“You spoke of a lady—Lady Western, I think. As it was you yourself who sought this interview, I may be pardoned if I stumble on a painful subject,” he said, with some bitterness. “I presume you know that lady by your tone—was it she who sent you to me? No? Then I confess your appeal to a total stranger seems to me singular, to say the least of it. Where is your proof that Colonel Mildmay has used my name?”
“Proof is unnecessary,” said Vincent, firing with kindred resentment; “I have told you the fact, but I do not press my appeal, though it was made to your honour. Pardon me for intruding on you so long. I have now no time to lose.”
He turned away, stung in his hasty youthfulness by the appearance of contempt. He would condescend to ask no farther. When he was once more outside the parlour, he held up the half-sovereign, which he had kept ready in his hand, to the slovenly fellow in the striped jacket. “Twice as much if you will tell where Colonel Mildmay is gone,” he said, hurriedly. The man winked and nodded and pointed outside, but before Vincent could leave the room a hasty summons came from the parlour which he had just left. Then Mr. Fordham appeared at the door.
“If you will wait I will make what inquiries I can,” said the stranger, with distant courtesy and seriousness. “Excuse me—I was taken by surprise: but if you have suffered injury under my name, it is my business to vindicate myself. Come in. If you will take my advice, you will rest and refresh yourself before you pursue a man with all his wits about him. Wait for me here and I will bring you what information I can. You don’t suppose I mean to play you false?” he added, with prompt irritation, seeing that Vincent hesitated and did not at once return to the room. It was no relenting of heart that moved him to make this offer. It was with no softening of feeling that the young Nonconformist went back again and accepted it. They met like enemies, each on his honour. Mr. Fordham hastened out to acquit himself of that obligation. Vincent threw himself into a chair, and waited for the result.
It was the first moment of rest and quiet he had known since the morning of the previous day, when he and his mother, alarmed but comparatively calm, had gone to see Mrs. Hilyard, who was now, like himself, wandering, with superior knowledge and more desperate passion, on the same track. To sit in this house in the suspicious silence, hearing the distant thrill of voices which might guide or foil him in his search; to think who it was whom he had engaged to help him in his terrible mission; to go over again in distracted gleams and snatches the brief little circle of time which had brought all this about, the group of figures into which his life had been absorbed—rapt the young man into a maze of excited musing, which his exhausted frame at once dulled and intensified. They seemed to stand round him, with their faces so new, yet so familiar—that needlewoman with her emphatic mouth—Mildmay—Lady Western—last of all, this man, who was not Susan’s lover—not Susan’s destroyer—but a man to be trusted “with life—to death!” Vincent put up his hands to put away from him that wonderful circle of strangers who shut out everything else in the world—even his own life—from his eyes. What were they to him? he asked, with an unspeakable bitterness in his heart. Heaven help him! they were the real creatures for whom life and the world were made—he and his poor Susan the shadows to be absorbed into, and under them; and then, with a wild, bitter, hopeless rivalry, the mind of the poor Dissenting minister came round once more to the immediate contact in which he stood—to Fordham, in whose name his sister’s life had been shipwrecked, and by whom, as he divined with cruel foresight, his own hopeless love and dreams were to be made an end of. Well! what better could they come to? but it was hard to think of him, with his patrician looks, his negligent grace, his conscious superiority, and to submit to accept assistance from him even in his sorest need. These thoughts were in his mind when Mr. Fordham hastily re-entered the room. A thrill of excitement now was in the long, lightly-falling step, which already Vincent, with the keen ear of rivalry almost as quick as that of love, could recognise as it approached. The stranger was disturbed out of his composure. He shut the door and came up to the young man, who rose to meet him, with a certain excited repugnance and attraction much like Vincent’s own feelings.
“You are quite right,” he said, hastily; “I find letters have been coming here for some months, addressed as if to me, which Mildmay has had. The man of the house is absent, or I should never have heard of it. I don’t know what injury he may have done you; but this is an insult I don’t forgive. Stop! I have every reason to believe that he has gone,” said Fordham, growing darkly red, “to a house of mine, to confirm this slander upon me. To prove that I am innocent of all share of it—I don’t mean to you—you believe me, I presume?” he said, with a haughty sudden pause, looking straight in Vincent’s face—“I will go—” Here Mr. Fordham stopped again, and once more looked at Vincent
