good? And he has spilled the ink over my papers. If I had seen that before, he should have had something in his arm that would have prevented his snapping his scissors for a month to come. He has been in luck, the insolent hair-cutter! I have not seen anything so laughable for many a long day. Peace to your manes, M. Roland, for rendering me so capable of defending my innocent life against frantic barbers!”
CHAPTER XXV.
It will easily be supposed by those who have ever had their hearts determinately set upon the attainment of an object, that although it did not enter into the calculation of Mrs. Urquhart that Arthur Lygon would be on his way to Paris without waiting for the morning, he was hastening thither in a few moments from leaving her house. He was, in fact, walking towards the capital at his best speed. The journey is not much to a man in health and with average powers, but to Lygon, under the circumstances, it seemed the merest trifle compared with the delay of a few hours. He walked well, and, though by his exertion of strong will he excluded to the utmost of his ability the thoughts which incessantly pressed upon him, as Abraham drove away the birds that sought to come down to the sacrifice, his sensations, alternating between an agitating hopefulness and a bitter and reproachful distrust, made him regardless both of distance and of the minor incidents of the night.
He reached Paris, just as the beautiful city was lying in the earliest light of the summer morning, but he had no eye for the charming spectacle that rewards the stranger who will at such an hour be astir in the French capital. He made direct for the quarter in which stood the residence of the lady whose card had been given him. The address had been fixed in his mind by a glance, but on taking out the card to be certain as to the number of the house, he perceived that other cards must have lain at angles across it for many a day, as its enamel was partially soiled with dust. But he did not at the moment attach any significance to this little sign, and pushed on for the street designated. It was in the Luxembourg quarter, which he speedily reached. He found the street, he found the house, he found the number, but the last was upon a wall already devoted to the architect, whose destroying workmen (not yet come to that day’s duty) had almost removed the house to which Lygon had been sent.
He had been deceived again.
Almost against hope he made such inquiries as were possible. At first, at that hour, there was no one whom he could consult; but, as the morning wore on, and houses opened, Lygon had the opportunity of ascertaining from respectable evidence that Madame * * * * * had certainly resided at the mansion in question, and was well known, but that, at least six months back, she had sold the place to a celebrated banker, who, as Monsieur could see, was going to rebuild it on a scale of—O, such magnificence! As for Madame, she had gone to Italy.
He said nothing, now, that could have told a stranger that Lygon was wounded, grieved, or angered. The time for such words had passed. He made no sign that could attract the notice of a passer-by. Casually addressed by a workman who asked him for a light, he took out a fusée-box and helped the man to kindle his pipe. A child, toddling after its hurrying mother, fell and bewailed itself, and Arthur Lygon raised it from the ground, and brought it to the woman’s hand. He actually stood still and permitted his eye to range over the architecture of one of the churches, though utterly unaware of what he was doing.
At length, exhausted both in body and mind, he entered the first decent place of refreshment and partook of food. He felt that he hated it, and all else that reminded him of home and comfort; but he forced himself to eat.
Then he went out and walked in the now busy city, sparkling in the sunshine, and as he saw men of his own rank on their way to their duties, he looked curiously in their faces, and wondered whether any one of them had left a wife who had embraced him tenderly, and would, in a few hours, have abandoned his house.
Lygon passed some time—he knew not how long—in the state in which intervals of a stupefied unbelief, of utter rejection of the grim circumstances around us, are broken by fever-fits of intense consciousness and bitter agony. And when these hours of agitation were over, and the brain cleared, and the heart throbbed less violently at the recurrence of the image of Laura, Arthur passed to a worse state—that in which a man resolves to believe the very worst.
And what words shall tell of that agony? Laugh at the attempt, you who have known such an hour. Laugh, and do not desire to be saddened by the picture, feeble as it would be, you who have never loved, or have loved and never known yourselves to have been deceived.
A tremendous hand on his shoulder, and the heartiest of voices in his ear, as he crossed for the fiftieth time, it might have been, the bridge near the Place de la Concorde.
“Arthur Lygon in Paris! That’s as things should be.”
He turned to be cordially greeted by Robert Urquhart.
The great, tall, broad Scotsman was delighted, and gave out of his big chest one of those laughs which are rarely heard, and so are the more worth hearing. And Parisians looked up at the sound, which indeed was rather over the heads of most of them, and wondered what was pleasing the genial giant with those insufferably ill-made clothes and vast round hat, and why his blue eyes and white teeth should shine out like that at the sight of the much better dressed and more elegant person whose hand he was clearly trying to wring off. And then they went on their way.
If there was one man on earth whom Arthur would have avoided at that moment, it was the man who was welcoming him so cordially. Without time to consider what course to adopt, without a shadow of preparation for inevitable questions, the answers to which might determine the events of a life, here he was in the irresistible grasp of his friend, the husband of the woman whose history