“You are raving,” said the stranger, keeping his awakened eyes fixed upon Vincent; “but this is easily settled. I returned from the East only yesterday. I don’t know you. What was that you said about Lady—Lady—what lady? Come in: and my name?—my name has been unheard in this country, so far as I know, for ten years. Lady—?—come in and explain what you mean.”
The two stood together confronting each other in the little parlour of the house, where the striped jacket quickly and humbly lighted the gas. Vincent’s face, haggard with misery and want of rest, looked wild in that sudden light. The stranger stood opposite him, leaning forward with a strange eagerness and inquiry. He did not care for Vincent’s anxiety, who was a stranger to him; he cared only to hear again that name—Lady—? He had heard it already, or he would have been less curious; he wanted to understand this wonderful message wafted to him out of his old life. What did it matter to Herbert Fordham, used to the danger of the deserts and mountains, whether it was a maniac who brought this chance seed of a new existence to his wondering heart?
“A man called Fordham has gone into my mother’s house,” said Vincent, fixing his eyes upon those keen but visionary orbs which were fixed on him—“and won the love of my sister. She wrote to him here—to this house; yesterday he carried her away, to her shame and destruction. Answer me,” cried the young man, making another fierce step forward, growing hoarse with passion, and clenching his hands in involuntary rage—“was it you?”
“There are other men called Fordham in existence besides me,” cried the stranger, with a little irritation; then seizing his loose coat by its pockets, he shook out, with a sudden impatient motion, a cloud of letters from these receptacles. “Because you seem in great excitement and distress, and yet are not, as far as I can judge,” said Mr. Fordham, with another glance at Vincent, “mad, I will take pains to satisfy you. Look at my letters; their dates and postmarks will convince you that what you say is simply impossible, for that I was not here.”
Vincent clutched and took them up with a certain blind eagerness, not knowing what he did. He did not look at them to satisfy himself that what Fordham said was true. A wild, half-conscious idea that there must be something in them about Susan possessed him; he saw neither dates nor postmark, though he held them up to the light, as if they were proofs of something. “No,” he said at last, “it was not you—it was that fiend Mildmay, Rachel Russell’s husband. Where is he? he has taken your name, and made you responsible for his devilish deeds. Help me, if you are a Christian! My sister is in his hands, curse him! Help me, for the sake of your name, to find them out. I am a stranger, and they will give me no information; but they will tell you. For God’s sake, ask and let me go after them. If ever you were beholden to the help of Christian men, help me! for it is life and death!”
“Mildmay! Rachel Russell’s husband? under my name?” said Mr. Fordham, slowly. “I have been beholden to Christian men, and that for very life. You make a strong appeal: who are you that are so desperate? and what was that you said?”
“I am Susan Vincent’s brother,” said the young Nonconformist; “that is enough. This devil has taken your name; help me, for heaven’s sake, to find him out!”
“Mildmay?—devil? yes, he is a devil! you are right enough: I owe him no love,” said Fordham; then he paused and turned away, as if in momentary perplexity. “To help that villain to his reward would be a man’s duty; but,” said the stranger, with a heavy sigh, upon which his words came involuntarily, spoken to himself, breathing out of his heart—“he is her brother, devil though he is!”
“Yes!” cried Vincent, with passion, “he is her brother.” When he had said the words, the young man groaned aloud. Partly he forgot that this man, who looked upon him with so much curiosity, was the man who had brought tears and trembling to Her; partly he remembered it, and forgot his jealousy for the moment in a bitter sense of fellow-feeling. In his heart he could see her, waving her hand to him out of her passing carriage, with that smile for which he would have risked his life. Oh, hideous fate! it was her brother whom he was bound to pursue to the end of the world. He buried his face in his hands, in a momentary madness of anguish and passion. Susan floated away like a mist from that burning personal horizon. The love and the despair were too much for Vincent. The hope that had always been impossible was frantic now. When he recovered himself, the stranger whom he had thus unawares taken into his confidence was regarding him haughtily from the other side of the table, with a fiery light in his thoughtful eyes. Suspicion, jealousy, resentment, had begun to sparkle in those orbs, which in repose looked so far away and lay so calm. Mr. Fordham measured the haggard and worn-out young man with a look of rising dislike and animosity. He was at least ten years older than the young Nonconformist, who stood there in his wretchedness and exhaustion entirely at disadvantage, looking, in his half-clerical dress, which he had not changed for four-and-twenty hours, as different as can be conceived from the scrupulously dressed gentleman in his easy morning habiliments, which would not have been out of place in the rudest scene,
