my dear; you are interested in the disposal of that, are you not?”
“Oh yes, of course,” answered the young lady, “I ought to be interested for Launcelot’s sake, I know; and I know that he ought to have the fortune, and that nobody has any right to deprive him of it, especially those nasty old maids who had him sent to India against his will, and I dare say he will have horrid pains in his liver from the climate when he’s older. Of course he ought to have the fortune, and yet sometimes I think it would be nicer for him to be poor. He may never be a great artist if he’s rich, perhaps; and I’d rather go to Rome with him and sit by his easel while he works, and pay the hotel bills, and the travelling expenses, and all that sort of thing, out of my own money, than have him a country gentleman. I shouldn’t like him to be a country gentleman; he’d have to hunt, and wear top-boots and nasty leather gaiters, like a common ploughman, when he went out shooting. I hate country gentlemen. Byron hasn’t one country gentleman in all his poems, and that horrid husband in Locksley Hall will show you what an opinion Tennyson has of them.”
Miss Mason went back to the signora and the embroidery, satisfied with having settled the business in her own manner.
“He couldn’t look like the Corsair if he had Woodlands,” she murmured, despondently; “he’d have to shave off his moustache if they made him a magistrate. What would be the good of his talking seriously to poachers if he wore turned-down collars and loose handkerchiefs round his neck? People would never respect him unless he was a Guy; with creaky boots, and big seals hanging to his watch-chain.”
Eleanor pushed the question still further.
“You think that Mr. de Crespigny has left his fortune to Launcelot Darrell, don’t you, Gilbert?” she asked.
Her husband, prompted by the evil spirit that was his occasional companion, looked at her, rather suspiciously; but her eyes met his own with an unfaltering gaze.
“Why are you so interested in this fortune, and in Launcelot Darrell?” he said.
“I will tell you by-and-by. But tell me now, if you think the estate is left to Mr. Darrell?”
“I think it scarcely unlikely that it is so. The fact of Maurice de Crespigny making a fresh will within six months of the young man’s return looks rather as if he had been led to relent of some previous determination by the presence of his niece’s son.”
“But Mr. de Crespigny has seen very little of Launcelot Darrell.”
“Perhaps not,” answered Mr. Monckton, coldly. “I may be quite wrong in my conjecture. You ask for my opinion, and I give it you freely. Pray let us change the subject. I hate the idea of all this speculation as to who shall stand in a dead man’s shoes. As far as Launcelot Darrell’s interests are concerned, I really think there is an undercurrent of common sense in Laura’s romantic talk. He may be all the better for being a poor man. He may be all the better for having to go to Italy and work at his art for a few years.”
Mr. Monckton looked sharply at his young wife as he said this. I rather think that the demon familiar had prompted this speech, and that the lawyer watched Eleanor’s face in the desire to discover whether there was anything unpleasant to her in the idea of Launcelot Darrell’s long absence from his native country.
But, clever as Gilbert Monckton was, the mystery of his wife’s face was as yet beyond his power to read. He watched her in vain. The pale and thoughtful countenance told nothing to the man who wanted the master key by which alone its expression could be read.
CHAPTER XXXIV.—RICHARD’S DISCOVERY.
An almost ungovernable impulse prompted Eleanor Monckton to make her way at once into Maurice de Crespigny’s sick-chamber, and say to him, “Launcelot Darrell is the wretch who caused your old friend’s cruel death. I call upon you, by the memory of the past, to avenge that old friend’s bitter wrongs!”
The struggle was a terrible one, but discretion in the end triumphed, and Eleanor submitted herself to the guidance of her devoted slave and ally. She knew now that Launcelot Darrell was guilty; but she had known that from the moment in which she had seen him lounging in the Windsor Street. The task that lay before her was to procure such proof as must be convincing to the old man. In spite of her impetuous desire for immediate action, Eleanor was compelled to acknowledge that the testimony of the sketch-book was not strong enough in itself to condemn Launcelot Darrell.
The young man’s answer to any accusation brought against him on such evidence would be simple enough.
Nothing would be easier than for him to say, “My name is not Robert Lance. The drawing abstracted by unfair means from my portfolio is not mine. I am not responsible for the actions of the man who made that sketch.”
And against this simple declaration there would be nothing but Eleanor’s unsupported assertion of the identity between the two men.
There was nothing to be done, then, except to follow Richard Thornton’s advice, and wait.
This waiting was very weary work. Estranged from her husband by the secret of her life,—unhappy in the society of Laura Mason, against whose happiness she felt that she was, in a manner, plotting; restrained and ill at ease even in the familiar companionship of Eliza Picirillo,—Eleanor Monckton wandered about the great rambling mansion which had become her home, restless and unhappy, yearning with a terrible impatience for the coming of the end, however dark that end might be. Every day, and often more than once in the course of the day, she locked herself in her room, and opened the desk in which she kept Launcelot Darrell’s sketches and her dead father’s last letter. She looked at these things almost as if she feared that by some diabolical influence they might be taken from her before they had served as the instruments of her revenge. So the weary days wore themselves out. The first week of Richard’s visit; the second