ing impatience, in her desire to come to something that should be evidence against Launcelot Darrell.
“What do you mean?” she said, and then she added impatiently: ‘How slow you are, Dick! What do I want to know of this man except the one proof that will identify him with that man upon the Boulevard?”
“I’m afraid we’ve been making a mistake all this time,” Richard said, in rather a despondent tone. “I’m afraid these sketches must have been done by some companion of Mr. Darrell’s. I’m afraid they’re none of them his.”
“Not his? But why—why not?”
“Because the first lot, the Cromwells and the Rosas, are all signed with a flourishing autograph—‘Launcelot Darrell, pinxt.,’ in full, as if the young man were rather proud of his name.”
“Yes, yes; but what then?”
“The London life sketches, the Lady Claras and the suicides, which are much better than the first lot, though I should have thought they had been by the same man, are all signed with a monogram.”
“A monogram?”
“Yes, of two initials. I’ve been trying to make them out for ever so long, and I’ve only just succeeded. The two letters are R. L.”
Richard Thornton felt Eleanor’s hand, which had been resting lightly upon the back of his chair, tighten suddenly upon the rosewood scrollwork, he heard her breath grow quicker, and when he turned his head he saw that she was deadly pale.
“It is coming home to him, Richard,” she said. “The man who cheated my father called himself ‘Robert Lan—’ Part of the name was torn away in my father’s letter, but the initials of that false name are R. L. Go on, Dick; go on quickly, for pity’s sake; we shall find something more presently.”
Eleanor Monckton had spoken in a whisper, but at this moment the scene-painter laid his hand upon her wrist and reminded her by a gesture of the need of caution. But Mr. Darrell, and the two ladies at the other end of the roomy studio, were in no manner observant of anything that might be going on in the curtained recess of the window. Laura was talking, and her lover was laughing at her, half pleased, half amused, by her childish frivolity.
Richard Thornton turned over a heap of sketches without speaking.
But presently he came upon a water-colour drawing of a long lamplit street, crowded with figures in grotesque costumes, and with masks upon their faces.
“We have crossed the Channel, Eleanor,” he said. “Here is Paris in Carnival time, and here is the assumed name, too, in full,—‘Robert Lance, March 2nd, ’53.’ Be quiet, Eleanor, be calm, for Heaven’s sake. The man is guilty; I believe that now, as fully as you do; but we have to bring his guilt home to him.”
“Keep that sketch, Richard,” whispered the girl, “keep it. It is the proof of his false name. It is the proof that he was in Paris when he was believed to be in India. It is the proof that he was in Paris a few months before my father’s death.”
The scene-painter folded the tumbled sheet of drawing-paper and thrust it into the breast pocket of his loose coat.
“Go on, Richard; go on,” said Eleanor; “there may be something more than this.”
The young man obeyed his eager companion; one by one he looked at the pen-and-ink sketches, the crayon drawings, the unfinished scraps in Indian ink or water colour.
They all bore evidence of a life in Paris and its neighbourhood. Now a débardeur hanging on the arm of a student; now a grisette drinking limonade gaseuse with an artisan beyond the barrier; a funeral train entering the gates of Père la Chaise; a showman on the Boulevard; a group of Zouaves; a bit of landscape in the forest of Saint Germain, with equestrian figures beneath an arch of foliage; a scene in the Champs Elysées.
And at last, a rough pencil sketch of a group in a small chamber at a café; an old man seated at a lamplit table playing écarté with a man whose face was hidden; an aristocratic-looking, shabby, genteel old man, whose nervous fingers seemed to clutch restlessly at a little pile of napoleons on the table before him.
There was a third figure: the figure of a smartly dressed Frenchman standing behind the old man’s chair; and in this watcher of the game Eleanor recognised the man who had persuaded her father to leave her on the Boulevard, the companion of the sulky Englishman.
The sketch was dated August 12, 1853; the very day on which Richard Thornton had recognised the dead man in the ghastly chamber of the Morgue. On the back of the drawing were written these words, “Sketch for finished picture to be called ‘The last of the Napoleons’—Robert Lance.”
The likeness of the principal figure to George Vane was unmistakable. The man who had been heartless enough to cheat his kinsman’s friend, had made this record of the scene of his cruelty, but had not been so callous as to carry out his design after the suicide of his victim.
SUNNY THOUGHTS ON LAWNS.
Notwithstanding their love of travel, Englishmen are, of all nations, most fond of home. The feverish hotel-life of America finds no favour in their eyes; and the continental mode of passing the evening outside a café, beside tubs of shady oleanders, is very well once in a way, but soon sends them home more enamoured than ever of their own institutions. The fireside forms the centre of an Englishman’s idea of home during winter, and in summer his garden, and undoubtedly the largest share of his affections is there given to his lawn. The hotbeds belong to the gardener, the flowers to his wife, but his special delight is to survey the smooth-shaven expanse of turf from his window, and saunter over its soft surface lord of all he surveys.
