It was a shock to Mr. Morgan when he learnt that Miss Harding had quitted Cloverlea without a word to him. At first he could not believe that she had gone; that she could have gone without his knowledge. When belief was forced on him his language was unbecoming. While he was engaged in little matters of a sort which demanded privacy, and which had to do with the safe storage of certain articles which he had brought himself to believe were his own property, a wagonette arrived at the front door, which, the driver explained to the footman who appeared, had come to fetch Miss Harding. The footman, with the aid of a colleague, had borne the young lady's belongings down the stairs; for which she liberally recompensed them with a sovereign apiece; and she and her possessions were safely away before Mr. Morgan had a notion she was going. Mr. Morgan abused the footmen for not having said a word to him; which abuse they, having no longer the fear of him before their eyes, returned in kind. The butler had to console himself as best he could.
"Given me the slip, have you, Miss Harding?" That was what he said to himself. "Very well, my dear, we'll see; I'm not so easily got rid of as you may perhaps suppose. You're a pretty darling, upon my Sam you are!"
As soon as circumstances permitted--at Cloverlea there were a great many things which he thought it desirable that he should do that day--he went out on a little voyage of discovery. He learnt at the local station that Miss Harding had not taken a ticket for her home in the west country; she had not taken a ticket for herself at all, Mr. Nash had taken one for her, and another for himself; they had gone up to London in the same compartment, and both had luggage. This news added to Mr. Morgan's pleasure.
"Dear me, has she? And I meant her to be Mrs. Morgan, and so she would have been if I'd put on the screw when I'd the chance. As my wife she might have come to something; but as his wife--I'll show her, and I'll show him. If she thinks she's going to hand over to him, by way of a dowry, that nice little lot of money, and leave me out; if that really is her expectation she'll be treated to another illustration of the vanity of human wishes. That sweet young wife will have an interrupted honeymoon."
Mr. Morgan called at an inn which it was his habit to honour with his custom in quest of something to soothe his ruffled feelings. There he met a friend, George Wickham, the Holtye head groom. Mr. Wickham had a grievance, in which respect, if he had only known it, he resembled Mr. Morgan. It seemed that he was the bearer of letters which had been addressed to the Hon. Robert Spencer at Holtye, which he was carrying to that gentleman's actual present address, the Unicorn Hotel, Baltash. It was supposed to be Mr. Wickham's "night out"; he wanted to spend his hours of freedom in one direction while Baltash lay in another.
"Might as well have sent 'em by post, or by one of the other chaps; but no, nothing would please the old woman"--by "old woman" it is to be feared that he meant the Countess of Mountdennis--"but that I should go. I had half a mind to tell her I'd an appointment."
Mr. Morgan was sympathetic; he explained that he was going to Baltash, and even carried his sympathy so far as to offer to take the letters for him. The groom hesitated; then decided to take advantage of his friend's good-nature.
"There's thirteen letters," he pointed out, "five post-cards, four newspapers, eighteen circulars, and these parcels, about enough to fill a carrier's cart."
Mr. Morgan laughed.
"I shall make nothing of that little lot," he said. "And I'll charge nothing for carriage."
On the way to Baltash he leaned against a gate to light a cigar; it was one of his peculiarities to smoke nothing but cigars; he held that a pipe was low. When the cigar was lighted he remained a moment to glance at the letters he was carrying. He noticed that one of them was from the London offices of a steamship company; the name of the company was printed on the envelope. While Miss Lindsay had been talking to Mr. Spencer in the copse on the preceding Sunday morning Mr. Morgan had been quite close at hand; the lady had supposed that the noise he made among the undergrowth was caused by a hare or a rabbit; had Mr. Spencer proceeded to investigate the cause of the noise the butler would have been discovered in a somewhat ignominious position. As it was Mr. Morgan, remaining undetected, heard a good deal that was said; among the things he heard Mr. Spencer's story of the letter which Donald Lindsay had sent to him at Cairo, which was only to be opened after the writer's death, which Mr. Spencer had put in his suit-case, and which suit-case Mr. Spencer had lost, containing not only Mr. Lindsay's letters, but also some more intimate epistles from that gentleman's daughter.
Mr. Morgan remembered the story very well; he had a knack of remembering nearly everything he heard, and he managed to hear a good deal. He was struck by the fact that the letter which he held in his hand was from the steamship company by one of whose boats Mr. Spencer had travelled on his homeward journey; it might contain news of the missing suit-case. On the other hand, emphatically, it might not. Still! It is notorious how carelessly some envelopes are fastened. Here was a case in point; the gummed flap only adhered in one place, and there so slightly that Mr. Morgan had only to slip the blade of a penknife underneath and--it came open. It was as he had guessed. The steamship company wrote to say that the missing suit-case had turned up. It had strayed among the voluminous luggage of an American family, where it remained unnoticed until the luggage had been divided up among the members of the family; the explanation seemed rather lame, but it appeared it was the only one that steamship company had to offer. Now the suit-case was at Mr. Spencer's disposition, and the company would be glad to hear what he wished them to do with it.
As Mr. Morgan enjoyed his cigar, and leaned against the gate, and looked up at the glories of the evening sky, he indulged in some philosophical reflections.
"It's an extraordinary world; extraordinary. To think that George Wickham's burning desire to see that red-headed girl of his at Addlecombe should have thrown a thing like this right into my hands. It's quite possible that that suit-case may turn out to be worth more to me than that nice little sum of money with which Miss Elaine Harding erroneously supposes she's going to set her husband up in life. Beyond a shadow of doubt things are managed in a mysterious way."
Mr. Morgan faithfully delivered those letters at the Unicorn Hotel at Baltash, with the exception of one letter; and on the morrow he treated himself to a trip up to town. He took a bedroom at a quiet hotel in the neighbourhood of the Strand, and he sent a messenger boy to the steamship company's office with an envelope. In the envelope was the Hon. Robert Spencer's visiting card; on the back of which was written--
"Your letter duly received; please give suit-case to bearer."
Some one at the office gave it to the bearer; who took it to the hotel, where it was sent up to Mr. Spencer's room; it happened that Mr. Morgan had registered as Robert Spencer. Mr. Morgan opened it with difficulty; none of his keys fitted the lock, which was of a curious make; but he did open it; he was an ingenious man. And when he had opened the suit-case he found that the letter, for whose sake he had taken so much trouble, was not in it. It was a painful shock; he was loth to believe that a m............