It was part of a telegraphic dispatch. The upper
portion had been burnt away, but the more important
part, the greater part of the message itself, remained.
“—alboys came to last night, and
left by the mail for London, on his way to Liverpool,
whence he was to sail for Sydney.”
The date and the name and address of the sender of
the message had been burnt with the heading.
Robert Audley’s face blanched to a deathly whiteness.
He carefully folded the scrap of paper, and placed
it between the leaves of his pocket-book.
“My God!” he said, “what is the
meaning of this? I shall go to Liverpool to-night,
and make inquiries there!”
TROUBLED DREAMS.
Robert Audley left Southampton by the mail, and let
himself into his chambers just as the dawn was creeping
cold and gray into the solitary rooms, and the canaries
were beginning to rustle their feathers feebly in
the early morning.
There were several letters in the box behind the door,
but there was none from George Talboys.
The young barrister was worn out by a long day spent
in hurrying from place to place. The usual lazy
monotony of his life had been broken as it had never
been broken before in eight-and-twenty tranquil, easy-going
years. His mind was beginning to grow confused
upon the point of time. It seemed to him months
since he had lost sight of George Talboys. It
was so difficult to believe that it was less than forty-eight
hours ago that the young man had left him asleep under
the willows by the trout stream.
His eyes were painfully weary for want of sleep.
He searched about the room for some time, looking
in all sorts of impossible places for a letter from
George Talboys, and then threw himself dressed upon
his friend’s bed, in the room with the canaries
and geraniums.
“I shall wait for to-morrow morning’s
post,” he said; “and if that brings no
letter from George, I shall start for Liverpool without
a moment’s delay.”
He was thoroughly exhausted, and fell into a heavy
sleep—a sleep which was profound without
being in any way refreshing, for he was tormented
all the time by disagreeable dreams—dreams
which were painful, not from any horror in themselves,
but from a vague and wearying sense of their confusion
and absurdity.
At one time he was pursuing strange people and entering
strange houses in the endeavor to unravel the mystery
of the telegraphic dispatch; at another time he was
in the church-yard at Ventnor, gazing at the headstone
George had ordered for the grave of his dead wife.
Once in the long, rambling mystery of these dreams
he went to the grave, and found this headstone gone,
and on remonstrating with the stonemason, was told
that the man had a reason for removing the inscription;
a reason that Robert would some day learn.
In another dream he saw the grave of Helen Talboys
open, and while he waited, with the cold horror lifting
up his hair, to see the dead woman rise and stand
before him with her stiff, charnel-house drapery clinging
about her rigid limbs, his uncle’s wife tripped
gaily put of the open grave, dressed in the crimson
velvet robes in which the artist had painted her,
and with her ringlets flashing like red gold in the
unearthly light that shone about her.
