of Southampton, he had filled his pockets with stones. He knelt down now by the edge of the pier, and tied all these stones together in an old cotton pocket-handkerchief.
When he had done this, carefully, compactly, and quickly, like a man accustomed to do all sorts of strange things, he tied the handkerchief full of stones to the whipcord that bound the brown-paper parcel, and dropped both packages into the water.
The spot which he had chosen for this purpose was at the extreme end of the pier, where the water was deepest.
He had done all this cautiously, taking care to make sure every now and then that he was unobserved.
And when the parcel had sunk, he watched the widening circle upon the surface of the water till it died away.
“So much for James Wentworth, and the clothes he wore,” he said to himself as he walked away.
He slept that night at the village inn where he had spent the day, and the next morning walked into Southampton.
It was a little after nine o’clock when he entered the docks, and the Electra was visible to the naked eye, steaming through the blue water under a cloudless summer sky.
Chapter 6
Clement Austin’s Diary.
“To-day I close a volume of the rough, careless, imperfect record which I have kept of my life. As I run my fingers through the pages of the limp morocco-covered volume, I almost wonder at my wasted labour; — the random notes, jotted down now and then, sometimes with long intervals between their dates, make such a mass of worthless literature. This diary-keeping is a very foolish habit, after all. Why do I keep this record of a most commonplace existence? For my own edification and improvement? Scarcely, since I very rarely read these uninteresting entries; and I very much doubt if posterity will care to know that I went to the office at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning; that I couldn’t get a seat in the omnibus, and was compelled to take a Hansom, which cost me two shillings; that I dined tête-à-tête with my mother, and finished the third volume of Carlyle’s ‘French Revolution’ in the course of the evening. Is there any use in such a journal as mine? Will the celebrated New Zealander, that is to be, discover the volumes amidst the ruins of Clapham? and shall I be quoted as the Pepys of the nineteenth century? But then I am by no means as racy as that worldly-minded little government clerk; or perhaps it may be that the time in which I live wants the spice and seasoning of that golden age of rascality in which my Lady Castlemain’s white petticoats were to be seen flaunting in the wind by any frivolous-minded lounger who chose to take notes about those garments.
“After all, it is a silly, old-fogeyish habit, this of diary-keeping; and I think the renowned Pepys himself was only a bachelor spoiled. Just now, however, I have something more than cab-drives, lost omnibuses, and the perusal of a favourite book to jot down, inasmuch as my mother and myself have lately had all our accustomed habits, in a manner, disorganized by the advent of a lady.
“She is a very young lady, being, in point of fact, still at a remote distance from an epoch to which she appears to look forward as a grand and enviable period of existence. She has not yet entered what she calls her ‘teens,’ and two years must elapse before she can enter them, as she is only eleven years old. She is the only daughter of my only sister, Marian Lester, and has been newly imported from Sydney, where my sister Marian and her husband have been settled for the last twelve years. Miss Elizabeth Lester became a member of our family upon the first of July, and has since that time continued to make herself quite at home with my mother and myself. She is rather a pretty little girl, with very auburn plaits hanging in loops at the back of her head. (Will the New Zealander and his countrymen care to know the mysteries of juvenile coiffures in the nineteenth century?) She is a very good little girl, and my mother adores her. As for myself, I am only gradually growing resigned to the fact that I am three-and-thirty years of age, and the uncle of a bouncing niece, who plays variations upon ‘Non più mesta.’
“And ‘Non più mesta’ brings me to another strange figure in the narrow circle of my acquaintance; a figure that had no place in the volume which I have just closed, but which, in the six weeks’ interval between my last record and that which I begin to-day, has become almost as familiar as the oldest friends of my youth. ‘Non più mesta’— I hear my niece strumming the notes I know so well in the parlour below my room, as I write these lines, and the sound of the melody brings before me the image of a sweet pale face and dove-like brown eyes.
“I never fully realized the number and extent of feminine requirements