CHAPTER XII.

NORTHWARD.

THE travellers had not left Greenlands two days when Eustace Thorburn arrived there. He had finished his work in Paris a month sooner than he had expected to do so, and had been glad to hurry home, in order to complete his arrangements with an eminent publishing firm, who, after considerable hesitation, had agreed to publish his poem without hazard of capital on his part, though not without foreboding of loss on theirs.

M. de Bergerac had not forgotten to write to his secretary, announcing the Scottish expedition; but he had only written an hour before starting, and the letter and the secretary had crossed each other between Dover and Calais. Eustace came to Greenlands full of hopeful agitation. He had not forgotten the promise made his uncle. He had not forgotten that he was pledged to make a full confession to his kind patron, and to accept his banishment, if need were. His Parisian exile had only deferred the evil hour; it must come now, and speedily; and the decree would be spoken, and he and Helen must in all likelihood part for ever. But in the meantime he would see her once more, and it was for this unspeakable blessing he languished. For the last night of his sojourn in Paris sleep had been impossible. He could think only of the delight to which he was hastening--to see her once again! His love had grown day by day, hour by hour, during these long months of absence. As the train ploughed onwards through dusty flats, as the steamer danced across the sunlit waters, this one traveller counted the miles, and calculated the moments until he should near the beloved spot where his idol dwelt.

He knew that his Uncle Dan would have been glad to see him, even for a brief exchange of greetings and shaking of hands; but he could not bring himself to spend the half-hour that it must have cost him to call in Great Ormond-street. Swift as a hack-cab could take him, he rushed from station to station, was so lucky as to catch a fast train for Windsor, and entered the shady avenues of Greenlands within fourteen hours of his departure from Paris.

How fresh and verdant the spring landscape seemed to him!--the cowslips and bluebells, the hawthorn buds just beginning to whiten the old rugged trees, gummy chestnut husks scattering the ground, and from afar the rich odour of newly-opened lilacs.

“And to think that for its master this place has no charm!” he said to himself, wonderingly.

His heart beat fast as he opened the gate of the bailiff’s garden. Here all things looked their brightest and prettiest. The birds were singing gaily in the porch. The deep voice of Hephæstus boomed from the hall, and the dog ran out to repel the intruder, but changed his bass growl of menace into a noisy demonstration of delight at sight of the traveller.

Even this welcome Eustace was glad to receive. It seemed a good omen. The door stood wide open; he went into the hall, with the dog leaping and bounding about him as he went. No one appeared. There was no sound of voices in any of the rooms. He opened the drawing-room door softly, and went in, prepared to see Helen bending over her books at a table in the window. But Helen was not there, and the room looked cold and dreary. Never had he seen the books so primly arranged, the piano so carefully closed. No cheery blaze brightened the hearth, no flowers perfumed the atmosphere. His instinct told him that a change had fallen upon the pleasant home. He rang the bell, and a fresh country housemaid answered his summons.

“Lor’ a mercy, sir, how you did startle me!” she said. “I a’most thought it was ghostes, which they do begin sometimes with ringin’ o’ the bells.”

“Is your mistress away from home?” asked Eustace.

“Yes, sir, and master, too. They both be gone to Scotland for a month, or more. Didn’t you get the letter as master sent you, sir? I heard him say as he’d wrote to tell you they was gone.”

They had gone to Scotland! To find them absent from Greenlands was in itself a wonder to him; but it seemed to him a kind of miracle that they should have gone to Scotland, that country which he was bent upon exploring in his search for the scene of his mother’s sorrows.

“What part of Scotland has your master gone to, Martha?” he asked the housemaid.

The girl shook her head despondently, and replied that she had not “heard tell.” They were to travel with Mr. Jerningham, she believed. That gentleman had come into property in Scotland, and they were going to see it. This was the utmost she had “heard tell on.”

With Mr. Jerningham! What should make that gentleman Helen’s travelling companion? A sudden pang of jealousy rent Eustace Thorburn’s heart as he thought of such a companionship. What could have brought about this Scottish journey? Having possessed himself of Martha’s slender stock of information on this point, Eustace went to the kitchen to question Nanon; but with little more success. The Frenchwoman was voluble, but she could tell him scarcely anything.

They were to visit many places, she said, but she knew not where. The names of those barbarous countries had slipped from her memory. It was far, very far; and they were to be absent a month. Oh, but it was dismal without that sweet young lady! Nanon had nursed her as a baby, and never before had they been so long asunder.

“For a month! It is frightful to think of it,” shrieked Nanon. She invited Mr. Thorburn to rest and refresh himself--to dine, to sleep, to make the place his home as long as he pleased. M. de Bergerac had left instructions to that effect. But the disappointment had been too bitter. Eustace could not endure to remain an hour in the house which had been so dear to him, now that the goddess who had glorified it dwelt there no longer. He declared that he had particular business to do in London, and must return thither immediately. He was eager to arrange for the Scottish expedition which had been planned by himself and his uncle--eager to start for the country to which Helen was gone, as if he would thereby be nearer her.

Before bidding old Nanon good-day, he made a final effort to extort from her some information.

“Surely M. de Bergerac must have left you some written address,” he said, “in the event of your having occasion to write to him?”

“No, sir; if I wanted to write, I was to give my letter to Mr. Jerningham’s steward; that was all. They will be going from place to place, you see, sir. It is not one place they go to see, but many.”

With this answer Eustace was compelled to be satisfied. He could not push his curiosity so far as to go to Mr. Jerningham’s steward, and ask him for his master’s whereabouts. And again, what benefit could it have been to him to know where Helen had gone? He had no right to follow her.

He hastened back to London, and to Great Ormond Street, where he was doomed to wait three dreary hours, turning over his Uncle Dan’s books, before that individual made his appearance, somewhat flushed from dining, and jovial of manner, but in nowise the worse for his dinner and wine.

“I have been dining in St. James’s Street, with Joyce of the _Hermes_, and Farquhar of the _Zeus_,” he said. “A thousand welcomes, dearest boy! And so you come straight from the station to find your faithful old Daniel? Such a token of affection touches this tough old heart.”

“Not straight from the station, Uncle Dan,” the young man answered, with a guilty air. “I have been down to Berkshire. M. de Bergerac and his daughter have started for Scotland with Mr. Jerningham.”

“What takes them to Scotland in such company?”

“Mr. Jerningham has just succeeded to an estate in the north; that is all I could discover from the servants at the cottage. This Scottish expedition must be quite a new idea, for there was no allusion to it in M. de Bergerac’s last letter to me.”

“Strange!”

“And now, Uncle Dan, I want you to keep your promise, and start for your Highland holiday with me.”

“What! we are to rush post-haste for the Highlands, in search of your Helen?”

“No; on a more solemn search than that.”

“Alas, poor lad! On that one subject you are madder than Prince Hamlet. Every one has his craze. But I pledged myself to be your companion, and I must keep my promise. You are really bent upon going over the ground on which that sad drama was enacted?”

“Fixed as fate, Uncle Dan.”

“So be it. Your faithful kinsman has been at work in your absence, and has made things smooth for you.”

“Is it possible, dear friend?”

“There’s nothing a man of the world can’t do when he’s put to it. A reperusal of Dion’s autobiography enabled me to identify the divine Carlitz of that narrative with a lady who took the town by storm when I was a young man, and who afterwards married a nobleman of eccentric repute. Once possessed of this clue, it was easy for me to identify her _fidus Achates_, the amiable H., as Mr. Elderton Hollis, a gentleman connected with dramatic affairs for the last quarter of a century, and still floating, gay and _débonnaire_, upon the border land of the theatrical world,--a gentleman with whom I myself have some acquaintance. To make a long story short, I contrived to throw myself in Hollis’s way at the Quin Club; and after a glance at the theatrical horizon of to-day, drifted into the usual commonplaces about the decay of dramatic talent. ‘Where are our Fawcetts, our Nisbetts, our Keeleys, our Carlitzes?’ I sighed; and at the last familiar name, the old fellow pricked up his ears, like a hound at the huntsman’s ‘Hark forward!’”

“‘Ah, my dear Mayfield, that _was_ a woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are, of course, aware that I was her secretary, her adviser, her treasurer,--I may say, her guardian angel,--before her brilliant marriage; and now, sir, she cuts me, though I give you my word of honour that marriage could never have taken place but for my management of her affairs.”

“This bears out the autobiography,” cried Eustace, eagerly.

“To the letter. I first sympathized with Mr. Hollis, and then pumped him. I found him somewhat reserved upon the subject of that northern expedition; but after some beating about the bush, I got from him the admission that the lady whom we will still call Carlitz was in Scotland just before her marriage with Lord V.; and by and by he let slip that the spot was in the extreme north of Aberdeen. This much, and no more, could I obtain. Examination of a tourist’s map showed me a headland called Halko’s Head, in the north of Aberdeenshire. This is likely to be the H. H. of Dion’s book, and thither we must direct our steps.”

“My dear uncle, you have done wonders!”

“And when you find the place, what then?”

“I shall discover the name of the man.”

“Who knows? The chase of the wild-goose is a sport congenial to youth; but April is a cold month in Scotland, and I wish the expedition could have been contrived later.”

Eustace would fain have started next morning, had it been possible; but two days were necessary for Mr. Mayfield’s literary affairs, and the agreement with the editors as to what contributions he was to send to the _Areopagus_ and another journal during his absence, and so on.

“I must scribble _en route_, you see, Eustace,” he said; “the mill will not stop because I want a holiday.”