“You speak as if you had a personal animosity,” said Desrolles. “I could understand the detectives being savage with him, for he has led them a pretty dance, and they have been held up to ridicule for their failure in catching him. But why you—a gentleman living at ease here—should feel thus strongly—”
“I have my reasons,” said Edward.
“Well, I’ll wish you good night. It’s getting late, and I suppose the George is an early house. Au revoir, Mr. Clare. By the way, when you told me your name just now I forgot to ask you how you came to be so familiar with mine.”
“I saw it in the newspapers, in the report of the inquest on Madame Chicot.”
“True. I had told you that I was Jack Chicot’s fellow-lodger. I had forgotten that. Good night.”
“You are still living in Cibber Street, I suppose?”
“No, the house became hateful to me after that terrible event. Mrs. Evitt lost both her lodgers. Mrs. Rawber, the tragedienne, moved two doors off. My address is at the Poste Restante all over Europe. But for the next week or so I may be found at Paris.”
“Good night,” said Edward. “I must come downstairs and let you out. My people ought to be home by this time, and perhaps you may not care to meet them.”
“It is indifferent to me,” Desrolles answered, loftily.
They did not encounter the Vicar or his wife on the stairs. The children’s party had been kept up till the desperate hour of half-past ten, and Mr. and Mrs. Clare were now on their road home, leaving Celia behind them to spend Christmas Day with the Trevertons.
XXVIII
Edward Clare Goes on a Voyage of Discovery
To sit besides a man’s hearth, drink his wine, shoot his pheasants and ride his horses, would in a savage community be incompatible with the endurance of a deadly hatred against that man. The thoroughbred savage hates only his enemy and the intruding stranger. Mr. Stanley tells us that if he could once get close enough to a tribe to hold a parley with them, he and his followers were safe. The difficulty was that they had to encounter a shower of arrows before they could get within range for conversation. When the noble African found that the explorer meant kindly, he no longer thirsted for the white man’s blood. His savagery for the most part meant self-defence.
The ways of civilisation are not as the ways of the desert. There are men and women whose animosity is not to be appeased by kindness—who will take all they can get from a man, and go on detesting him cordially to the end. Edward Clare, the sleek, white-handed poet, possessed this constancy in hatred. John Treverton had done him no direct injury; for the poet’s love for Laura, had never been strong enough to outweigh prudence. He had wanted Laura and Hazlehurst Manor: not Laura with her modest income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. He was angry with fate and Jasper Treverton for the will which had made Laura’s wealth dependent on her marriage with the heir: he hated John Treverton for the good fortune which had fallen into his lap. And this hatred wore such a noble aspect in the man’s own mind. It was no base envy of another’s prosperity; it was not even jealous anger against a rival, Edward told himself. No, it was a chivalrous ardour in the defence of the woman he had loved; it was a generous desire to serve her which urged him to pluck the mask from this smooth hypocrite’s face. If this man was indeed, as Edward believed, the husband of Zaïre Chicot, the dancer, then his marriage with Laura was no marriage, and the conditions of the will had not been fulfilled. The estate, the possession of which could only be secured by a legal marriage within the year following Jasper Treverton’s death, had been obtained by an audacious fraud.
Was this great wrong to pass undetected and unpunished? Was Laura, whose love had been so easily won by this scoundrel, to go on blindly trusting him; until some day an accident should reveal his infamy and her dishonour? No, Edward believed that it was his duty to let in the light upon this iniquitous secret; and he determined to leave no stone unturned in the fulfilment of his mission.
This fellow Desrolles was evidently a creature of John Treverton’s. His denial of the identity between the two men went for nothing in Edward’s mind. There must be plenty of people in the neighbourhood of Cibber Street able to identify the missing Chicot, if they could only be brought face to face with him.
“I wonder you and Mrs. Treverton have not been photographed since your marriage,” Edward said, one afternoon in the Christmas week, when John Treverton was well enough to join the kettledrum party in the book-room, and they four, Mr. and Mrs. Treverton, Celia, and Edward, were sitting round a glorious fire.
He had been looking over a volume of photographs by the light of the blazing wood, so the question seemed natural enough.
“Ah, by the by, Jack, I really must have you photographed,” said Laura, gaily. “Lady Barker was very particular in her request for our photographs the other day. She has a very fine collection, she tells me.
“About a hundred and fifty of her bosom friends, I suppose,” retorted John Treverton, “all simpering in the highest style of art, and trying to look unconscious of the photographer’s iron collar gripping them by the scruff of the neck. No, Laura, I am not going to let the sun make a correct map of my wrinkles in order that I may join the simperers in Lady Barker’s photograph album, that fashionable refuge for the destitute in brains, after a drill dinner.”
“Do you mean to say that you have never been photographed?” asked Edward.
“No, I do not.
