“It is very good of you … both,” she said simply.
They continued dancing for some time before the silence was again broken.
“Some day, Brenda,” whispered Hicks, while preserving with immaculate skill an indifferent face before the world, “I will tell you why I was forced to interfere even at the risk of displeasing you. Some other time, not now.”
A peculiar contraction seemed to pass over her face, and it was only with an effort that she smiled while acknowledging a passing bow from a girl-acquaintance.
Soon afterwards she began talking cheerily on a safer subject; and despite all his experience, all his cleverness, William Hicks could not bring the conversation round again to the topic she had shelved.
Her spirits seemed to rise as the evening progressed. There was a task before her, the dimensions of which were soon apparent. Almost everyone in the room had heard something of Alice, and the only contradiction possible, until Trist and Huston arrived, lay in the brave carriage of a cheerful face before them all.
There was a clock upon the mantelpiece of a small room where refreshments were set forth, and the merits of this secluded retreat were retailed by her to more than one of her partners. The pointers of the dainty timepiece seemed to crawl—once or twice she listened for the beat of the pendulum. Midnight came, and one o’clock. Still there was no sign of Theodore Trist. At two o’clock her chaperon suggested going home, and Brenda was compelled to apologize laughingly to several grumbling young men, who attempted to cut off her retreat at the door.
The spacious hall was full of departing guests; through the open door came the hoarse confusing shouts of policemen and footmen. Brenda pressed her hands together beneath her opera-cloak and shivered.
Theodore Trist never returned, and his absence passed unnoticed by all except William Hicks, who waited till the end.
Volume III
I
The Sport of Fate
Theodore Trist did not attempt to blind himself as to the difficulties attending his strange undertaking, but he was prepared to face them courageously.
“If,” he said to himself, “I can only find him … sober … I will manage the rest.”
Without doubt this silent man was ready to speak at last—to tear aside the veil of reserve, behind which he was wont to take refuge. And this to the eyes of Alice Huston’s husband. His was a nature capable of immense self-sacrifice, and to this capability had been added an almost exaggerated sense of discipline. That which he thought right he would probably do—not on the spur of the moment, but with deliberate purpose, and without fear of subsequent regret.
As has been mentioned, he was never under the influence of sudden enthusiasm; and, as a rule, his errors arose more from too great conscientiousness in setting both sides of a question equally before his own judgment than from rash partisanship.
Even as he passed down the broad staircase, against a stream of gaily-dressed guests, he was mentally apologizing to Hicks for having harboured a vague feeling of dislike against him. If there had been any distinct motive for this dislike, he would never have withdrawn it, but he recognised that it was without ground. Hicks was not a man after his own heart; he was neither a sportsman nor a soldier—in fact, he was what is euphoniously called a “muff”; but these charges were merely negative in their bearing. Mrs. Wylie might have told him that he had come into closer familiarity with Hicks at a propitious moment, when the young artist was finding his own level and laying aside unconsciously his small affectations one by one, but of this Trist had no suspicion.
He called a hansom, and drove to the club of which the books showed a subscription as due from Captain Huston. In return for this privilege its doors were still thrown open to the disgraced soldier. Careful inquiries at the door elicited the information that Huston had been there.
“He was took … he went away with a friend a good half-hour ago, sir,” the porter added, with a curious smile.
The smile did not escape the questioner’s glance, and, in consequence of it, Trist went upstairs to the smoking-room. He was not a member of the club, but his name was a power in military circles.
The information he gathered from friends upstairs was not of an encouraging nature. One young blade, with downy lip and weak, dissipated eyes, volunteered the statement that Huston had gone home to his diggings as tight as a drum. This news was apparently of an hilarious drift, because the youthful speaker finished with a roar of throaty laughter. An older man looked up over his evening paper, and nodded a grave acquiescence in reply to Trist’s raised eyebrows.
“Does anybody know his address?” inquired the correspondent.
Nobody did.
Upon inquiry at the door, Trist made the discovery that the porter had fortunately been asked to give the direction to the driver of the cab in which Huston had been taken away. The address was one hardly known to the war-correspondent—a small street, leading out of another small street, near the Strand.
In his calm way he suddenly determined to follow Huston. He lighted a cigar at the spirit-lamp affixed to the doorpost, and then called a cab.
“I am not,” he reflected with some truth as he descended the steps, “I am not an imaginative person, nor very highly strung; but. … I feel … somehow … as if something were going to happen.”
There was a considerable delay in the Strand, where the traffic was much congested owing to the outpouring theatres. A fog was hovering round the lamps already, and would soon envelop everything. The first keen frost of the season was at hand, with its usual disastrous effects to London lungs. Amidst the confusion, the roar of traffic, the deafening shouts of drivers, policemen, and runners with latest editions of evening papers, Trist sat forward, with his arms upon the closed door of
