"Give it to Crozier; and pray tell Miss Alice Arden, immediately, that she need have no fears. Good-night."
And pale Mr. Longcluse, with his smile and his dismally dark gaze, and the strange suggestion of something undefined in look or tone, or air, that gradually overcame her more and more till she almost felt faint, as he smiled and murmured at the open window, in the moonlight, was gone. Then she stood with the note in her thin fingers, without moving, and called to Crozier with a shrill and earnest summons as one who has just had a frightful dream will call up a sleeper in the same room.
Mr. Longcluse walks boldly and listlessly through this forbidden ground. He does not care who may meet him. Near the house, indeed, he would not like an encounter with Sir Richard Arden, because he knows that his being involved in a quarrel at such a moment, so near, especially with her brother, would not subserve his interests with Alice Arden.
For hours he strode or loitered alone through the solitary woodlands. The moonlight was beautiful; the old trees stand mournful and black against the luminous sky; there is for him a fascination in the solitude, as his noiseless steps lead him alternately into the black shadow cast on the sward by the towering foliage, and into the clear moonlight, on dewy grass that shows grey in that cold brightness. He was in the excitement of hope and suspense. Things had looked very black, but a door had opened and light came out. Was it a dream?
He leans with folded arms against the trunk of one of the trees that stand there, and from the slight elevation of the ground he can see the avenue under the boughs of the trees that flank it, and the chimneys of Mortlake Hall through the summits of the opening clumps. How melancholy and still the whole scene looks under that light!
"When I succeed to all this, who will be mistress of it?" he says, with his strange smile, looking toward the summits of the chimneys, that indicate the site of the Hall. "No one knows who I am; who can tell my history? What about that opera-girl? What about my money?--money is alway exaggerated. How many humbugs! how many collapses! stealing into society by evasions, on false pretences, in disguise! The man in the mask, ha! ha! Really perhaps _two_ masks; not a bad fluke, that. The villain! You would not take a thousand pounds and know me--that is speaking boldly. A thousand pounds is still something in your book. You would not take it. The time will come, perhaps, when you'd _give_ a thousand--_ten_ thousand, if you had them--that I were your friend. Slanderous villain! To think of his talking so of me! The man in the mask trying to excite suspicion. My two masks are broken, and I all the better. By--! you shall meet me yet without a mask. Alice! will you be my idol? There is no neutrality with one like me in such a case. If I don't worship, I must _break_ the image. What a speck we stand on between the illimitable--the eternal past and the eternal future--always looking for a present that shall be something tangible; always finding it a mathematical point, _cujus nulla est pars_--the mere stand-point of a retrospect and a conjecture. Ha! There are the wheels: there goes the funeral!"